Alan Watts | The Universe | Individual and the World (1-4)

If you were told that you were going to be given half an hour's interview with God and you had the privilege of asking one question I wonder what you would ask you might be given some preparation too because when you think what is your ultimate question you'll probably do many things before you arrive at it and I know many people would discover that they had no question to ask the situation would be altogether too Overwhelming but many people to whom I've put this problem say that the question that they would ask is Who am I

and that is something we know very little about because whatever it is that we call I is too close for inspection it's like trying to bite your own teeth or to touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger and although other people can tell you what they wear who you are and do they only see you from the outside as you see them from The outside and you don't see from the inside and so the nature of what is a what it is that we call AI is extremely puzzling because

there is some confusion as to how much of us is I we talk in ordinary ways about my body my feet and when we go to the dentist to have our teeth fixed we regard him rather as a mechanic like you take your car to the garage so you take your body to the surgeon or the dentist or whatever it is to be fixed how the parts changed or Something of that kind and they're really getting to work on that now and so the question is when somebody has a heart transplant that sounds very radical

because we say in my heart hearts but nowadays most of us seemed to feel that whatever it is that I is is located in the head somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears is the center and the rest of us is an appendage a vehicle which carries the self around Now popular speech also reflects the sensation that I am very different from what we call the other other people other things anything that we can become aware of is sort of other there is an opposition apparently between the knower and the known and so we

talk about facing reality we talk about coming into this world as if somehow we didn't belong as if instead of being leaves growing out of a tree we were a lot of birds that had like had alighted on bear Branches and it has become common sense for most people living in the 20th century today to adopt of the 19th century philosophy of science which interprets the physical universe outside human bodies as being a mechanical contraption which is essentially stupid unfeeling automatic are composed of mainly geological elements rocks gases and so forth and therefore we feel

rather alone and left out of this thing in contrast with the ideas of Ptolemaic Astronomy instead of being at the center of the universe we are on the outer limits of a minor galaxy revolving around an unimportant star on a small minut ball of rock and therefore that astronomical way of looking at things is simply overwhelming it makes us feel not only of no importance but also very much left out and as there is a common sense of most people living today we did of course have a religious view of our nature that We were

the children of a loving God who is in charge of this whole operation but very few people actually believe that anymore a great many people think they ought to believe in and would like to believe in it but they don't most ministers that I know don't believe it but they feel guilty about this because they feel they ought to but it became implausible there never was a serious argument against it it simply became unthinkable in comparison with the Dimensions of the universe as we now see it so having lost a way of looking at the

world an image of the world which gave us some sense of meaning we now have it an image of the world which gives us none at all and so we feel rather inclined to put up a fight against the whole show interestingly enough when in the 19th century we switched our common sense from supernaturalism to naturalism one would think that a naturalist would be a Person who loved nature just as a material is thought to be a person who loves material but certainly isn't with what is called the philosophy of scientific naturalism their own naturalism

is used as an in a negative way it has nothing to do with being natural it has something to do with being not supernatural merely natural and all sorts of phrases were coined in that epoch which I would call put-down phrases Freud spoke of the basic psychic Energy as libido which means blind lust people like Ernst Haeckel spoke of the universe as being a manifestation of blind energy think of that put downward blind and therefore we also speak of unconscious mental mechanisms and the very word unconscious as being the deeper aspect of our psyche is

a negative word and a put-down word so as to say what you are functioning as a rational ego with values and with a capacity to love is simply the Epiphenomenon of a purely mechanical process too bad so as a result of this so-called naturalism we began to put up the most whopping fight against nature that was ever engaged in and that fight is an expression of our fury and of our feeling of being left out so that the technological experiment which became possible as a result of the mechanical sciences has largely been conducted in a

spirit of rage and the results are Evident all around us here in Palm Springs you are gradually getting all the smog from Los Angeles this great cloud of poisonous gas put up by a city which is exemplary in this whole civilized world for fouling its own nest perhaps only Calcutta could be a bit worse some such terrible slum but we have done it by technology by ruthless beating about of nature without consideration for what the scientist would call our ecology Ecology is that aspect of science which deals with the relationship between organisms and their environments

ecology is the study the balance of nature of the way in which every living being depends upon innumerable other living beings of all species and also upon inanimate forces air water temperature gases vegetation and all sorts of things and this is one of the most important sciences that we can possibly study today because we are In a position where we realize that we cannot help interfering with the world to be alive is to interfere you must interfere you cannot go back and say hands-off nature let's leave it all alone whether you're stuck with it especially

once you've started to interfere in a major way we have so altered our environment that there is no hope for it but to go ahead but we can to some extent change direction but the only way That I can see of our effectively changing direction is through a transformation of the feeling that we have of our own existence and of what we mean by I the reason for this is simply that all kinds of intelligent and even powerful people like say Laurance Rockefeller who are interested in ecology and in conservation of our natural resources they

can scream their heads off but nobody pays any attention there is no as yet no really serious Program at the government level to do anything radical about the pollution of water the waste of water the pollution of air and the general ravaging of the United States of America I'm amazed that congressman can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands the United States as a territory as a people and as a logical manifestation that is an example Of our

perennial confusion of symbols with realities which is in a way at the heart of the trouble because what we think of as AI is much more a symbol than it is a reality the living organism the whole mind body is much more than anything we mean by I I largely stands for your personality your role in life and the very word person as you probably know comes from the Latin para sona a word originally used for the masks worn by actors in greco-roman drama that Through which sound comes because the mask had a mega phonic

mouth to carry the voice in open-air theaters so when you speak of being a real person it really means being a genuine fake because the personality is only the front what is behind it well of course the organism is behind the whole organism and we must be very careful not to confuse the organism with various symbols that we have for it because those symbols can be extremely Misleading if we say the organism is the body what we usually mean by the body is a an impoverished meaning when we speak of my body that is to

