The Power of Space: Alan Watts #philosophy

I suppose you may think it rather nervy of me to devote this whole seminar to talking about nothing but it's about space and in most people's minds space is just nothing unless it's filled with air but once you get outside the air space may be in some way crossed by floating bodies by various kinds of electrical vibrations light waves cosmic rays Etc but since the Michaelson moley experiment which seemed to prove conclusively that there wasn't any such thing as ether some kind of attenuated fluid through which light was propagated space is just uh isn't there

it's a way we have in other words of talking about distances between bodies in other words when we say the distance between them increased uh as if the distance were a substantive that does something like the man walked the distance increased but I suppose what we are actually saying is that the two bodies we're talking about increased uh the distance between themselves they did it but then you suddenly find that you've got distance as an object they increased the distance the distance now being the object of the verb whereas before it was the substance sub

the the subject and so at once one begins to see there's something fishy about space and uh after all it is the background against which we see everything and even a blind person has a sense of space in uh that which does not obstruct motion and yet funny thing about space is that in a way it doesn't end where a solid begins you can shift a solid around in space without apparently altering it in any way and after all there is space between the two sides shall we say or ends of the solid we can

think of that in terms of space and measure it in terms of space but it is against space that we experience everything that we experience and by the way also we experience everything not only in the dimension of space but also in the dimension of time and the fascination about space and time is that while they are basic to all possible experiences that we have you just can't put your finger on them space seems to be completely immaterial and when St Augustine was asked what his t time he said I know what it is but

when you ask me I don't so these two basic dimensions of our physical world are uncommonly elusive we could perhaps say that they are pure abstractions there is no such thing as space and there is no such thing as time they are merely our way of measuring and thinking about the behavior of the physical universe as a pattern a system of patterns energy patterns and if you measure the movement of these patterns uh the line along which you measure motion is called the timeline if you measure their positions the line along which you measure their

positions you would call the space line and these two lines would be as abstract as the uh the equator in relation to longitude zero these things don't exist on the physical face of the of the world they are imaginary lines and are only to be found on maps is it could you also say that the same thing was true of time and space we think for example that there are three coordinates of space and one of time the three coordinates of space being length breadth and depth and through that runs one of time but come

to think of it it's rather artificial it um is making us think of space as having a sort of grain to it as if it were a crystalline substance and however transparent the crystal it does have a grain and space has the grain of up across and through those are the three ways in which we think of space and we can't think of anym uh not with our senses we can um mathematically conceive spaces with infinitely many dimensions that is to say you can write it down as if it were so but you can't conceive

it in your imagination you can draw it's great fun to draw a four dimensional Cube having four spatial Dimensions it's called a tesseract and it uh Tesseract is a good word to apply to a person who is ultimately square four-dimensional square but um the tester act you see the minute you draw it that obviously you can't have more than uh the three right angular dimensions of space or the coordinates in any kind of solid figure that you know and so you can think about it in terms of mathematics but you can't conceive more than these

three coordinates sens sensuously and so we be it's it's basic common sense to us that space has this structure but of course the the the question is is this a structure of space or is it a structure of the human nervous system the human brain and human thought which is projected onto the external world as a tool for measuring it this is one way of approaching the problem but there's another way altogether which is to consider space as anything but nothing if space is basic to all that we experience as time is you might say

then that space is as near as we can imagine to being the ground of the world or what some people have called God the uh texts of the Hindus Buddhists and daoists are full of ways in which the symbol of space is used to mean the Ultimate Reality space is used in Indian uh basic Indian philosophy in vanta it is called Akasha and Akasha is for them the fundamental element there are five elements earth water air and fire and Akash and so space contains all the other elements in Buddhist philosophy where the Ultimate Reality is

called shatar the void the Chinese will car will translate the Sanskrit shun with their character that means sky or space and the dsts would say quoting ler the usefulness of a window is not so much in the frame as in the empty space through which something can be seen the usefulness of a vas is not so much in the sides made of clay as in the hollow inside into which something can be put and of course that is a startling metaphor for a Westerner because we think the other way around you see as I started

out to say we really think common sensical that space is nothing at all and we are much more sympathetic to the idea that it's pure abstraction than to the Oriental idea that space has some kind of basic reality it bothers us too when astronomers talk about curved space how can nothing be curved or properties of space or expanding space how can it do that and then when Architects begin to talk about the functions of spaces the common sensical Westerner thinks why don't they talk about the functions of walls uh of course the walls enclosed spaces

but the spaces of themselves have no function and they're bothered about this painters also are very um aware of space because especially if you paint in oils you have to paint your background and therefore if filling it in you begin to realize that it has its own shape it is the obverse of the foreground and uh when you play with photographic negatives or anything that switches uh back foreground to background foreground to background you begin to become aware of space as having a shape the interval between all sorts of objects becomes for you something significant

even though it's constantly flowing and changing as indeed are the objects within the space so it is a kind of a bit of a shock to our Common Sense which in most cases has not caught up with 20th century physics or astronomy to hear space considered as something effective as something definitely there uh so that you could say it has properties take another case of uh space which is rather startling there is there are different kinds of space space is basically isn't it an interval uh there is an interval between each one of us sitting

here if we didn't have that we would suffocate buai being packed together like sardines we need space in order to function as a human being we need a kind of area in which to gesture and move and walk about and breathe and express ourselves now you can have intervals not only in space but in time pauses are intervals you can also have intervals in sound the intervals between tones or notes and the interesting thing about the intervals between tones is that they are that upon which the hearing of Melody depends Melody is hear to hear

Melody is to hear intervals now if you will simply visualize melody in uh terms of something graphic supposing uh you um represent a simple uh say introduction of a Fugue or whatever you know uh you can see that in terms of a dancing line or a series of points at different uh levels representing uh like musical notation the high ones and the low ones and you will recognize a p P but you see at once that the pattern depends on the way the critical dots in it are spaced and it doesn't matter much whether the

space is a big space or whether it's a little one because it will always be relative to the size of the dots you can magnify it or Minify it but you will see it is the way they are spaced that makes makes the difference and here once again we are using spaced as a transitive verb now we've talked about spaces or distances increasing or people increasing a distance and now we can talk about space as a verb to space to be spaced and so once again the language is either Playing Tricks on us or else

expressing a profound intuition language does both and you have to watch out for which it is of course it may be both that is a possibility but here at once you see especially in that illustration of music of it being necessary to hear intervals in order to hear Melody you see that the way things are spaced is really another way of talking about the way things are related so you begin to realize that space is relationship go further now there is another idea about space which is connected with both the with all the Oriental uses

of space it is quite fundamental to Indian and a great deal of Chinese thinking that space equals Consciousness in other words what actually we are experiencing as the allinclusive space in which things happen is your mind and uh your mind of course is not something inside your head that is a great mistake to make your head is something in your mind we can define a person's mind in many ways uh but but beginning with something rather simple mind is occupied with thinking most people think in words and you didn't get words out of your head

you got them from the community in which you live and were brought up so when you think in a language which your community gave you you are not really thinking your own thoughts it is very difficult indeed to have private thoughts because the the when the very materials with which you think are public property it shows what a vast influence the public has on you in your the deepest recesses of your mind it's therefore very difficult also to think freely independently because we are pushed around with the symbolic systems of words or of numbers in

which we think but since uh you see the functioning of the Mind in the process of thinking depends upon an outside Community you begin to see that your mind is a network a network of relationships you think only if in the context of an environment of people and of natural processes so that you could say that your mind is at the very least a very most complex network of present and past relationships stretching out to the very limits of the universe and this as I've often said uh explains such truth as there may be in

astrology that when you want to draw a map of a person's soul you draw a map of the universe as it was when he was born we say that is your chart that expresses uh you in a special way now the astrologers maps are very crude they're based on a rather primitive view of the universe but the truth of it is there you see that who you really are your soul your mind is the total universe as focused upon you and this connects with what in Mahayana Buddhism is called the doctrine of mutual interpenetration namely

that every thing event in the world anything in other words supposing the whole world is a is is a a moving pattern and uh then you want to identify the Wiggles in the pattern very difficult to to um determine how much of a wiggle makes one wiggle but by a sort of calculus image we chew the thing up we say all this Wiggly world consists of so many wiggles and each individual wiggle is a thing event what is called in Japanese g means a thing event and so the idea of the doctrine of mutual interpenetration

is that everything event in the universe implies all the others it goes with it doesn't matter how long it lasts or how short lasts the fact that it is or the fact that it was implies the existence of everything else to put it in another way the fact that there is a moth flying around me it's very small and it will soon run into a candle and extinguish itself that little incident would not be possible at all except in the context of of all these galaxies because they their existence goes with the possibility of there

being such a minute little life fluttering around what is um not so easy to see is the picture in the opposite direction that in the same measure all these galaxies depend upon and go with this little moth as the poet suso Henry suso once said no it wasn't suso someone like him lived about the same time I'll think of it in a minute anyway he said I know that without me God could not live for one moment and uh this is the other aspect of it and this is the difficult one to understand and uh

we we we shall be able to approach this in the course of the seminar in fact if you realize that then you've really got it you've got the point of your own existence but to get the reverse picture you have first of all to get clearly the its opposite one namely that the existence of any one minute little thing is intimately related to everything and then you can you what happens when you clearly understand that and you've really got that your mind does a flip like that you know it's like when you squeeze the air

into in a sausage balloon and you get all the air squeezed up you think into one end of the balloon and suddenly It Go oop and it comes out the other end you see well it's sort of like that and you have to be very careful at that point not to go crazy but because you see when you find out that all this universe depends on you uh some people get frightened others get cocky and uh from both things disasters can follow you have to discover that and then be natural act as if nothing happened

so then this uh Buddhist idea Mahayana Buddhist idea of mutual interpenetration uh is expressed by the great simile of the net of jewels in which uh you have a multi-dimensional spiders web in the Morning Dew and on inspecting one Dee drop you see the reflections of all the others and in each reflection in turn the reflections of all the others and again and again and again and so of course one discovers this to be no mere philosophical fancy N your metaphor when you start working with laser beams and finding out that you can reconstruct a