say my vehicle my physical automobile that is a unenriched meaning of the word body because what you really are as a body as a living organism is not some sort of separate existence coated by a skin which divides you from the rest of the world Shakespeare has King John saying to Hubert within this wall of flesh there Is a soul counts the accreditor within this wall of flesh the skin considered as a barrier when actually from a biological point of view the human skin and all skins are osmotic membranes you know when you get something

by osmosis but I sort of soaking it in so in the same way one skin is a spongy construction full of holes four of communicators nerve ends and your skin is simply a vibrating membrane through which the so-called external world flows Into you and through you so that you yourself actually are not so much an entity that moves around in an environment you are much more like a whirlpool in a stream and as you know the whirlpool is constant only in its doing that is to say in its whirling and you could recognize individual whirligigs

in a stream but the water is flowing through them all the time they are never the same but for a second and so it is also with us or imagine it in Another way supposing you have a rope and one foot of the rope is made of hemp one foot of it is made of cotton one foot of it is made of silk one foot of it is made of nylon and so on now tie a simple knot in the rope now move them the knot along the rope and one minute it will be hemp

the next cotton next Hill next nylon and so on same knot it will be recognizable as a continuing not as that not the knot in that rope but the constitution of it Will change as it moves and so our Constitution is changing constantly they imagine for example a university the student body undergraduate changes every four years the faculty changes every so often the buildings keep changing more and more what constitutes the University of California it certainly isn't the Faculty it isn't the students it isn't the governance it isn't the administration it isn't the buildings What

is it why a doing a behavior a university in process of study and experiment and so on so it is exactly the same with you you flow you are a process but how do we draw the line about this process and its relationship to all other processes we find that a very difficult thing to do the more you think about it if you really felt with your whole organization instead of just with that part of it called conscious attention you would become aware of this Flowing fact and you would get a very strange feeling which

at first might frighten you it is possible of course to have this feeling the feeling is is like this you would not be quite sure how to interpret it you might feel that you yourself were doing everything else that's happening that would be one way of feeling the other way of feeling it would be that you are doing nothing at all but that everything else is doing you and you would feel completely Passive like a puppet on the end of strings although on the other hand if you've got the feeling that you're doing it all

you would feel like God Almighty it is very easy for our consciousness to slip into this state of sensation it can happen spontaneously like measles it can happen by training as when someone practices yoga it can happen chemically as when certain drugs are taken and one has to be very careful about this feeling because it's enormous Ly easy to misinterpret it either as being omnipotent being God in the personal literal sense or as being helpless and merely driven now what should be understood is that both these ways of feeling are right only they must both

be taken together to be simultaneously omnipotent and helpless these are two poles opposite poles of one in the same state because the message that is coming through and that we find difficulty in understanding Because it's contrary to our common sense contrary to our whole history and conditioning the message that's coming through is you as a living organism and all that is going on in your environment constitute a single process what in physics we would call a unified field a single process like a pattern but you know any pattern has all sorts of subsidiary Wiggles in

it like the the organism itself is a unified pattern but it's full of Wiggles all sorts of tubes And organs and bones and nerves and so on working in this way you know the body doesn't have a boss we could pitch a big argument who is really the top dog in your body your stomach or your brain I can argue but for both ways we'll let's first argue for the stomach the stomach is fundamental that's what eats and it eating is the fundamental thing of being alive by putting food into the stomach it digests it

and from there goes out and energizes everything else Obviously the stomach is the most the hands the mouth the feet are all exist to serve the stomach and naturally as a final achievement of the stomach is the brain evolving later in the evolutionary process as a gadget up there to scavenge around and find stuff for the stomach to eat that's the function of the brain but now let's take the argument to the side of the brain the brain says oh no no no come now just because I arrived late it doesn't mean That I'm unimportant

I was being gotten ready for because I am the thing that was in the flower at the top of this thing and this tube with stomachs in it and things below was preparing for me and the stomach is my servant it is doing all the dirty work and getting energy to put currents through my wonderful circuits so that by the creation of all the goods of the mind of the arts and sciences and religion and philosophy and so on I shall be the true Head of man well both arguments are right because you will have

a relationship between stomach and brain which is a sort of polarity the one exists for the other it's like when you prop up two sticks against each other they will stand up so long as they lean on each other take one away and the other collapses so chop off the head and the stomach is finished take out the stomach and the head is finished so this is the way all Organic life proceeds it's different with mechanical life because the mechanism must invariably have a boss the man who puts the machine together the person who constructs

the computer who designs it who asks the questions who programs it he is the boss but organisms don't have bosses they are essentially I would say democratic arrangements where somehow in a marvelous way an enormous company of cells are working together but if that Isn't the way the body wasn't sort of it one day a lot of cells all crept together and said we're a body that does sometimes happen in the biological domain but much rather this when you watch the gestation of a a mammal you see first of all a very simple little organism

which swells and as it swells it becomes more and more complicated from within no parts are added nothing is screwed on there's no welding done or anything like that it bulges and it of Course it does absorb material but it transforms it but all of it works together at once like the legs of a centipede like you work all together it works for you see when we come down to it you think you decide things but you don't know how you do it how do you open and close your hand you can decide I will

now open my hand and do it but you don't know how it's done and yet in a sense you do know how it's done because You I say I know how to open my hand but you don't know in words you can't explain it still less can you explain how you see still less can you explain how you are conscious how are you an ego well you don't know because the springs of being conscious of being an ego are outside the surveillance of consciousness they're somehow underneath and that lets the cat out of the bag

at once because you see that what is I is something very very much deeper than the Superficial consciousness and what you call I in the sense of the voluntary Willing Center ego has very little to do with it you are just a watchman on top of the mast or a radar on a ship that is scanning the environment by conscious attention looking for trouble or looking for food the real you is much too complicated to think about supposing when you woke up in the morning you have to switch Yourself on that is to say you

had to buy an act of conscious attention to go through your brain and turn on all the synapses necessary for wakeful life to take you hours supposing you really had to be conscious of all the details involved in walking or in breathing or in circulation of the blood you'd never get around to it so you see when we inspect the physical world with conscious attention the first thing that strikes us is that the Physical world is extraordinarily complicated how can it possibly be organized but actually the physical world is not complicated at all what is