whole photograph from a tiny snip out of the negative because the crystalline structure of the whole photographic field the chemical spread over the acetate or whatever um when it's exposed to light all those crystals change in harmony with each other see supposedly we all touch each other and then somebody says boo uh we'll all jump a little bit together and if you examine any one jump carefully enough any one individual jumping you will see if you can find out enough about it that the way he did it was in response to the one's next to

him and they did it in response to ones next to them and they jumped so far because they couldn't push any further and uh some were a little bit pulled in their jump and so on and by seeing exactly what one of them Did You Could reconstruct what all of them were doing only usually we don't bother to think about things like that because it takes too long and this is one of our great difficulties as human beings that the mode of thinking upon which we we largely rely for our practical calculations is unbelievably clumsy

because it can only deal with one thing at a time and that uh doesn't get you anywhere that's in a way why a great deal of scientific work is apt to be trivial um so all very well if I had all that time to think it out but I don't I have to make practical decisions in a hurry and uh no time but on the other hand here is nature here is your body uh not merely Your Body by itself as something bounded by the skin but your body in relationship to a whole community of

people and animals and bugs and uh vegetables functioning in this astonishing way doing myriads of things all together everywhere at once and not thinking about it at all it is astonishing you know how we Overlook that because of course this is a faculty which everybody possesses and uh therefore we say well that sort of cleverness is a dime a dozen what we like to distinguish is special cleverness people who can do strange tricks like great feats of thinking and talking and uh intellectual and cerebral performance but we mustn't forget that there are also people who

do absolutely astonishing things without thinking at all there are jugglers there are very beautiful people that's pretty astonishing when you pick out someone and saying gee isn't she gorgeous and that's done without thinking and It embarrasses many women to be told that they're beautiful because they want to be admired for their intellectual achievements rather than for the bodies which their parents provided for them and so we are a little bit on the defensive about the things that we achieve without our egos uh being in charge but we do the most beautiful things that we do

really by that means because uh all that thought and intellectuality can do is it can embellish your natural talents a lot of people who are incredibly good at thinking never do anything creative because they are have no Talent available they may have it but they don't know they don't trust it they don't know how to make use of it and therefore their intellect Works to little purpose because the inunction of the intellect is to be the servant of the organic intelligence you see only what we're doing is we are trying to make the intellect the

master the intellect is a wonderful servant just so long as it knows its place but once it becomes saying to Nature look you you you submit I know how you ought to be run and I'm going to take charge that is the moment of hybris where Adam eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is to say of technical knowledge and tries to be God to the world and God says okay baby you try the then you see you've got to work that's why the curse of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge

was work everything became work cats you know dogs and birds they don't do any work they it's true they Scurry around getting food but that's that's what there is to do that's fun that's that's life that's living it's not work besides you don't have to think about it you have um your your brain tells you where to look for it your nose tells you where to find it uh you do what comes naturally and there it is and if God so clothed the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is cast into the

oven how much more will he clothe you faithless ones but I never met a minister never who would not comment upon that that that is a very impractical Passage which we can't live up to but to get back to space all I was showing in this sort of digression was that our mind our self is not inside our heads but extends and so you see uh you you have as the great vehicle of this extension of the universe you have space and you see immediately that you cannot pin space down you cannot really conceive space

at all look at the Wonder a child has when it asks questions and begins what's up there what's beyond what's after that what's after that the child is absolutely fascinated by thinking about that do you know all children are fascinated with infinity don't you remember seeing um say a child's book and on the cover of this book is a little girl sitting reading the same book with the same little girl on the cover and so naturally there's another little girl on the cover of the book she's looking at in the picture and so the child

begins to wonder how small can it get how far can it go or they get in opposing mirrors and look and gee that's wonderful why can't you line them up so that it doesn't just disappear around the corner always couldn't you get in straight on this seems so difficult mommy what did God do before he started the world to think back what would it be like to be in heaven and live forever and ever and ever and ever and immediately this somehow stretches the skull and children love doing this because children are always trying out

experiments on themselves you know they prod themselves pull themselves they love to spin in circles and make themselves feel dizzy CU that's a great thing you know that feeling they going like this you see they're always fascinated with the the limits of experience so what's out beyond that because now when a sophisticated astronomer tries to tell you that space is finite uh the we still represent this and say all right space is fine I but what's outside it well astronomer says you see you can only talk about an outside inside Space outside space there is

no outside this see the mind won't take it the sense you see of infinity so uh this space fascinates us going on forever expanding it seems to be actually going on forever see if the universe is a huge explosion but you can see can't you I think this space although you cannot pin it down and it has the quality of infinity there's no way of of talking about space because it has no color it has no weight you can't cut it you can't possibly chop it into pieces and yet at the same time you cannot

differentiate it from solids we come to another important Point here you see that solid and space are in a secret conspiracy with each other actually there's very little solid in the world most of what appears to be solid appears so by virtue of the speed at which it's jiggling it's um like an electric fan which when put in rotation uh the blades appear to form a solid disc and this chair is solid on rather for rather the same reasons well you can't put your finger through it it's moving too fast but actually uh whatever it

is that's dancing in space is increasingly difficult to define the more you think about energy you see and you can make a calculus of energy like you make a calculus of Wiggles in the well and you can say there are various waves or wavicles or particles of energy which we give all sorts of different names to but the more we pursue it the more it all seems to disappear like space the more you try to think what it is the more difficult it is so in in the same way the more you try to say

now come on let's sit down what is this here it's all right if you stop at a certain point then you say well now we know that's practical L let's let's not ask any more questions up see um if you keep on asking questions everything falls apart you notice this in the scholarly World Scholars spend far more time debunking than they do creating because everything that has ever happened has been debunked practically you can uh show that there is no evidence you know that Julius Caesar existed not really certainly is there's no evidence that Jesus

existed that Socrates existed there's a great deal of doubt about Plato probably the emperor shoko was a myth and so on you know you can go on in that indefinitely uh finding out that there really is no evidence I don't know the probably the same sort of thing as happening with the Warren Commission I don't know or that it's something that it didn't happen anyway because that is the work of the analytical intellect you see when you finally try to be God that's to say Define it exactly now just where is it and let's get

perfectly clear so it's fixed see and it all become slippery because in order to handle the world you see you have to touch it rather gently you mustn't try to pin things down say say in Zen you do not try to drive a nail into the sky because that's the beauty of space you see it has no there's nothing in it to hang on it hasn't a hook to put your hat on you know somewhere in space and yet it hasn't got a flaw to fall on to see if space had a concrete floor on

the bottom it' be pretty dangerous stuff but it doesn't there's nowhere in space to collide with space you can run into somebody or something else yes but not with space figure then on this work on this hypothesis you see it's only a hypothesis at the moment nothing more that space is you because you are equally inaccessible to inspection when you look to find out who you are somebody like a zen master will interrupt you and say excuse me but who is it that wants to know and who is it that's looking find out that so

you know you s chasing your own tail like a little dog and you never catch up with it there's all this you see so space is like you only we turned in the ordinary way to think of ourselves we make the gesture like this see and I'm here we go this way I can feel this I'm inside it this me see but always when you get a certain feeling about things examine the opposite possibility that you are this now we're going to look in due course at the Neurology of this but you do see that

what you see outside you and feel outside you is the way you feel inside your skin since all the optical images shapes and colors and uh everything are neurological states in the brain so what appears to you as outside is the most intimate feeling you have of the inside of your head as you know you don't it's difficult to feel the inside of your head unless you have a headache or a tumor or something but uh in the ordinary way the inside of your head is unconscious and a surgeon can open up your skull and

put instruments in the brain and you won't feel them at all brain is very anesthetized so in order to feel the brain you have to look out there see and that's how it feels in the brain so I'm just trying to give an an indication of how to get the feeling of reciproc reciprocity of you on the one hand it's easy to see as I said you depend on the whole show now I want you to see the opposite and equal truth that the whole show depends on you so that you don't anymore put yourself

down as this wretched little bacterium living on this obscure planet that revolves around a minor star in the outer fringes of one of the Lesser galaxies uh this is the great 19th century put of man how nice to be all unimportant watch out for this watch out for the political consequences of everybody is equally inferior the political consequences emerging and becoming cleared as day goes by barbarism is the answer to that unram violence police States and uh shocking disregard for human existence because they're only wretched little bacteria see let's get rid of a whole lot

of them burn them up and this is not unrelated you see to this feeling of uh the individual as someone who doesn't matter matter at all which can be the reaction against the philosophy of life in which an individual mattered too much in the wrong way in the Christian tradition we have made the individual matter too much in the wrong way that is to say you you as an ego are infinitely precious God has made each one of you separately and each one of you as a separate ego will last forever and uh therefore you're

all important in the eyes of God but you better know your place baby because you're subjects of the King on the other hand the other way of looking at the individual as an incarnation of of the Divine as God him or it or herself um coming on at God everywhere did you realize how fascinating that is that if you were God wouldn't it be fascinating to see myriads to know yourself in terms of myriads of reproductions of yourself all different and really different like other people seem to be different from you and they've got a

secret in them you don't know what they're going to do next see so they are alive if I push you you just go BL I say plastic if you jump a little I say ah someone else I don't know what she's going to do next see that's what I'm looking for that's what we're all looking for in personal relationships and that's you see you can imagine if you simplify it here is a kind of ball of Light which is the Divine being but it's fascinating it's fascinated with itself and so in order to find out

its own possibilities you see it puts another one out there and uh they they they bounce together plop there comes another you see they go all over the place and uh so you get this idea of ever so many Echoes of one sound and they're all chattering back but they're not just plain uniform you see soon you introduce into this the element of differentiation so that each one looks as different as possible from the other but it's all one because they can't be the sense of I am I without the sense of there is someone

else something else there is other I and other imply each other as much as solid implies space well we'll have an intermission last night I was I began by reviewing two possible concepts of the nature of space one that it is simply an abstraction and uh projected upon the physical world in rather the same way that we project measurements lines of latitude and longitude or the cutting up of uh another abstraction called time into divisions like hours minutes and seconds uh which are there only on the dial of the clock the Earth in its rotation

doesn't tick uh and time is of course th seen thus simply a measure of change of the rate of change as between two changing processes the changing process of the clock and the changing process of say uh a person's running around uh it is out of that relationship in other words that you get a concept of time and similarly through being able to measure distances in a similar way you get a concept of space you this is one point of view that it's a an abstraction because uh force would be lent to this point of

view by the fact that space itself isn't really there space is just absence and you must be very careful not as Whitehead would have said to reify that is to make a thing out of uh something that isn't uh there at all like saying um have an absence oh boy Gary Snider invented a corporation was called the n and void guarantee and Trust Company and its slogan was register your absence with us and so I had some business cards made up for him which but at the bottom Gary Snider non-representative but this is of course

Zen humor because Zen people are always joking about things not really being there at all uh the the the general feeling of um there's being nobody at all uh as distinct from being important in somebody has a kind of inverse humor to it one becomes a sort of bag of wind and the something about that uh they Zen Masters call each other wind bags and rice bags and things like that because uh the whole idea of taking nothingness for real is somehow funny the other point of view that I was trying to contrast with this

was uh rather different and that is that just because they are so imponderable and so unget atable space is you space is your Consciousness and your Consciousness is not something located in your head although your head is a way in which it's focused and therefore Consciousness can be altered by a surgeon putting instruments into the brain but the the full range of Consciousness or the full range of the mind is the entirety of space as the Continuum in which the universe exists in rather much the same way as images exist in a mirror only here

there seems to be no solid mirror uh there is an infinitely permeable Continuum space in um a Chinese text called the ding or the platform Sutra attributed to the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism hang he has the passage where he says that the mind uh is like The Emptiness of space now he says if you want to realize this don't exclude everything from your mind because if your mind is like space space contains the earth and the stars and the Sun and the Moon and the mountains and forests good men and bad men enlightened men

and unenlightened men everything is in it and so if a person wants to attain an understanding of the Mind merely by emptying his mind he's making his mind small instead of great so you cannot therefore separate space from what it contains because without the content there's no container without the container no content and when you see that kind of relationship when you see two apparently very different things going together inseparably always find them together you can smell a rat for example nobody has seen any stuff that had no shape and nobody has ever seen a

shape that had no stuff there's a suspicion here then that stuff and shape of the same and likewise un improbable as it may seem you can realize that space and solid are the same only they are as it were the same energy showing itself under two different aspects to a being who always must see things two-sided which is man man is symmetrical almost you see right down this dividing line two sides to his brain two eyes two nostrils two ears a symmetrical mouth two arms two nipples uh hips legs you see all balancing except the

heart is a little bit over to one side and uh but here he is you see this this two-way thing man is like a RW Shar plot uh he's some mess that was squeezed folded and then you unfold it my job it's symmetrical and it's a very strange thing about that you can make a order out of almost any Mess by symmetrizing it in various ways you you know there's a gadget called a teleidoscope which uh is a a marriage between a kaleidoscope and a telescope and uh you can look at things through it and

because it's got mirrors inside at a 45° angle they will bounce the reflection in a circle which is very elegant and the more messy that the thing you look at the more interesting it is with the toos scope because it is through this balancing process of some sort of symmetry that order comes about repetition regularity so uh the human being then being thus two-sided is always wanting to ask is you is or is you ain't is it this or is it that answer yes or no true or false black or white and has very diff

great difficulty the more simple minded a person is the more difficulty they have in using their conscious attention to uh do anything but estimate these very simple contrasts between the good guys and the bad guys you man or a woman there can be no doubt see there might be nothing vaguely in between uh no Grays no uh no washes because uh a simple mind wants this great Precision which of course you can't have but as polls you see of one of the greatest uh dualities in the world is the is the duality of something and

nothing of being and non-being and of course in our thinking the solid World represents existence and the space World represents non-existence the conquest of space therefore will be the conquest of non-existence perhaps see this is the our great attempt to survive by being able to leave this increasingly plundered Planet go somewhere else and plunder that uh that's the difference between Mining and farming hunting and farming too well so there's this great contrast of reality considered as uh what's in the space the that's what's there and the space is simply what's not there but you can't

make it that simple because you've only got to think about it one step to realize that you can't have the recognition or perhaps even the existence of what is there unless there is also what is not in other words uh I wouldn't be able to see you as moving human entities if you were all densely packed in some sort of material medium like say jello or milk or uh whatever because then there would be no intervals between you to bring you out you see now actually space uh must in this connection for a moment be

considered from the point of view of Optics the eye is receptive to a certain Spectrum of vibrations of light and therefore where such vibrations are not being transmitted the nerve ends are not stimulated and therefore don't report and that failure to report is space we call it Darkness where there is no visible light but actually there is nowhere in the universe where there is not some kind of vibration going on so that if you had an instrument that responded to it you would see that space was full of impulses and if you saw it all

you wouldn't be able to make out the individual outlines which require these non-being intervals in order that their being can be realized that is to say outlined distinguished delineated discriminated so to see the outline of the being you must have the intervening space of the non-being but non-being means simply in this connection uh the lack of stimulation of whatever perceptive or perceiving instrument you are using now for example when you print a book we say there is empty paper underneath the print but of course it isn't nothing under the print it's nothing so far as

print is concerned but something very much so far as white paper is concerned now do you see in the same way perhaps it isn't nothing in which we are living in moving it's only nothing so far as our visible shapes are concerned but it is a you mean you could say this that um space is a something of a quite different order than ordinary something ordinary something being the things and events which we say occupy space just as the print occupies the paper but the philosophers especially modern philosophers have a great deal of trouble thinking

about this and the reason is that uh they are too one-sided in the kind of instruments they use for understanding the world and the instrument they use principally is words and thought now they have just as much trouble in thinking about the universe in terms of their words and thoughts and logical categories as you would have in a printed book writing some words down which pointed directly to the paper underneath them supposing I say there is paper underneath every word on this page now the philosopher the the type of logical positivist person who dominates American

and British academic philosophy today he would think uh that that could only mean something if I wrote the sentence there is paper under every word on this page then under each one of those words I wrote the word paper paper paper paper [Music] paper then he would say yes that's true but you see that that isn't the way it is the difficulty is you see there is an incommensurability between the print and the paper if we can stand outside that because we are diverse enough to realize that print is one process and paper is another

and they can be put together but if you are immersed in the print you can't see the paper and so if you're immersed in the kind of Consciousness which simply discriminates things you cannot realize the background that is to say then you cannot realize uh the nature of space when you use only your um analytical Consciousness the Consciousness which looks at things Bit by Bit by Bit by Bit I call the spotlight Consciousness if you use that alone then you you can't think anything about uh the Continuum the ground in which all this flourishes uh

but you may then go on to make a mistake uh if you if you if you're not following me correctly this is the mistake of course that these kind of philosophers fall into um if I say now underneath all distinct things space constitutes the ground in which they live and move and have their being this is not quite correct because if I speak of space in that way it makes it just another thing of the same kind and nature as all the things it contains if in other words I can think about space and I

can only think about it by analogy by likening it to paper to a mirror to the the a basis a background well if I can think about it that makes it a thing which is to say a thing all things are thinks there are as much of life as you can catch hold of in one thought that means a think so likewise in German dankan to think ding thing in Latin Ray or to think Ray is thing so if I make space into a think I've somehow missed it that's why we have to say it's

a Noth think why the in Buddhism it has said the real nature of mind is no mind and you realize this in Daily Life by the fact that when you see clearly [Applause] you see everything except your eyes except if there's something wrong with your eyes and you see spots in front you know that interferes with seeing if you hear clearly you don't hear your ears but if you have ear trouble you get buzzing in your ears same way if you're very healthy physically you hardly notice your body except as a kind of um Blissful

uh vagueness which is exhilarating so on and if your clothes are comfortable you don't notice them so this is connected with the nature of a beautifully functioning mind is that it doesn't get in its own way it doesn't think itself s if it thinks itself it gets in its own way because it's a no think no thinks is the background for thinks see so that's why every con attempt to conceptualize the ground of being whether it's space or God is an idolatry and that's why sages have always condemned idolatry that it to to understand uh

the the nature of the the ground of being correctly you must not have an image of it now we don't need to be compulsive about that uh compulsive uh iconoclasm is a terrible thing the Islamic people suffered from it from time to time and when they got to India they knocked down all the Buddhas and uh beautiful images and banged off their noses uh and the Puritans uh did the same sort of thing to Roman Catholic and Anglican churches in England they hated images that meant you see they were terribly attached to them they hadn't

they were still hung up by the images therefore had to smash them uh either way uh if you say you must not like as in very strict Orthodox Islamic culture you must not make any image of any living creature and so their art very interestingly and one must admit went off into abstract patterning but what one is saying here not is not that it is somehow just wrong to make an image the point is much deeper than that it is this that in order to realize in order to experience the ground of being you need

to be free from images that is to say you need to suspend the activity called thinking now most people imagine that if they stop thinking that's sort of the end the life of the mind there instantly curls up and dies but um this isn't the case because there's a lot more to the Mind than thinking there is this direct apprehension of the world unmediated through Concepts or thoughts and that's the kind of apprehension of the world you need to understand space it's interesting how to some extent this sort of thing enters even into the Sciences

because scientists operate with certain should we say it's a hard to say concept with certain tools that are not Concepts really you always feel about a concept that you have to know what it is but for example the basis of algebra is operating with patterns uh and you don't know what they are they're called unknowns X is the unknown you can say x + y = y + x and uh you've made a perfectly clear statement but you don't have to know what x is or what Y is couldn't mean anything at all so in

the same way in in modern geometry you don't Define what you mean by a point they've abandoned this as a sort of a nonsense definition ID's idea that a point is that which has position but no magnitude what do you mean it has position what has position and so now a point everybody knows what a point is but you don't explain it because you see there must be a starting point in anything that anybody does in anything they think about in any um system of ideas any conception of the good life where you don't explain