complicated is the task of trying to describe it in words or of trying to figure it out in numbers because that is analogous to the task of say we are removing the water for the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic with a beer mug we can only take one mug at a time and so we say in popular speech you can only think Of one thing at a time that's not exactly true but what it reveals is that thinking that conscious thought is a kind of calculus in which we understand things bit by bit and it

leads us into the superstition that things really are bits now when you eat chicken of course you have to bite it and you take it in bits and to make it easier to bite you order from the grocer they cut up fryer but you don't get cut up fryers out of eggs Because you see although we can speak of a chicken and egg or a body it is not actually a bit it hasn't been bitten off except for purposes of thinking now this is beautifully brought out in the passage from whitehead which I will read

to you [Applause] he's discussing the 19th century philosophy of science which I was just discussing - and He's saying in this philosophy all our impressions of nature are simply products of our minds nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves the rose for its scent the nightingale for his song and the Sun for his radiance the poets are entirely mistaken they should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into ODEs of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind nature is a dull affair soundless Scentless colorless merely the hurrying of

material endlessly meaninglessly however you disguise it this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed even the 17th century in the first place we must note it's astounding efficiency as a system of concepts for the organization of scientific research in this respect it is fully worthy of the genius of the century which produced it it has held its own as the guiding Principle of scientific studies ever since it is still raining every University in the world organizes itself in accordance with it no alternative system of organising the pursuit of scientific truth has

been suggested it is not only raining but it is without a rival and yet it is quite unbelievable this conception of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our Abstractions for concrete realities he calls that you see the fallacy of misplaced concreteness the attribution in other words to our bitty way of thinking to the world which we are biting that is misplaced concreteness the separations between things are abstract they are concepts in the same way for example as lines of latitude and longitude are

concepts even though a Russian poet has recently made a beautiful poem about the World being like a ball carried in a net bag but you never expect to trip over the equator when you cross it and although it is something quite abstract and does not exist in nature it's extremely useful for purposes of navigation so in the same way bidding and having words to describe particular events or particular Wiggles in the universal pattern are very useful but they are very dangerous when you confuse things with natural events because then You get into this sort of

trouble the trouble of the sorcerer the surgeon who is too much of a specialist in one organ runs into that organ and alters it and does what he considers a better mechanical job than the Lord did but then he discovers to his dismay and the even greater dismay of his patient that the operation has unforeseen consequences in some other part of the organism because he didn't realize the connection when likewise we object to Certain insect pests always say get rid of DDT and so then we found we got rid of something else we didn't want

to get rid of and worse still that this insect we didn't like was doing a job for us in some manner of which we weren't aware we only become aware of it when suddenly we find ourselves covered with another kind of fly altogether or with some sort of bacteria which this insect kept down watch it watch it watch it because Nature does not consist of separate Things which you just pull out like parts from an engine take the case of bees and flowers oh we always use the bees and flowers to explain fundamental things about

life but we're going to go deeper than sex this time fascinating thing about bees and flowers is they're very different looking things a flower sit still and blooms and it smelt or stinks to be correct the bee moves about and buzzes but they are all one organism you don't Find flowers without bees you don't find bees without flowers they are just as much one as your head and your feet which also look very different so in that sense you see we are one with the incredible complexity of processes and Wiggles upon which we depend although

to say upon which we depend is not quite accurate because that separates us from it as if I were hanging on to a beam and depending on it it isn't like that You don't depend on it because it depends on you it's a mutual arrangement and it isn't that one bit of this sort of came first although that sometimes happens but it's always there in potentiality what came later but it's rather in the same way that when a flower opens you see all the different petals extending simultaneously when you especially when you watch a fast

motion movie of the flower opening and so in the same way there is a simultaneous Arrival or evolution of the human organism and the human environment and thus biologists speak about the evolution of an environment as well as the evolution of an organism in it in other words human beings could not have appeared on this planet until it's temperature had lowered to a certainty until the atmosphere contains certain gases as a result of vegetative development and then the environment became evolved enough for human beings To appear in it evolved enough I'll save something further intelligent

enough for the appearance in it of intelligent beings for your environment is intelligent otherwise you couldn't be you see we is as Jesus said you don't gather figs off thistles or grapes from forms you won't get pears off an apple tree so you won't find people except on the people tree and this planet this solar system this galaxy is peopling in Exactly the same way that an apple tree apples put our existence into verb language as distinct from noun language and you're much closer to the point you see nouns have the difficulty of designating things

verbs designate process now everything is a process really when we speak of housing for houses matting formats we're getting there the Nootka Indians have a language in which there are no nouns and so they say It houses and then they add an adverb to show whether it houses religiously homey lis or marketing Li and so they see the world as the flow what is it that houses what is it that rains when we say it is raining you see we always have a funny idea that to get a verb that is to say to get

action you have to have an agent now this is the most ridiculous idea conceivable how can a noun start a verb how can a things start an event because there's no action in a thing action can Only come from action energy from energy you can't get energy from a concept because nouns are all concepts they're abstract really it's only verbs that are concrete because the world is processed now common sense insists that the pattern of the world must be made of something because we still think without a startles common sense or with the imagery of

the book of Genesis where God made Adam out of the clay in other words he made a clay figurine and breathed Breath into it and it became alive and so we constantly think that we as are made of flesh as if flesh were some sort of stuff like clay of out of which you shaped bodies or like you make tables out of wood our trees made out of wood what a ridiculous question trees are wood they're not made of wood and it's simply this artifact thing that gives us the idea of the world being made

out of something it isn't made out of anything and so when physics tries to investigate What is the stuff of matter they can't find any because you can never talk about anything except a process you can describe what a process is doing you can describe the structure the the nature of the dance whether it's doing a waltz or a mazurka hora or the Frog or whatever it is then you can describe that mela that that melody shall we say what it is performing but there is nothing doing the performing at all if there is no