it because everybody knows what it is and yet when you ask them about it they don't and you see we get time and space if you turn back on your starting point and say I will not go anywhere I will not proceed with my geometry with my investigation with my business plans until I am quite sure of my starting point you'll never begin because you can go back into your starting point forever and that's a manifest itself in people who for example have certain kinds of hypochondria their starting point is their body but they wonder

my goodness ought I to go out would I catch cold uh would I get into an accident should I go to a foreign country would I get the great Siberian itch or the heie jibbies or trots or whatever and so always worrying about the starting point see uh now now are you quite sure that you your your your premises are right it's always good to look at your premises but you very quickly come to the conclusion that if you don't have some premises uh you won't go anywhere at all so as one General once said

a poor plan of attack carried out with zest and uh uh determination is much better than an excellent plan carried out in a wobbling way so in in this way for example in Japan I have no idea is really about talking Japanese uh I know lots of words and no grammar therefore I have no compunction whatsoever about talking because I know it's mistakes all over the place and if I were nervous about it as they get nervous about talking English because they do desperately want to be correct I have absolutely no desire to be correct

because I know that in my whole lifetime I shall never be able to speak correct Japanese so I just Plunge in and I get [Laughter] understood that's the way you have to do it life you muddle through so if you keep turning back you see on the initial beginning point and trying to be sure of it uh nothing will ever happen so then whatever is the point whatever is the ground that we are and that we take our stand upon appears to us as space as not being there to give us Str transparency you see

if God were visible nobody could see anything but God uh it would blot out everything else but by virtue of becoming invisible the world is created because as it were God gets out of the way so that the world can appear and the world is a selection as I explained the eyes select what they see because they are only noticing what goes on in a certain spectrum of light if you could change the Eye Spectrum all together you would see a different world of creatures Flip Flip Flip you could have the thing like a radio

tuner and go on from uh performance to Performance all on different bands of a spectrum to see them all at once though would be for our kind of intellect like taking your hands like this across the piano and going slam see you just get this chaos of sound so that there being realized objects in space is uh partly dependent upon are using an attentive and selective type of Consciousness you see that the same thing if you have a selective Consciousness you have a a selective world uh so putting down the five fingers on the piano

instead of the full flat arm selects a certain pattern of sound and you can say it's a chord it's a melody and so on so when the Angels play their Harps in heaven they are selecting they are the fingers of God selecting uh What uh kind of patterns are appearing in the world you see that's that's really what that image is about so then to to see this then uh you go back to no thinking the suspension of thought is for Modern Man in particular a tremendously important undertaking when in about 19 21 ludic vonstein

published a book called The tractatus Logical philosophicus it was the end of Western philosophy uh because where he finished he said you know philosophy is really a method for getting rid of meaningless Concepts and uh so he practically got rid of all metaphysical Concepts and ended up by saying uh whereof one cannot speak of that one should be silent this was the great moment for philosophy departments all over the Western World to lapse into silence and practice meditation but instead they had to go on talking because they couldn't prove that they were an academic discipline

unless they did some talking and especially some publishing so uh they began then to chatter uh nauseatingly about trivialities uh they became grammarians mathematical logicians and things and everybody forgot about philosophy because it got so dull it wasn't expressing anymore man's Fascination and wonder at the improbable situation of living in the universe so uh but fortunately things are at last getting through to people and uh you would not be entirely laughed out of court in academic surroundings today if you suggested that some nonverbal uh research be carried on you would have to put it rather

carefully you would have to refrain from calling it yoga or Buddhism or meditation but it would be sort of uh research in nonverbal um sensory awareness or something you know some kind of academic gobleg but it's coming and th this presents problems to people who are compulsive thinkers because when they try to reach this completely non-verbal level they think about doing it they think I trying to reach the nonverbal level I'm trying to empty my mind of thoughts I'm trying to think not thinking you feel so sorry for those people but it is an a

problem if you have it and uh to get rid of it then one uses gimmicks one uses methods of absorbing the individual in non-conceptual experiences uh such as you can play a single loud musical tone and get that going and it really shatters thinking and it has you just turns you into this your whole body becomes this one tone and you get the person concentrated on that one point you see go go go go and zip cut it off then where are you haven't had time to collect your thoughts you're blown by this tone and

all those uh techniques that are used in yoga then when they chant when they uh do some kind of physical exercise is when they have a nonsense proposition like a Coan to concentrate on all these things work in the same essential way to suspend the analytical thinking to suspend uh the spotlight mind for a while so that you get back to what is called Original mind where you act without thinking that's why in in the whole interchange between a zen teacher and his students the the zen teacher is constantly challeng challenging the student to respond

intelligently to a given situation without thinking without stopping to think just as in say uh using Judo you mustn't stop to think you're lost if you do you must learn to respond without thinking so creative skill in so many things depends upon uh the opposite of thinking when you examine what people say what invent say what artists say what um mathematicians say about the discovery of new ideas very few of them arrived at those ideas by a purely um thought thinking veral or numerical process and the reason is of course that the structures which we

have arrived at and we do understand by analytical thinking once you see them they tend uh to stay put they become habits and there's nothing more difficult to cure in an individual than a habit of thought you know I've argued for hours and hours and hours sometimes with people who simply can't understand knowing without a knower because they are so trapped by sentence structure the verb has to have that subject therefore you can't have a state of affairs in which there is just the verb that is to say knowing they say well who is who

is knowing and it's as bad as arguing with a flat earst or a Jehovah's Witness uh impossible because of the ruts of thought now such a person can never be inventive why because he will never see a new pattern and a new structure and he won't see one because he's thinking all the time he's not open to the variations of the actual world and so he can only see what he's been taught to see that's why academic psychology is always in a position of bafflement about learning theory because if learning is a process of converting

new experience into the terms of what you've already learned you never really learn at all it's like according to kind of a narrow-minded aerodynamics bees cannot fly well there's no way of explaining the aerodynamics of that vibration but it flies and you often come up against this when an inventor has an idea and and all his colleagues say to him oh don't be silly you can't do that it just wouldn't work well he says I've tried it and it does work or they say come on and very often they won't even try they'll just say

it can't be done you can get a fantastic dogmatism in the scientific world and you have to be terribly careful not to upset certain absolutely fundamental strip prejudices which are the result of thinking too much and of getting accustomed to the warm ruts of thought and so you never could see the new so this is the real meaning of an open mind not merely that you're a liberal sort of guy but that you can turn off thoughts and get thus be turned on to reality thought Susi belong to the world of symbols what we experience

with our senses is of course the physical world the real world you may ask me well isn't there also a spiritual world but you must understand that the spiritual world is the same thing as the physical when the physical is not confused with the symbolic there is no real difference between the spiritual and the physical it's all one energy all in one space now you see though the difficulty is that in saying something like it's all one energy this is the really the point I mean if you understand that this whole universe is one energy

and you're it you don't really have any any much in the way of further problems uh I mean you have some a few practical problems like uh how to make a good table or um a beautiful dress or whatever it is that you're after but you don't have any more metaphysical problems uh when you see that but a person who thinks lot can't understand that at all because he says well it doesn't make any difference if everything is all one energy let's begin again I mean uh what have you said of course we haven't said

anything logically the statement is pure nonsense everything is one energy so what but that's only because the person who's received this communication has had it only as a thought and as a thought it's again like saying there is paper under every word on this page and thinking that that means that paper paper paper paper Pap but when this is something that emerges from not thinking and when you see that um you've been bamboozled all your life long you've been bugged by everybody else into thinking that um you a some kind of a freak that uh

came into this world and uh you don't really belong here because all your probably your parents didn't really want you and uh certainly your brothers older brothers and sisters didn't want you around you were eating up more and uh in school they tell you you know you've got to learn that you're not the only Pebble on the beach and that therefore the best way of teaching you that is that uh you're really rather insufferable around here and you're on probation until you uh are acceptable well babies then grow up you see with this treatment feeling

strangers feeling that the Earth is something alien and so we all have this feeling of uh of being alone of being impotent little puppets of a huge system going on and so we are progressively fooled out of really with our own cooperation fooled out of this sense that you can get if you suspend all these identifications that one does with the thinking process this is this this is that I'm me what's me is different from so on you suspend that you see not simply that all those problems and all those definitions of who you are

were unreal there's something else you see there's the feeling beyond having dissipated the illusion of the sheer um joy and Delight of this one energy now is realizing itself as you and uh how nice that that um It won't always be doing that because that would get boring it'll go like this you see and there'll be a different situation altogether uh you know you'll run into a brick wall and before you know where you are you're um beep beep beep beep out of an [Music] eggshell uh the whole thing is flipped and you're doing on

on another track but there's only one you you see it's all the one energy but this is as I say difficult to understand logically if you don't understand it experimentally if you understand it experimentally it's perfectly clear when somebody says everything is one energy we say of course but the person who's stuck with the concepts and has nothing more than the concept can't can't simply can't make any sense of it at all and he says well you're suffering from a hallucination and we'll proceed to prove according to his ideas that what you've achieved in that

has made no difference to you or do anything else and of course he can prove it because his proof is set up to give just that result well then I got into that at some length the the question of no thinking because of trying to point out how one uh Mr void trying to understand space uh in such a way as to make it a thing like a box you see which contains all the objects in it but a no like space is at the same time in cahoots with things there are two aspects Two