stuff out of which it's to being done Because when you examine stuff you just find more pattern see what you mean by stuff is fuzz when you look at something with a lens and you're out of focus you see fuzz but when you come into focus you see structure all right now this structure is made of all sorts of little lines and things you can see them you won't know what are they made of to turn up the magnification and for a while you get a lot of fuzz but when you're clear again You see

that those little lines are also made of more little lines more structure big patterns evident patterns upon their backs divided and so on and that's the way it goes so suddenly you feel rather insecure because stuff was disappeared there's a famous story about a physicist who understood this so well but he always went about in the most enormous padded shoes because he was afraid of falling through the floor now look what's happened just look and see what Happens if we go through everything that I've been saying we find first of all that the thing that

we thought was I is nothing more than a social institution just like the equator or an inch and two mistaken to do two reified as whitehead would say is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness it's a strictly a hallucination and any a certain amount of psychological air self-exploration shows this to be the case For what we are is the organism and what the organism is is a transactional interchange between the organism and the environment it's not quite correct to say you're doing it and it's doing you because see Whitehead in describing the the scientific philosophy saying

for example that blue is entirely our projection on the sky he's half right you see the those scientists he's talking about are half right but the the the part of it that is left out of Consideration is this true you with your optical nerves and eyes transform the sky into the blue feeling but without the sky you wouldn't have any optical nerves it works both ways you see without the air whose density gives the blue effect it's mutual you do it and it does you but that's as I said a two-way a clumsy way of

talking about it's all one process the unified process and furthermore from this process there has disappeared what we thought was solidity What we thought was common sense substance and stuff it's just powdered and at once one feels sort of ghostly as if you could be easily blown away and that's why the Hindus call the universe the Maya which means the illusion don't forget illusion is related to the Latin word Lew dairy to play serve the play the big act it also means magic as in a conjurus creation of an illusion it also means creative power

It also means art and finally it means the divine power the Maya of the Lord Lord there is a bad translation of bugga one does the divine one the Lord means boss in English and the Hindus don't do it that way but now you see having I've arranged this general introduction which I'm afraid will be familiar to some of you who've attended my seminars before but I've arranged this general introduction to raise the question all right if That's the way it is how on earth are we going to arrange a transformation of man's consciousness so

that he will know it not just in theory but something he feels in the same way as you feel what you take to be I at the present moment confronting an external world how will you transform that sensation because if you don't transform that sensation you will not ever be fit to use technology we shall continue to use our technology in a hostile spirit Towards the external world and we shall wreck the external world we're busy doing it now there is no necessity to abandon technology we can't abandon it but we can certainly use it

in a different spirit I have just been in the island of Ceylon which is a garden a beautiful beautiful place but it's completely undeveloped from a technical point of view and it's in very bad economic circumstances because nobody wants to buy natural rubber anymore There's no foreign exchange it is very peaceful but the change has got to come so I discussed with the one of the high members of the government the possibility that we could set up in salon an experimental station which would serve not only India eventually and Africa but us to a an

institute of ecological technology where we could in that experimental island work out ways of production of mechanization automation And so on which would not ruin the island and you have to do that sort of thing with a certain dedication because one of the reasons why we make such a mess with tecnópolis technology is that the shareholders in any given corporation want to make a fast buck now there's nothing wrong you see in wanting to be rich there's nothing at all wrong in being rich in fact I think the world without rich people would be extraordinarily

boring point is you have To understand what riches are and they are not money riches are land clothes food houses intelligence energy skill iron forests Gardens those are riches but when you're concentrating you see only on making the buck doesn't occur to you that you're not really getting rich you're just impoverishing yourself it's like you know when you up up up up up prices the value of the dollar goes down down down down down you go unis on a rap race on a treadmill they do the faster It moves that it doesn't get anywhere that

well it doesn't even stay in the same place so it is that kind again you see this is another example of confusing the symbol with the reality of misplaced the fallacy of misplaced concreteness was whitehead closed it so we shall devote the rest of the seminar to discussing the various ways in which it is proposed that we bring about or assist the bringing about of that change in our perception and conception of our Own existence so that we can feel ourselves the way we are as distinct from the way in which we've been told to

feel ourselves so this morning I was explaining the problem of the relation of the individual to the world discussing it very largely in the terms of 20th century science and showing that there was a wide discrepancy between the organism environment relationship as described in science and the subjective feeling of what it is to be an Individual human being and that the ordinary sensation we have of being an individual ego confronting an alien and external world is a hallucination and a dangerous SaLuSa nation because it leads to our using technology in a way that is antagonistic

to the outside world and results in our destroying the very features of the world upon which we depend for our lives we are polluting the world and so it becomes necessary to find ways in which we can change the Basic sensation of existence and that therefore brings in some rather outlandish subjects because there is not within the tradition of Western culture any well known way of doing this what do we have available but we have religion which is supposed in some respects to be capable of this and we have psychiatry I don't know what else

religion in the West is a peculiarly problematic thing because it's extremely talkative gives us a great deal of Advice many Commandments but it doesn't really tell us how to do what it tells us to do it has been carefully worked over and statisticians have checked it that way if you go through the sermon topics of turbulent throughout the United States that the vast majority of them our exultation stew goodness that is to say they are sermons about moral behavior usually within a rather restricted sphere of moral behavior when we say of a certain person that

he is Living in sin what do we mean by that we would very rarely say of a crooked bookie that he is living in sin you're much more liable to say it if somebody who's got an irregular sexual relationship well the fact of the matter is that with some exceptions are the Christian churches and the Jewish synagogues our family and sexual regulation societies and precious little else we used to have when I was in school a preacher who came I don't know who he was or where he came from but he came once a year

and he always preached the sermon which had in it the refrain drink gambling and a morality immorality only meant one thing [Music] so but but the the point is that the emphasis of preaching and Protestants you see when they go to church mostly go to a preaching session Catholics receive sacraments Protestants do occasionally but there but Catholics when you get Through the sacrament and you listen to what the priest has to say he's usually raising money and you know I'm saying something like this year it will be a martial sin not to send your child

to church school the things of this kind so everybody knows that they ought to be good and unselfish so on we all recognize that as a highly reasonable idea but nobody feels like it because if you feel that you are a separate ego it must necessarily follow that your Conduct is egocentric and egotistic there's no other way about it if you feel that you don't love someone the no amount of pretense can make you love them you cannot possibly love anyone out of a sense of duty and if you do watch out you will start

hating them they'll start hating you in a secret in a concealed way the relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children are absolutely haunted with fake love it Stirs up resentment and it leads people to expect things of you which you're never going to come through with if I say out of feeling that I really have a solemn duty to love so-and-so and therefore in the attempt to trap myself into the fulfillment of this Duty I make rash promises I'm not going to fulfill them and the person is going to be terribly letdown when

I don't so it's a if anything is a sin it is emotional dishonesty saying I Love you and I don't well of course your mother always told you we all have to do certain things we don't feel like doing maybe the debts make no bones about it when somebody says to me would you like to go out into the market and bring it back so and so I will answer no I wouldn't but I will and and we need that sort of exchange between each other because we did we put children in awful positions with

faking up their feelings for them by telling a child who simply Enraged and mad that he's tired all by saying you know what nice boy would like to clean the blackboard all this sort of thing you see leads to emotional dishonesty so the problem then is this that when people preach moral behavior and then out of a sense of guilt or out of a sense of fear people try to be good that is to say to do those things that are preached all it does it turns into hypocrites preaching is a hypocrisy Creating institution in

that sense because it does not transform the consciousness of the individual if by any chance consciousness could be so transformed that one is no longer felt as a separate ego then you would not have to be so egotistical generating love within human beings as a kind of constant attitude to the environment that is going to be far more effective in bringing about unselfish behavior than anything else well that's our Problem you see too good to do just that and no amount of talk is going to do it because it depends on something more happening than

merely understanding words or even seeing the theoretical reasonableness of certain lines of conduct we need a bomb under us rather than intellectual persuasion about church religion as we know it in the West doesn't provide the bomb it's very demure decorous except in negro revivals or Pentecostal outbursts But no person of education and taste would attend such things ha this Bishop Pike was telling the other day Larry found his story which was that he's run into an awful lot of trouble with the trustees when he was Bishop of California because he espoused some rather controversial causes

and they began cutting down their contributions to the cathedral but then they started to realize that if they did that they'd have nowhere for their daughters to be Married because they couldn't possibly go to the Methodist Church or the Pentecost cuz that was unbelievably low clouds the either has to go to the Episcopal other Presbyterian Church Orem you might be a Roman Catholic which is the sort of a different thing only a sort of an Italian Church we go to the synagogue but but the problem you see is therefore that our churches are awfully nice

and demure but they're talking shops so much so that when in any Ordinary church service there's a moment of silence it's invariably an awkward silence unless it's a Quaker meeting and so what happens is Organists have a technique of what they call inkling they improvise on the theme of the last him that was sung while there's a silence in which the minister has forgotten his notes or there is some hitch in the ritual and also you see when you look at the design of a church it's perfectly clear that it's a Protestant Church is a

Courtroom it has in it boxes that are like witness boxes and jury boxes their pews and the minister wears the same robe as a judge exactly the same robe and everybody goes there they look at the back of each other's necks and they smell of mothballs well that's no scene for anything to happen you know we're just not with it so it is as a result of this sort of spiritual starvation that enormous numbers of people and now phenomenal Numbers of young people have become interested in having a religious expression of some completely different kind

but why is it that things that we have had that were in their own way exuberant like holy rollers and moral rearmament forth well gospel Salvation Army in Zing's all that seems awfully irrelevant especially to the young of today why is it that if you go to most people who have had a college education and say to them have you made Jesus Christ your personal Savior that they cringe that that's a somehow it's like making an indecent remark has the same sort of in effect why is it that such phrases as our Heavenly Father our

Lord Jesus Christ are very dear Lord all these expressions give people the heebie-jeebies why does that happen but to do I'm an experienced one I know all about it I was a university chaplain and I know all the problems in trying to communicate with Intelligent college people and more and more of us are just that can't face it the universities are turning out thousands and thousands and thousands of children is getting worse all the time well go to Japan and you will find that the young Japanese have just the same feelings about Buddhism you ask

a young Japanese today what's your religion and you'll say my parents a Buddhist or even my parents are Christians he has none because to him the activity of religion Is completely meaningless and he knows nothing about it at all the average young Japanese today knows less about Buddhism than young American knows about Christianity for them it's just mumbo-jumbo it's an old fuddy-duddy priest whom their parents get together with under the superstition that if they pay the priest to recite a Sutra something nice will happen to a dead ancestor in the preschool [Music] nobody knows what

it means and that's it so far as the Unruh concerned they see no glamour in it such as we see because to us mysterious priests chanting in incense filled temples dimly lit idols and things glimmering there and all their robes and the smell of the incense suggests magic and mystery and something way way out well now a lot of people who would say well that's a lot of nonsense that's just romanticism that's just Being beguiled by a dream about another culture that doesn't exist but that's not altogether true because different cultures have always borrowed from

each other always there is no such thing as a sort of a simon-pure culture unless the people lived in total geographical isolation for several centuries the Chinese borrowed from the Indians the Japanese borrowed from the Chinese the French borrowed from the Romans the British and the Russians and everybody Else borrowed from the French and so it goes all the way around because we're always fascinated by the exotic and the reason is that the exotic way of doing something shows us another approach to it than we had hitherto imagined just as in Reverse when we see

Christianity as a Hindu sees it or as a Japanese like Ogawa sees it we get rather a shock there's a new way of looking at to locate the position of any object you triangulate it you look at it from two Positions and therefore this triangulation in religion is a very good idea because the unfamiliarity of the other point of view will somehow revive things you never saw in your own but there's another thing to this that's tremendously important rather difficult to explain one of the things that is oppressive about our own standard brand religions is

their lack of humor and also I would say their lack of a kind of Glee and the Glee and humor Have to go together because you can get religious Glee in a big him sing you know but it's often without humor to understand and really have a religion really well you must be able to make jokes about it and this is a kind of criterion which distinguishes the men from the boys if you cannot joke about your own religion you are very insecure in it but what religions joke about themselves [Applause] Occasionally a Catholic like