Poles two terms of the same one energy don't make space at the same pole of the one energy as the things it's the opposite pole it is then because of our treatment of space as nothing you see that we are afraid of death we are afraid of that pole of experience which is unconsciousness that corresponds to space uh surrounding the world and because we think that reality that our life that our identity is entirely in the domain of Consciousness and thingness and thinkl the other pole seems completely threatening whereas of course it is that on

which it all depends because the two poles depend on each other they energize each other so when you um are scared of the non-being side of things you are as it were frightened of your own mother now of course you may have reason to be because there are such things as devouring mothers but the devouring mother represents uh the original horror felt for the unknown and uh in practice in human relationships the devouring type of mother is the precisely the person who cannot come to terms with her own unknown therefore she wants to control everything

she wants to see that all her children remain perpetually under her dominance but she can't let go as if she let go you know she'd become uncared and flop all over the place as it [Laughter] were so uh she becomes the Devourer but you always conquer the devara by dropping into it by faith in other words faith in the sense of trust I don't mean belief trust drop into space and you float see this is only begins to be understood by rocket people as they get out there and we're going to have I don't know

how the psychology of this is proceeded we're going to have an awful lot of people getting out in space and not wanting to come back because uh when you're in orbit and you float very interesting sensation and they have to follow very strict rules that same way you do with the skin diving when you get to a certain level of pressure uh you start floating and you feel no no body weight and uh you have to absolutely keep your will going when the watch says a certain thing up you go orders is orders you see

otherwise you'll drown in great delight and Bliss so so uh the point is though that uh we are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown and that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship which could hardly improved upon it has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it is beautifully equipped with oxygen with Food Supplies with all kinds of um uh delightful things

to do while on the journey and it's traveling through the space at a colossal speed and it's called the planet Earth and the Art of exploring from the planet Earth depends not on conquering space with uh rockets and bombs but on developing greater sensitivity in the place where we are laa said without going out of my house I know the whole universe so by uh Clumsy beginnings of this sensitivity are seen in radio astronomy which instead of trying to LEAP out of the world it stays here and gets more sensitive and eventually I feel that

we shall discover each one of us have inside our heads a radioastronomical Contraption of great subtlety and uh we shall eventually the more we use instruments we shall begin to watch a process which I will call etherealization what a present we call miniaturization is connected with this miniaturization means that electronic equipment becomes smaller and smaller and smaller until what was originally a great box like this becomes a tiny tiny little thing little tiny cell and so in the same way as certain techniques Advance all kinds of joining lines like wires begin to vanish see when

radio substitutes for the telephone all the wires vanish when um the airplane substitutes for Road and Railway all the roads and rails are going to vanish see and uh more and more we find means of getting rid of the clumsiness of primitive technology and then as all this apparatus disappears we find that we are moving in the direction of having it all in our um own apparatus just like um dolphins have sonar homing pigeons have built-in radar I think it's all in us but we had to exteriorize it technologically in order to discover it within

it's curious how past the middle of the 20th century there's a very strong evidence of a Revival in Western philosophy of what used to be be called idealism not in the moral sense but in the metaphysical sense that is to say of the feeling that the external world is in some way a creation of the Mind only we come to this point of view with very different assumptions than were held by people like Hegel or Berkeley or Bradley great idealists of the European metaphysical tradition and probably rather more akin to similar Trends in Buddhist philosophy

emerging from India about 400 ad the difference of approach the difference of the way in which today this thing arises and the way in which it arose in the thought of a man like Bishop Berkeley is that the new idealism has a kind of curiously physical basis when one would argue everything you know is in your mind and the distance the feeling of externality between you and other objects and people is also a content of Consciousness and therefore it's all it's all your Consciousness this of course created all sorts of weird feelings are things there

when I'm not witnessing the more is there anybody else there or are you all my personal dream and one has only to imagine a conference of such people of solipsists those who believe that they alone exist arguing as to which one of them is really there to make the whole idea rather laughable uh and furthermore there seem to be no Clarity in such philosophical thinking as to what the term mind or Consciousness meant it had long associations with the miasmic and the gaseous by way of images uh mind and soul and spirit were always vague

and formless and matter by contrast was very um rugged craggly and how these two ever influenced each other nobody ever could decide because all properly behaved ghosts walk straight through brick walls without disturbing either the bricks or The Ghost and so how can a mind incarnate in a material Body Move That Body in any way this was always a puzzle so people began to think that the differentiation between mind and matter was of no use because actually what happens in making such a differentiation is that you impoverish both sides of it when you try to

think of matter as mindless or mind as immaterial you get a kind of a mess on both sides sides it's the same way when you get a Mystic who's not a bit of a sensualist and a sensualist is no wit of a Mystic such a sensualist is boring such a Mystic is a fanatic uh too spiritual it's the same uh when we divide the medical profession from the priesthood both are losers not just because they lose their so-called opposite half but the problem is when you separate a doctor from a priest you do more than

create a specialization out of what was originally one field you create two specializations because a priest physician is more than a priest plus a physician by having as it were the binocular vision from medicine and from religion he just doesn't see two added areas he sees the area in three dimensions by as a result of this combination well in a similar way when we have the concepts of mind and matter working separately both are impoverished mind becomes vague kind of uh gas psychic gas and matter becomes mere stuff but you see what has enabled us

to make a transition is first of all above all I would say two Sciences biology and neurology because through biology and to some extent physics the method of physics has shown us that the idea that man can be an objective Observer of an external world that is not himself so that as it were he can stand back from it and look at it and say what is out there we see that this cannot be done we can approximately do it but we cannot really and fully do it for the simple for two reasons one the

most important reason is that the biologist will show us very clearly there is no way of definitively separating a human organism from its external environment the two are a single field of behavior and then furthermore to observe something either simply by looking at it or more so by making experiments by doing science on it you alter what you're looking at you cannot carry out an observation without in some way interfering with What You observe it is this that we try when we're watching say the habits of birds to be sure that the birds don't don't

notice us that we're watching to watch something it must not know you're looking and of course what you ultimately want to do is to be able to watch yourself without knowing that you're looking then you can really catch yourself uh not on your best behavior and see yourself as you really are that this can never be done and likewise the physicist cannot simultaneously establish the position and the velocity of very minute particles or wavicles and this in part because the experiment of observing uh nuclear Behavior alters and affects what you're looking at this is one

side of it the inseparability of man and his world which deflates the myth of the objective Observer standing aside and observing a world that is merely mechanical a thing that operates like a machine out there the second is from the science of Neurology where we understand so clearly now that the kind of world we see is relative to the structure of the sense organ that in other words the what used to be called the qualities of the external world its qualities of weight or color texture and so on are possessed by it only in relation

to a perceiving organism the very structure of our Optical System confers Light and color upon outside energy and in this sense then especially if you want to read a very easily digestable account of this thing you get the book by Jay-Z Yan called doubt and certainty in science but you see here from a new basis altogether we have a new answer to the old riddle if a tree falls in the forest when nobody is listening does it make a noise the answer uh in terms of modern science is perfectly clear that the falling tree creates

vibrations in the air and these become noise if and only if they relate to an eard drum and to an auditory nervous system just as in ordinary drums however hard you hit the drum will make no sound if it has no skin because sound is not something that exists in the external world sound is a relationship between vibrating air and certain kinds of biological organisms and therefore it is these organisms which confer what we call sound Upon A vibration which in an earless world would make no noise now you see that is a perfectly clear

and straightforward but now we can we dare we take certain steps from that could we say for example that um before any organisms existed there was no world and what we're talking about when we talk about a world prior to the existence of organisms is what is called an extrapolation let me explain extrapolation for a moment supposing you have a map of Kansas and you want from the evidence contained in the map to guess at what kind of territory lies Beyond its edges well naturally you will extend those straight line roads off and off and

off that's the only basis you've got to go on nothing in the map of Kansas would warn you that a little Way West you will encounter the Rocky Mountains the roads will have to wiggle and still less will warn you that you're going to encounter the Pacific Ocean Way Out Beyond where you can't build any roads so naturally you see extrapolation we extrapolate from what we know to the unknown and so one might say then is the exist existence of a universe before there were any living organisms an extrapolation all we are saying is this

is how things would have been if we had been around but we weren't so it wasn't that is a possible argument although in the climate of opinion today it is a one that is not fashionable you must watch out above all for or fashion in philosophy fashion in science there are completely irrational functions that govern what is a what is not a respectable scientific opinion uh and although there is very careful work done very valuable and thoughtful experimentation always in the background of this work there are these irrational Fashions of what is believable and what

is not many things that we accept today were completely unbelievable we are always coming across this authoritative pronouncements that uh no one will ever reach the moon because of uncontroverted evidence about this that and the other but nowadays we have swung over perhaps to be a little bit too uncritical and as Norbert weiner warned in his book the human use of human beings we must not take science as a sort of um Fairy Godmother say well we have all these problems of overpopulation and lack of water and so on but science will solve it don't

worry see that's the Other Extreme but there are these Fashions and so the idea that um the world is uh in some way you see therefore the moment we one moment you let this little idealism thing under the door and I remind you I'm using idealism not in a moral sense but in a metaphysical sense as opposed to uh some sort of um materialism now the moment you let that in under the door if I can possibly realize that the way the world is is evoked by the structure of my organism it is that way

all mountains and Suns and Moons and stars are the inhabitants of a strictly human World perhaps insects with their different sense organs uh have a very different universe and that is an insect Universe this is again it seems to be a recrudescence of what used to be called a pathetic fallacy which was the attribution of human qualities and emotions to Natural phenomena the wind sigh in the trees and my heart is sad and somebody comes along and says it isn't the wind that sign it's you true and not true true cuz you wouldn't be able

to sigh if there were no wind and you sighing and wind blowing go with each other I've invented this new word go with g w or goes with it is to replace the idea of causality certain things go with each other and sighing wind goes with the same world in which there are human hearts and human emotions and if there were not a world with human hearts and emotions there would be no wind and if there were no wind air there would be no human hearts and emotions it's a transaction it's reciprocity so in the

same way every event then in the external world is as dependent on the Observer for it's happening as for example is a rainbow uh you can say the sun is shining and there's moisture in the atmosphere and the sun being at the right angle to the moisture makes a rainbow and if somebody is there they see the rainbow that is a mythology a way of putting things that is acceptable to us in the current climate of philosophical and scientific fashion but I want to put it in another way the sun is shining and there is

a person standing if there were moisture in the atmosphere there would be a rainbow but there isn't so there is no rainbow if you want to be fair there is no rainbow if nobody is watching it you see cuz you must have one of the three components Sun moisture Observer to have the thing called rainbow and what applies to the tenuous filmy luminescent rainbow applies equally well to the hardest rocks the solidest mountains and the hottest fires because all existence is a relationship it's like the skin of the drum if it's not there it will