D K Chesterton will be very funny indeed about Catholicism but this is quite rare Hindus very rarely joke about Hinduism the people who do joke about their own religion are from China and they are Daoists and Zen Buddhists if you want to get the original joke book on religion it is by a certain man by the name of Duong sir who are Gyeongju who wrote probably about 350 AD in the tradition of loud Sir and the daodejing zhang xue'er elaborated the doctrine but his whole work is full of the most marvelous anecdotes in which one

of his pedagogical devices is to make caricatures of his own point of view for example he has a great deal to say about the value of the useless that everybody who is aspiring to be useful we'll probably get eaten up because after all it's the healthy pigs that we take for food so he has a parable about an Exceedingly deformed hunchback and he says this man was really skillful in his life because whenever the conscript officers came around they rejected him immediately but whenever the social service workers came around he was the first to get

a handout of food and he describes at a colossal tree that some travelers came across on a journey and they said that must be the most remarkable tree and they went up to it and they found that It's wood was all full of piss and that the branches wouldn't even do his bean poles because they were all scraggly that the leaves were rough and inedible and that the fruit was exceedingly bitter so nobody wanted to eat this tree as a result of which it grew to an enormous size then he gave such a Gilles trations

as this when a drunken man falls out of a cart though he may suffer he does not die because his spirit is in a condition Of security and he does not suffer from contact with objective existences if such security may be obtained from why how much more from the DAO from being you know with it what he means this kind of relaxed going along with the course of nature but you see he exaggerates all the time he says he makes these impossible illustrations and there is always a very gentle humor in this now when it

comes you see Zen comes from China and it is the result of a Fusion of Buddhism with Taoism Indian Buddhism arriving in China in this kind of style Oh a little after 400 AD and then picking up a Taoist atmosphere so a humor of course is essentially laughter at oneself humor is really not taking yourself seriously and therefore naturally is your religion is something very close to your heart you mustn't take your religion seriously either and so the Zen masters have invariably depicted themselves in a humorous way When you look at the drawings they did

of themselves and even of Buddha they're all oaths and clowns and baboons you know that marvelous character Hotei who is the fat Buddha he's not exactly he shouldn't be called the fat Buddha he is really a Zen this terrific belly and he carries around a big bag and that bag is full of crash it's all odds and ends which nobody else thought were important but Hotei is like a child he has no Prejudice about things and anything might be important and so he picks up old rags bottles bottle tops discarded notebooks all kinds of fascinating

things don't you remember as a child how fascinating there were and he puts him in this bag and he gives them away to children and he is regarded with great respect in Zen but he's not taken seriously now what do I mean there is a difference between being serious and being sincere And the G K Chesterton to go back to him once said that in frivolity there is a lightness which can rise but in seriousness there is a gravity that Falls like a stone and thus the angels fly because they take themselves lightly so this

is true of the of the Zen people they take themselves lightly they refer they say for examples of the teachings of Buddha all the troubles in this world started when old golden phase stuck out is three inches of iron that means his Tongue old golden face is butter and of course when you see Buddhist images outputted Eric their their goals the old golden face and if he has a tongue it's an iron tongue as if to say Buddhism the doctrine this method isn't serious as a matter of fact it's wider the troubles begin when the

teaching begins why for the simple reason that when you attempt to get yourself out of The difficulties caused by your own ego you're on the wrong track as we say anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined and you see the many levels of meaning in that statement so they would say that the study of Zen is like putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch it is somehow well we would say our arm arm metaphor is gilding the lily is doing something unnecessary and by doing it making

a mess of everything because you Know lilies are not very happy when gilded those legs fine snake snakes fine legs inconvenient so this is that this is the humor in the whole thing that when you catch yourself doing something such as looking all over the house for the spectacles you're wearing there's nothing when you find out what you've done but to laugh and so in the same way when you are trying to get liberated get yourself liberated from an ego which never existed in the first place [Applause] when you discover that that's the case there's

nothing for you to do but laugh at yourself and the whole of Zen is based on this then you see traps you cunningly enough into going through a great discipline and boy it's not there the case of somebody coming out and telling you you come here and this discipline is good for you you knew better crowd in around here and all take it no if you apply for admission to A Zen school you get thrown out immediately they don't want you so you have to force your way in you really have to slay your head

on the block and say I am in trouble I firmly desire I sincerely intend I will curse and swear that I do indeed want to become a Buddha before anything else in the world and unless you make that much fuss about it they will not let you in and then what they do is they fix you up with the Funniest problems there are two that I might illustrate this with one is you have to show the teacher who you really are not who you've been brought up to be but who you are originally before your

father and mother conceived you that is to say you must perform a completely sincere and spontaneous act or they will ask you to hear the sound of one hand they know there's a Chinese proverb which says one hand doesn't make a clap so what is the sound of one hand you Know those Rascals what they get away with but they get away with it you see just as the long as to someone ready to be fooled just so long as you will allow yourself to be put down into pretending that you're just poor little mean

and the true this little separate ego has all these problems and is disconnected and it isn't after all the whole universe and as long as you feel in that way some smart or master can put you down and can trap you up by persuading You in some way other that you haven't made it and you've got to make it you've got to attain that legacy that's your ego just so they go through all this and it's just like someone being put in a squirrel cage or set to chasing his own tail while trying to catch

his own shadow but under the supervision of a teacher who knows just exactly what's going on the teacher himself has been through it and he's not like the other Kind of teacher who is still a student and who is urging his students to keep on the rat race because he's still on it finally it dawns that you see when you when you persistently do something absurd eventually you'll have to see it as Blake says the fool who persists in his folly will become wise if but if you're really consistent about it if you really go

for that foolishness then you will suddenly realize that you have made yourself absolutely absurd Then there is nothing to do but laugh and as for the teacher who trapped you into this you were very very grateful to him but you see that after all he's a big hoax because here he is in his robes and in his dignity and he's just an old rice bag who tricked you into this as RINs I himself put it one of the great Chinese Zen masters it is like using a closed fist to deceive a child his method of

teaching is like that as you know when you've got a child and you've Got a closed fist and you say what have I got here the child's full of excitement to show me is that uh-huh you've gotta guess what I got you there show me a child tries to pry your hand open and you hide it in every way and the child gets more more fascinated and finally in the end nothing well it's all like that because you see taking another way what are you holding on to what are you protecting what are you anxious

about what is it That you don't want to lose and you discover eventually that all your defending is defensive miss you know you started defending something you build up a wall and then you go worried about whether the wall would stand up so you lose another wall around you build another one round that and really it's a sort of onion system in which there's no Center so we are defending our defenses and when that is exposed and that's you see all your doing and there wasn't Anything to defend in the first place nor was there

anything to be attained that you didn't already have but you can't find this out by being told because he wouldn't believe it you can only find it out by carrying your supposed predicament to its logical conclusion so then we take the ego now how on earth are we to show that the ego is an abstraction to someone who firmly believes that that's himself well the Only thing to do is to challenge it so when the problem is put before a Zen novice be sincere show me your true self he works like anything added but the

circumstances under which this occurs are such as to make it practically impossible for him to do it if you understand this posing you go and confront the teacher and you go through certain kind of formal salutation like a ritual and then it's a certain minute you have to do something completely Spontaneous and unpremeditated how can you do that because here's the teacher sitting looking at you like this waiting for you to do it show me you looking right at you and you think he sees right through me in any kind of little guilt you have

or any kind of thing like that you feel that he's looking right at it and just like a very skillful swordsman if you think before you thrust he's caught you because he's caught you thinking you have to thrust before you Think then you want then you're surprising but the moment is a little waiver of intention before the act is too late he's read it read your mind so you mustn't have any thoughts and then he won't read your mind it's like when you want to go on the wagon goodness sake don't make a resolution I'm

going on the wagon this here because then you published to the devil your intention never let him know see the same way if your when allowed sir This is a story that drawings are invented and has a certain typical humor to it it loud sir is supposed to have had a discussion with Confucius on the nature of love and benevolence and when Confucius has given for several pomposity is about this loud sir is alleged to have said to him what stuff surely you're getting rid of self is a positive manifestation of self you are like

people beating drums and such a fugitive or we would say the police Driving off to raid a nightclub with their sirens on that announces that they're coming so we in order to surprise yourself you mustn't know what you're gonna do well how can you do that it's the paradox which the Hindus expressed by saying if you think of a monkey while you're taking medicine the medicine won't work therefore try not to think of a monkey while taking medicine so how are you going to surprise yourself see we got back to that thing We were talking

about this morning that button with the word surprise on it and if your god do you know what the surprise is how can you not the problem for God as well as for us how do you surprise yourself that's what you've got to do if you're going to be spontaneous see your action has to be a surprise to you like having hiccups but at you how how are you going to arrange for yourself to do something surprising so you really work at that and you work and You work and you work and the teacher rejects

all your efforts even some of your fairly good efforts get rejected because he's building up with you fabulous frustration he's making you feel that this task is like looking for a needle in a haystack to discourage you in every possible way and yet at the same time lead you on by saying well you've got to work at it in the past there were all those famous students who went before and they sweated blood to Find this out they were ready to give their lives to hear the sound of one hand you can't expect to get

anywhere near them unless you'll redouble your efforts you see this is the come on a sales pitch so finally you get to a point where you understand and see perfectly clearly that there's nothing you can do about it nothing at all but there are where I because as if there's nothing you can do about it then nothing's gonna happen you Mean you're gonna sit around and wait for the grace of God maybe it will get you one day and you say well I'll just go along and do my daily work it's nothing I can do

and if you indicate to the teacher that that is your attitude he's got another curve to throw at you which is that this giving up is still a contrivance is still doing something so there's nothing in it so far as the transformation of the ego is concerned there is nothing you can do about it Also there's nothing you cannot do about it you find you cannot abandon this quest once it's excited you and just go off and be an ordinary Philistine type person because if you do that that too will be phony so you're left

in this frantic dilemma there's nothing I can do and there's nothing I could not do but you see you eventually get to the meaning of that situation what does it mean that I'm in this situation it means that the I which I thought I was since it can neither do anything nor not do anything then it doesn't exist you realize it for the abstraction that it is that's the practical experiment is very frustrating and why is it frustrating you made it frustrating by swallowing the teachers advice which he knew you'd fall for and you were

trying to do what the preachers tell you to make yourself unselfish by either an active course or a passive course and neither of them were Because they are both redundant there is no real self no real ego and then of course when that's find out everybody has a good laugh so that is a kind of a spirit in spirituality in religion which is really rather rare so I think this is the is the feature of Zen which is attractive to most Westerners on the one hand it's extreme directness and on the other it's human so

it's very difficult although a few People have achieved it to be Zen and to be stuffy because it is essentially an unstopping process a way of getting rid of I I think we have in art contemporary American slang some very wonderful words such as hang up almost exact translation of what Buddhists mean by a cliche or worldly attachment see when you talk about worldly attachments to Christians they think it means enjoying your food and liking sex and having a beautiful car or something like that that's what They call worldly attachments now in Buddhism all those

things could be worldly attachments or pleasure but aren't necessarily so it depends if you are hung up on it and to be hung up means to be in a dither in a state where around you were hesitate not knowing wish I go this way or that way see that's a hang-up and so the the tactics of a Zen teacher are to put all his students constantly into hang up situations to challenge them by Such a procedure as this you're in a conversation you've just been introduced to the teacher this is how do you do where

have you come from oh I came from Tokyo and where did you go to school well I was at the University of Tokyo for a while why is my hand so much like the Buddha's hand dead silence so you suddenly slipped into this question which non pluses the student now so the art of non plussing is this is part of the whole technique of the Teacher and your problem is to get out of being nonplussed and to be able to do that you have to be able to act without ego that is to say without