no no amount of hitting a non-existent skin will produce any noise so you see energy is uh we can see this energy is relation ship we can see the falling Fist and the skin of the drum boing like that and if there isn't both the falling Fist and the skin no noise no existence but existence is not only the impact of rocks upon each other existence requires always as it's third you can get the Rocks knocking the sun and the moisture the tree crashing to to the ground uh the sun pouring out electrical energy but

none of these things constitute existence until related with the neurological complex but then you have to look backwards and say at the same time the neurological complex belongs to the same world as the sun it's a physical pattern physical Behavior physical energy but it it takes this complexity of pattern to evoke the world you see this idea is unfamiliar and that's the difficult of understanding that's all it's a very simple idea but it's an unfamiliar one and it's an unfashionable one although as I say this sort of thinking is coming back to us at this

time uh very largely as people as a result of people's experiments with psychedelics where uh one gets the perfectly uncanny feeling of the world and oneself as simply two phases of a single process well as the rainbow metaphor Illustrated we arbitrarily favor an explanation of the triangle the impact of energies in the external world and an observer of this impact which um as it were energizes or realizes them makes them real the difficulty that we have in our prejudice that it's the two forces out there that are real and the Observer is irrelevant to the

reality of the situation it's what we're really saying it goes back to the whole notion that man himself is irrelevant man is conceived as something therefore that is irrelevant in various ways uh he could be said to be irrelevant because he is a spiritual visitor From Another World altogether he could be said to be irrelevant because he's unimportant he makes very little difference to to the total Universe he's very small but when you get this kind of thinking you want to go back and ask why do people want to believe that man is irrelevant What

in in all theory of this kind look for some um sort of uh well ask the question what do these people want to achieve by their Theory by holding the stamp and it was fashionable in the 19th century to look upon man as Irrelevant for some very sound political reasons I may sound a little bit like a Marxist in saying this but it's when you're on the Rampage uh you have to believe either that you're the representative of God Almighty and doing everything at his bidding or that what you're doing isn't really very important either

Position will give you an alibi for behaving like a Barbarian so the great put down on man that our little Affairs are of no concern to God thank heaven he's not watching anymore and we can get away with murder which is what we wanted to do in the colonization uh doings especially of the 19th century and the outrages of the two World Wars there is no God watching anymore you know uh teacher has gone out boys let's raise hell that was a way of getting rid of teacher you know God is dead let's have a

[Laughter] drink and as a result of this you see it became so fashionable to think of man as uh me unimportant little victim of the cosmic trap that for a while Western man lost his sense of uh the dependence of the well what the Hebrews used to call he lost his sense of man's position as the head of Nature and uh [Applause] uh when you when you hear today people's comments on that old myth of man as the head of nature they come back in a very funny way they say oh that's the most conceited

point of view man is part of nature yes but why is it that the naturalists who think that man is part of nature are always fighting nature because they don't understand what it means to be the head of nature every creature is the head of nature in its turn and we all take turns because it's taking turns that makes the world go WR every creature in its turn is the head of nature because each creature creates the world in its own image and uh so each creature as a creator of the world is man Man

simply means the middle position this is the whole idea of man the middle the middle way the mean and so whereever is the central point that is the point called man just as you are the center of your universe and uh as the astrologers explained that uh when you wanted to draw the map of the Soul you took the center point occupied by the individual organism in other words a date and a time that gave you a latitude and a longitude and so in relation to that date and time how was the universe AR rign

shows the map of the individual soul because the the individual is the whole universe considered from this point of view or focused at this point of view so in like way the cosmic situation of a bee or a mouse puts that Mouse in the position of man when the mouse is considered the center of the universe now every point in a curved SpaceTime Continuum is the center of the universe you can see it although this is only a metaphor and is not quite the right mathematical and physical description but when you consider the surface of

a ball of a sphere uh any point on that surface can be the center just rotate it uh to what appears to be the front as you look at it and it's the center of the surface of the sphere and any point so in that kind of if if our space is curved like the surface of a sphere then any point on it may legitimately be considered the center and so considered as the center that is the point called man although as I say it may be Mouse it may be Ant it may be insect

anything you know but this becomes inconceivable and unimaginable to individuals who have no experience of themselves as Center and people who insist on the idea of being an objective Observer of standing outside and watching the individual the the world as kind of television screen or movie screen upon which there is a distant Panorama of passing events that person by adopting that position has excluded himself from the feeling of centrality in fact he rather looks down on the feeling of centrality he says that is the egotistic situation you think you're the center of everything but you

know you may call it all sorts of bad names you may call it the egocentric predicament but that's the way it is and uh it's much less egocentric to accept it than to say well I'll go off and play my own eccentric game as an objective Observer who uh is a sort of controller outside the world in that qualitative sense in which the monotheistic God is said to be outside the world the boss so then if you take this to a very far extent see how far we can go with it is it then that

in the measure that you are the behavior of the universe is the universe the behavior of you I was talking at the beginning you see about the ease of understanding one way of looking at this and the difficulty of understanding the other even though one implies the other uh when we see that uh the degree to which individual behavior is a factor of the of the whole environmental scene we tend to try and understand that in terms of determinism that the individual uh organism is the helpless pushed around by and responding to environmental forces but

on the other hand if the relationship between the organism and its environment is transactional uh it it won't be that one-sided if the relationship is transactional it will be true simultaneously that the individual organism behaves in accordance with the environment and the environment behaves in accordance with the individual organism so if we put that in startling practical terms if you got into a mess that was what you wanted will you say I didn't know I wanted it I certainly didn't think I wanted it no because uh that will be true you didn't want it so

long as you refer to yourself only in terms of the conscious Spotlight which scans experience bit by bit and which thinks about it to the degree you identify your own functioning with that alone then you will say of what happens to you well I didn't ask for this it has nothing to do with me I wasn't responsible but as soon as you extend your way of looking at things and are not that myopic about it you'll begin to see what is I think clumsily foreshadowed by Freud and Yung in uh especially Freud in his idea

of self- punitiveness death wishes and all these things where he is trying to say of the wanted to punish herself now actually grodek is much better at this than Freud if you very few people know grodek grodek really uh was behind lot of Freud's ideas and he wrote a thing called The Book of the it D book from and in this he explains an most extraordinary theory of the unconscious uh which he doesn't like Freud Freud basically didn't trust the unconscious that's why he felt that the reality principle uh was in irreconcilable conflict with the

pleasure pleasure principle and that this conflict would destroy human civilization grodek who looked like a goblin with enormous ears a little man with really looked like a goblin and he ran a sanitarium at bon bon where people who came for massage got psycho analysis and people who came to psycho analysis got [Laughter] massage well he wrote this book in the form of letters from A goblin to a young girl and uh it's it is the most it's much more sexy than Freud but in through the whole thing he has this complete faith in the unconscious

and its wisdom and a friend to whom I once lent this book years ago said after reading that I will never be afraid of getting sick again because he pointed out about all sickness that sickness is really not a a disease but a symptom of the the it the unconscious trying to cure you and uh therefore just as One does not simply knock down a fever with quinine because that would stop the work of the fever so perhaps one should not knock down all sorts of diseases because for purposes which we do not as yet

understand uh the unconscious is using them for a constructive uh purpose but now so you see uh this was something Freud was fumbling after the notion of uh an intelligence in US greater than the intelligence of Consciousness and operating in an unconscious way uh in not the choice of words why didn't he say superconscious because the climate of opinion at the time in which he was alive wanted to insist that everything below human conscious reason was stupid that mere matter blind energy had displaced God upon the throne of Heaven but it comes back you see

with with Freud that you cannot eliminate the unconscious as part of your essential operation yourself you cannot uh say you because you are an Inseparable part of the world you cannot divvy up responsibility and say you should praise me for that I should blame you for that it's your fault no wasn't it's your fault you know all this is a perfectly silly argument and if we think it dignifies human beings and gives them a sense of uh mean theologians are always talking a lot of nonsense about this kind of thing they're saying that the Dignity

of man depends upon each individual assuming his responsibility and then as soon as they start doing this and then T isn't this isn't you know and and arranging who's to be clobbered who's the fall guy who gets the blame for this situation it's usually somebody who was just happened to be standing by when it happened so if then you understand that you are an integral functioning part of this whole Cosmos what price do you pay for stopping this yak yak yak abouts your fault my fault Etc the price you pay is you have to admit

your own complicity in the catastrophes that occurred to you you have to see that every everything that comes to you is what went out of you everything that comes to you is a return to you of what went out of you you asked for it but it's not the conscious you that asked for it not the uh the you that is just the spotlight Consciousness because that's unconscious of most of the things that go on in you so you get a curious uh fascinating picture of how things are operating underneath the surface when you this

is what's so valuable about studying some science uh take a very uh so-called simple science like um Elementary botany or best of all a kind of Elementary course in ecology plant microb organism relationships and what you see is this you see a developing pattern in which everything that happens gets integrated into the whole thing that's going on on uh that what is from one point of view say the disease of a certain plant is the method of reproduction of some other species if we get say malaria from anop mosquitoes that's because anaphes mosquitoes have an

extraordinary reproduction cycle that involves their being parasitic to us now if you take the anop point of view it becomes man you see so that as you study these systems you see what is going on is so we need a little bit this way and somebody says oh no that's going too far and then they say they pull it and it comes back you see now a little bit this way you get it going over here and then they say no no no that's too much too much too much um they feel a strain or

something they say too much so there's this constant adjustment going on and um if you would examine for example the sharp edge of a leaf you put it under a huge microscope and a churning churning churning going along and there are certain little element cells in that leaf you see they want to go we way out there and uh if they do you know the leaf is disintegrating into gas and uh we but then some police come along along that line and say hey get back inside keep in keep in keep in thing no you're

destroying our Liberty we want go out see go get in this whole thing this clamor goes along the edge of the leaf see but from our point of view it's a perfectly stable clean Edge we're not looking closely enough so our turmoils our Pro problems our uh uh Wars and calamities and atomic explosions mean if the planet blows up that's going to be like um s morganth once showed me a great um plant covered in greenfly they were succulent and fat and having a ball came by the next day all thing was gray dust they'd

eaten up the plant and disintegrated as a fact of nature around here we say thank heavens for that those green flies just ate the weed up and both of them were pests anyway it works out in the balancing system of nature so we are doubtless in the same situation and uh only we have a kind of blinkers on whereby we only see half the picture we get the end of it that it can push us around but we don't get the end of it that being pushed around is what we asked for we evoked it

all by the very fact that we're here children don't think that they are responsible for being born theyve their parents not realizing that they can't really separate themselves from their parents that in the measure that example I have sexual desires I can really understand my father's predicament and uh I couldn't possibly blame him because actually I was the evil gleam in his eye when he approached my mother you know I asked for it now now you can see in this that your relationship to the world as being responsible for everything that happens to you is

not the same as an ordinary boss who would be a magician and and and say that all sorts of improbable things should happen rather it is this you will think if you think of yourself only as the Consciousness then if you get some ideas from me about being in control of everything that happens to you you will act stupidly as if you were the boss of the whole thing like a kind of a lunatic thinking he's God but if on the other hand you understand that your real self is the wisdom that is expressed in

the intelligent form of your organism then you won't fall into the error of thinking your relationship to the world of being that as its Governor this morning I want to talk about space in relation to uh what is ordinarily called reincarnation because this is one of the most fascinating applications of the sense that space constitutes something significant now the subject of reincarnation is one around which is ringed an incredible amount of Hocus Pocus and yet there is something in it and there seems to be something in it not mainly because uh there is a lot

of alleged evidence for it in the form of stories of children who remember their former lives and so on uh I want to approach the the subject much in the way that win shring and the physicist does because he has a view of this that does not involve any Hocus Pocus at all it is perfectly simple and all the evidence for it is already before us so it involves no claim to special inside psychic knowledge but merely to grasping a principle that is staring Us in the face and this principle is ult to understand not

because there's any inherent intellectual complexity to it but simply because it requires getting across something that's just unfamiliar there is obviously some sort of analogy which I've already drawn your attention to between space and unconsciousness between stars there is Darkness uh between stars there is not the energy which constitutes a so-called body in uh some Modern physical Theory uh that is purely hypothetical not really tested bodies in space are thought of as points at which space is intensified but at any rate there are these gaps these intervals and obviously the unconscious state must appear always

to the conscious State as a gap or interval so when we go to sleep at night we wake up in the morning almost instantly in other words there appears to have happened nothing except something quite vague between going to sleep and waking unless you had dreams and so you can conceive or barely conceive going to sleep but not waking up or the reverse of it waking up without ever having to sleep which appears to be the nearest we can imagine to death and birth respectively to go to sleep and never wake up when we die

when we were born to wake up but not to remember ever having gone to sleep and of course this bugs our imagination because it's in inconceivable in terms of Consciousness people are afraid some people are afraid of the possibility of Eternal Annihilation and I suppose one of the most eloquent expressions of that is John Ban's poem before the anesthetic where uh he would prefer rather even the Dismal Hells and that this eye should cease to be and uh other people perhaps of a more rational bent say well that's no problem because if you simply cease

to be there's nobody to be disturbed by it you can't experience not being there forever and what most people do is they project upon the Prospect of annihilation the imagination of being shut up in a dark prison and as it were a super sensory deprivation chamber forever but of course uh there is no the the the notion of Eternal Annihilation really has no meaning it is an attemp to conceive uh nothingness non-experience and so far as our imaginations are concerned nature abhor a vacuum we have to project something into that because psychologically as well as

logically it is a void however you see just as we've been discussing the notion that all creatures whatsoever not to mention all people feel themselves in the middle they feel Central to their experience and being Central to experience is the nearest thing I can conceive as a meaning for the word I not an ego because that is a social structure a social institution uh which has been kind of implanted Upon Our psychological Behavior upon shall we say experience because experience is a thing that we are taught we are taught what we what per what experiences

are permissible and what are not just in the same way as we are taught what speech is permissible and what is not and what gestures are permissible what actions are permissible and what are not so our experience is trained and we are trained to experience ourselves as egos but still underneath the implantation of the ego experience there is this sensation of centrality you may feel that your Center is isolated as in the ego thing or you may feel that your Center is simply the center of a of a being which is you which extends to

the ultimate limits but in every case there is the sense of centrality in every being that exists and therefore every being is I just as you are and there are always eyes in this sense uh so long as the planet endures and there are living creatures on it this is the planet which eyes and so long as there is the possibility that anywhere in the galaxies there should be such a planet or creatures who have uh who Focus the centrality feeling of the universe there is I and that I is always you we know that

when people die other people are born after them and uh that is all the evidence we need for the notion of a reincarnation all it could be explained in various ways discussed in various ways and elaborated but fundamentally people die and then people are born and that is only the simplest way of saying it because people are born While others are living and a whole collection of Eye Centers can sit around in a ring in this room and I would explain according to my feeling that we are all a cycle of reincarnation sitting around here

in a circle because reincarnation is The Reincarnation of ey uh if you want it to be The Reincarnation of a particular eye then you will have to do something else altogether which we shall go on to talk about but one thing seems to me to be perfectly clear there was a time when your eye woke up it emerged from the biological Continuum and what the shardan calls the biosphere of this planet and you don't remember having been here before at least not in the ordinary way that is as surprising and as inconceivable an event as

ceasing to be and uh without any apparent Prospect of being again but you see after this event called life you if you go back to unconsciousness you go back to where you were before you started and uh since there can't be any experience of non-experience obviously uh any next eye that comes up and all in fact next eyes that come up are you only since I is an experience of centrality you don't experience yourself as multicentered you experience yourself as a particular Center because the universe although it is multicentered each Center is experienced uniquely so

what you might roughly expect is this that after you die uh the next thing you know is that uh you are without the slightest memory of what ever happened before you repeat the same sort of experience as you had when you were born as this somebody else being born but there has to be someone around I'm really saying that the experience of being I goes on even if there's an interval of uh several billion years makes no difference whatsoever I mean supposing it took supposing the human race was wiped off the planet and it took

that much time for it to reappear or any living creature that would make no difference to this phenomenon so let me repeat since there is no possibility of a non-experience there are always experiences coming up and each one of them is you because that's it's it's I now I know there's a difficulty in this because it arises from the fact that we identify I with ego and ego part of ego is a memory system you know who you are in the sense that you remember who you are you identify yourself with a series of events

that you remember and these are like a a strung out in a line they're like a certain tune and therefore you identify yourself with that tune so we repeat ourselves we have consistent characters just in the same way as a tune uh is always constructed to repeat itself in a certain way with variations so that we recognize the the tune and the name of the piece by hearing even one part of it so here is a tune you see that is being played and it is attached to a center called I only the eye is

much more than this particular tune this particular series of memories even though we are persuaded and kind of hoaxed into identifying the whole eye with that series of memories but you know supposing somebody plays a shopan Aude and then he stops then later on somebody else plays it is it the same tune why in one sense yes in another sense no so it is possible isn't it that even though your tune was wiped out because the memory system goes with death uh the same sort of tune can be played a game and the with its

characteristic themes and uh that will be in another sense you in a more particular sense than the U of centrality in Buddhism there has never been the idea that rebirth or reincarnation involves the transmigration of a specific Soul because all schools of Buddhism are agreed on the idea that the individual self or soul is an illusion a Maya and they liken the process of rebirth to the motion of a wave across the surface of water actually the motion is illusory the water simply goes up and down and there is an optical impression of a wave

moving out and no wave moves and yet there is the seeming of movement so the Buddhist would say no soul reincarnates and yet there is the illusion of reincarnation Buddhists think of reincarnation as an illusion and yet believe in it westerners think of it something that might be a fact and find it difficult to believe in it westerners adopt the idea of re Incarnation as a comforting idea Buddhists are trying to get out of being [Laughter] reincarnated it's very funny but at any rate the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation says that what passes from life to

life is karma is uh doing action that's what Karma means process and that's something like wave not Soul not entity that doesn't pass uh you can look at it in another way there is an institution like the University of California uh this un University keeps going on and on and on and yet all the buildings change certainly all the students change all the faculty changes all the administrative officers change as the years go by and yet it's still the University of California what is the University of California why it is a process it is a

doing it is a pattern of behavior your body is in the same situation there is not one scrap of you that was with you 10 years ago it is all been rebuilt reorganized completely repaired and renewed then who are you you are a pattern you see you're a process that is identifiable and recognizable you face in a certain way you hair in a certain way you eye in a certain way and you behave in a certain way so we recognize you but it's all Inc constant it's like a whirlpool in water the water flows through

and the world poool retains the shape until it doesn't but then it can always well poool again somewhere else so now what do we do if that's clear so far what do we do to give any Credence at all to the notion that there is some connection between some lives of a peculiar character that we could take a a life lived between the years years of 1500 and 1580 and look at that and then see another life lived between 1700 and 1792 and say ye gods there's no getting away from it but that the latter

is a continuation of the former now how could you do that well very simply let us consider that we are looking at an enormous number of biographies scattered over a very great period of years but to visualize them we've got to think of them as different colored spots now as you look at this great Mosaic you see of spots of all sorts of different colors you will very soon begin to pick out patterns in it as you do with a RW shock plot and you will see continuities running across and you will therefore have projected

a rein a particular even personal reincarnation pattern uh running between these different biographies it is highly conceivable that one of these blocks May at a certain point lead you into a there may be a stream of of blocks that you associate as being a stream and then at a certain point they divide and two lines proceed from them it could very well be you see that an individual could reincarnate as two next time or any number you want amiba fashion uh but you will see these Connections in your blots now then the question arises is

this just your idea or are these connections real in order to answer that one all we have to do is to look at a some sort of pattern formation that we find not in the situation that we find a raw Shar blot but say we are examining the structure of a muscle we've sliced a muscle and are looking at it carefully with microscopes and things what do we find we find that muscle is an enormous conglomeration of cells but that these cells have patterns in them or at any rate we notice certain areas of their

behavior where they seem to constitute tubes but these what is the difference between the tubes one sees in a cross-section of muscle the pictures or forms one sees in a RAR clot just get down to it what is the difference you might say there would be a large variation of individual opinion as to the nature of the RW Shak blot patterns and uh less uh division of opinion about how one should interpret muscle patterns but is that alone enough to establish a significant difference between the two situations especially when you get down to the micro

level where more and more the uh molecules or cells or whatever are distant from each other you say isn't it really remarkable that at a certain level of magnification we see this as a huge distribution of rather formless things and we can only see what form we make when we uh go down in magnification and come back to approaching the normal vision that we see these vastly scattered blob blobs and Globs and globules or whatever uh take shape and is this alteration of magnification uh anything like psychological projection it's very difficult to draw a hard

and fast line between making out sensible patterns in the physical world of everyday life on the one hand and interpreting RW Shar plots on the other seeing faces in Marble seeing cities in the clouds and so on so then uh what might appear as lines of continuity between various lives could be said to be there in the sense that there are veins and nerve lines embedded in the cell structure of muscles but there is always it's quite clear to us there is something about the projections we make of faces into marble that has a kind

of Illusion to it quite so and what Buddhist philosophy wants to draw our attention to is that the same kind of Illusion is existing in our attitude to the physical world we're projecting but of course creatures of like structure will make the same projections just as we look around here and see that we are more or less all the same basic shape uh and therefore probably have the same sort of brains inside our heads we are projecting a more or less similar structure upon the external world and our agreement about that is the same thing

as saying well that's the way it is but you see how relative that is it is in relation to having a brain system of this particular kind so the Westerner may be anxious that his idea about reincarnation is something more than a fantasy the Oriental the Buddhist or the the Hindu very much hopes it is only a fantasy and in that case it can be overcome he can be delivered from a cycle of futility only you mustn't understand again you mustn't understand that too literally if you want to know what Buddhists really teach on this

matter put in a very simple way you get a book by Alexander David Nail called The Secret oral teachings in uh difficult to get hold of but somebody in this country is going to publish it soon it is published in India but I think Lawrence fingy is going to publish it City Light San Francisco that book really goes into this and I called it I call it the I Told You So book because I've often been accused of inventing my own unique brand of Buddhism and boting it off on the public as being the real

thing I just have to find them this book and so you see Alexandra David Nail that's French d a v d hyphen n e l David Neil it's say David Neil so now what becomes interesting in this is that you will pick out the lines of continuity between lives upon what basis why just in the same way as you pick out continuity between tones by the way they interval to each other in which case the death interval the off interval becomes the significant connecting factor between the on intervals that's what you do when you look

at patterns and of blobs on a wall you can play with Roland Hall's paintings that way and see all sorts of things in them and it depends what intervals you find significant that connects uh what you call the onp pieces so you always get off pieces and on pieces you've got a kind of Mosaic look into a um press photograph with a magnifying glass and you find a mosaic of black and white dots and so you can again you can make the sign significant connection and as you do you come out with somebody's face and

so in the in the world our nerves are very much like the Press photograph the when something impinges upon the retinal uh backdrop of the eye uh it impinges on a whole lot of rods and cones that are either on or off where the state of a neuron you see is that it fires or it doesn't fire so we've got this press photograph thing in us if you work with LSD this comes very clear you get a vision sometimes of the world which is positively poist like the paintings of sah uh somehow it seems as

if your nerve ends have been activated individually and you become aware of a grainy quality in everything uh this could be dismissed as a pure huc ination but all hallucinations have some basis in our neural structure you see they may not be experiences that are of what we call the objective world but uh in any experiment that turns your Consciousness on your Consciousness your senses on your senses you will get curious things happening just as you might get oscillations in electric circuitry so it would then be intervals once again that could be the significant connecting

factors in a developmental pattern of an individual through a series of incarnations but th those intervals are Illusions the the connection is illusory but in a sense of Illusion to which we westerners are not really accustomed because Maya means illusion in a very complex sense it means also creative power art magic uh calculation in the sense of the calculus this is difficult for us to understand you see the notion that the world is Maya why is it difficult for us to understand that what is our feeling about saying this is a dream a projection what's

the objection to that idea well I think that that historically at the root of our Western objection to this idea is that it's discourteous to God it as if to say God did not really create the world as it says in the Bible but that um he only seemed to but you realize that this is an absolute verbal hangup it's really a question of U it's it's also a question of values uh if the world is real then I must take you seriously and you must take me seriously if the world is only a dream

then we we it doesn't M it doesn't matter you see if you say it doesn't matter then you are saying it's purely spiritual like it's immaterial baby know and and you see how we flip around in our use of words we say something oh that's mere matter so it doesn't matter everybody gets completely confused in the way they think about these things because they've never really been thought about clearly these questions of is it real or is it not real when an oriental serves for something that it's not real the first thing he means is

it's not permanent and so the dream the quality of change of um the smoke like and therefore they say the dream like because the dream vanishes you see and so they say life is like a dream uh it keeps as you get older you're more and more aware of the speed at which things change with a child it seems to be slow children easily get bored but as you get older life is just going especially if you live in California where you can't keep a steady mailing list for more than two months because every two

months a quarter of the address has changed and uh you know the bulldozers come in and they change the shape of everything and knock down all the old buildings and up go new ones and then they get knocked down or they're so jerryb built that they fall apart but there it goes you see and so there is this quality he means uh dream like the thing is in constant flux uh but he also means illusion in showing the extent to which what is going on in this flux is a creation of the the perceiving organism

so that by illusion the Oriental also means relative as in uh the relationship between the air vibrations and the ear between the cloud the sun and the Observer these things produce rainbow sound and so on but these are relative realities and so uh when Buddhists use the word void shat in Sanskrit as designating the nature of the world this should rather be translated relativity than nothingness the great scholar statsky made this very plain in his book on the Buddhist Nirvana it is relativity that we should think of rather than our ideas of non-being so from

that point of view as also from the standpoint of quantum mechanics and modern physics the illusory nature of the world it is very clear it was so much so that one physicist who was a little Daft used to go around in the most enormous padded shoes for fear of dropping through the atomic structure of the floor so what gets this extraordinary sense then of living in this in incredibly real seeming World which the more you analyze it consists mostly of of of of space and you come to feel a shall I say diaphanous quality about

things that a mountain is only a faster wave and longer lasting rainbow and that as the poet said the hills are shadows and they flow from from form to form and nothing stands and you if you will experience this uh this kind of creepy feeling you get when you think that this is just that you and everything about you is just a here and gone and swallowed up in space and why do you say swallowed up you see people poets people who talk swallowed by the grave swallowed into space disappeared into nothing gone vanished into

thin thin air uh why is there an objection to this well one's been taught to object because you've been taught to identify with the solid side of the picture and to disidentify with the empty side of the picture but you've been hoaxed and fooled because you when you die are not as it were gulped up by Thin Air you're just as much the thin air as anything else it's all of a piece it isn't an it isn't a fight going on but everything is represented as a fight the contest between this side and that but

this is this is really the whole thing about illusion where the ordinary person sees a battle the enlightened person sees a cooperation between two sides have you ever tried to play chess with yourself and honestly take each side as you play its move against the other one or to get two uh you know those swords they have in bars they stick into olives in martinis you get through these swords and fence with yourself and see if you really can stick it into one of your hands and the other one defended this is the most fascinating

game and this is the game God is playing sitting there two hands you know here's good here's evil here's Jesus Christ and here's Lucifer and uh he got real involved in this fight you see when he finds out that if he makes the right hand win all the time there's no point in the game he has to get into the left hand and uh but in order for there to be a real fight he mustn't let the left hand know what the right hand is doing vice versa yeah explains all the stuff in the [Laughter]

Bible but really you see underneath they the two hands they join back here like a kind of a horseshoe or like um the snake or rubber Ross which is after his own tail and uh an aspect of that not not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing is the way we identify ourselves with what's inside the skin and not with what's outside it we identify ourselves as reality with the solid things that we can see and all the rest is space and that's nothing you see we characteristically take sides in a

situation where both sides are aspects of the situation if would take this side will you have this or that choose but the sage doesn't choose because he said well there's no choice here he might choose for the sake of going along you know like somebody says well um what would you like to do today we can go into town and do some marketing or we can stay out here and go swimming you don't care what you do so you just say one in order to satisfy your guest your host so uh then behind the explicit

battle there is the implicit agreement Tweedle Dam and Tweedle be agreed to have a battle we agree to differ if we want to have a same social order so cheer up [Laughter] uh you may well be so conditioned just like uh to to feel the fear of the unknown even though you know much better if you have come through in life uh to a point where say you have bad teeth through aging or hardening eyeballs when you get awakened in um you get sat or anything it won't make any difference to your teeth or your

eyeballs I never heard of a case of the spiritual healing of somebody's teeth so in rather a similar way there will be certain emotional habits that you have that will be practically unchangeable and they settle in as you get older and you have to live with them they're just like you have to live with the color of your hair or whether you've got a funny shaped mouth or something like that uh it's it's all goes along it's part of the pattern that you're in for the time being and will live out but a lot of

people go around judging other people and say well they think they've had some wonderful experience but they uh are still sick in some way as if that was um reprehensible or they still um lose their tempers a bit one expects all these things to change emotional habits poof like that one must get rid of that kind of Thea protestantism so but you know what does happen is although you have fears anxiety basically in the face of life and death nevertheless you can get to a point where deep is it's like having a deep Center which

isn't anxious and above all isn't anxious about being anxious you say okay so I get anxious and somehow you can tolerate it you can stand the tension it's one of the most fascinating things to learn to to hold tension and not go when you get a problem not go rushing off to solve it immediately because most problems when solved in a rush are solved in the wrong way especially emotional problems between people you have to stand for example not being lighted which is a terribly difficult thing for Americans but what I've said here I think

about space and about rebirth and so on you will notice one thing about it all it doesn't nothing that I've said or understanding anything that I've said doesn't require any kind of what I would call special knowledge it's all out in front of you it doesn't require actually it doesn't require meditation exercises or LSD or or anything uh it's it's all out in the open uh and the only really essential meditation uh exercise is stopping thinking uh and the being able to to perceive without conceptualizing what you're looking at and that's the interior silence without

which there is really nothing to think about or talk about except thinking and talking so let's have an intermission