choice without deliberation how to act without deliberation is - all right thinking people very foolish thing to do we say look before you leap we also say he who hesitates is lost [Laughter] now you see what we're getting down to here really seriously is that the the Zen method is a way of teaching people to get with themselves in the larger sense of self than the ego and that is shall I say to have faith in yourself in that larger sense if your brain in your nervous system is the most fabulous computer which you had

no hand whatever in constructing from the standpoint of conscious ego it but it is you you you should certainly learn to trust it but we're all brought up not to trust yourself and therefore for us brought up In that way it's a very dangerous thing to trust yourself to rationally and therefore to learn how to do it we have to learn in protected circumstances so the the Zen school provides protected circumstances in which we can behave in unexpected ways or we can try out spontaneous behavior everybody around there understands that some very odd things may

happen but just because this is understood there's no problem about them So all those Zen stories that we read and laugh over because they seem so idiotic our stories in which the teacher hangs up the student and the student does or doesn't get out of the hanger if he can come on within sort of instant but not hurried response to the challenge that means his psychic energy is flowing unobstructed Lee the whirlpool is just working beautifully and the energy is flowing right through it but on the other hand if he's hung up He means he's

in a state of insecurity he is afraid that if he doesn't choose the right response to this situation he may be in serious danger danger maybe of disapproval by the teacher or of actually risking his life in some way or you know as we viciously saying the wrong thing but the secret is of course to respond instantly in some way if he says why is my hand so much like the Buddha's hand you might slap it oh you might just shake hands with or You might put a penny in his palm or you might spit

on I might kiss it but immediately that's the answer now sometimes he will feel that you're not really skillful at this that you're your spontaneous answer is inappropriate or that it's a contrived spontaneous answer you get to the point where you can detect with its spirit in which it's done very easily all sorts of cues give it to you and therefore he rejects it let's try again Because you cannot give that sort of answer until you come to the point that you get to when you learn to ride a bicycle you remember when you try

to learn to ride a bicycle you get to the point where you know that you're gonna be the one damn stupid child who will never learn to ride a bus I handed that minute suddenly you find it's doing it how is it the same with learning to swim with those all those knacks are just like the study of Zen so you will insert Study of Zen get to the point where you know you're going to do one eternally stupid student will never never will get through that con that's a Zen problem in Japanese word :

like what is the sound of one hand there's a KO on and out of that intense frustration there occurs the transforming experience because it is that intense frustration that reveals to you in an undeniable immediate sensuous way the frustration of discovering that what you thought you Were all along isn't really there at all you see didn't do you remember that I described the state in which you discovered that your actions are the actions of the environment and what the environments doing is what you're doing and that both of these are true because it's all one

process and when you're so used to thinking about it the other way you get into a feeling of it being that way it's frustrating it's like the experience of talking into a microphone And then hearing your own voice a split second later and you start doing this and this thing starts talking and then sudden you find yourself waiting for it to go on very frustrating but of course it's you've got to go on talking it wonder it won't work without you doing it although it sounds it's coming from somewhere else well it's just like that

this feeling I'm describing so you think this is why a lot of people get into trouble with psychedelic chemicals they Get into this state and when they suddenly find that that it's all one process they begin to worry now who's responsible am I responsible for my act but I'm not doing them is it responsible so that I can say well it wasn't my fault and then you suddenly see that you can't divide it from you but since you don't feel in the ordinary old way you feel that well now how do I know that I'll

still speak the English language or now We'll remember how to do it 10 seconds from now because if it all depends on something that's not under my control I don't know that it will remember English or might I commit a murder supposing I suddenly commit a murder how can I trust myself not to commit a murder because there's no one in charge but you find that it's really perfectly easy to go ahead and remember what English is and to act in an absolutely civilized way but when people don't see That they get panicky and panic

in the state builds up and builds up and builds up and builds up into the most appalling vicious circles but on the other hand if you get into this new situation and just go ahead you'll find it works beautifully and that this is why the Zen poet speaks of drawing water and carrying fuel as a miraculous activity I walk on foot and yet I'm riding on the back of an ox empty-handed and yet a spade is in my hand when I crossed the Bridge the bridge flows and the water is still that's the feeling see

empty-handed I go in yet a spade is in mine how would you know your hand was empty unless you've seen it with a spade and if you're always seen a spade in a hand you would think that Spade was an extension of the hand like a finger so in order to know what empty-handed news is you must know what full handedness is therefore a spade in the hand makes Possible the realization of an empty hand and vice versa so in the same way the realization of something other makes possible the realization of what you call

you so you can't know what you mean by you unless there is the experience of the other then you suddenly see there for self and other and all of that implies what you will and what you don't will what you want and what you don't want these are all going together like this so it's like when you're driving a Car when you move the steering wheel are you pushing it or pulling it let not your left hand know what your right hand do it you are of course pull pushing it so the same thing happens

in this state of consciousness what you ordinarily felt was pushing the world around was it pulling you what you ordinary felt is the world pushing you around is you pulling it and you always suppress one side of the awareness so Zen practice leads to bringing about That awareness of polarity between the organism and the environment but getting around the problem the false problem of how do I get rid of myself how do I transform myself when the I which I believe myself to be has no power to transform anything because it's a social convention and

an abstraction let me start by a little bit of backtracking and revision which I shall do with the help of a an Whitehead I've been talking about the situation of man of the Individual in the world of nature and the complexity introduced into this by technology and further troubled by the way in which individuals generally experience themselves as confronting an alien universe a form of experiencing our existence which is in flat contradiction to the scientific description of man as an organism environment rather than an organism in an environment Whitehead puts it in this way The

doctor in which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities the products of logical discernment the concrete enduring entities are organisms so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it in the case of an animal the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms Until the ultimate smallest organisms such as electrons are reached thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside

it by reason of the plan of the body the electron blindly runs either within or without the body but it runs within the body in accordance with it with its character within the body that is to say in accordance with the general plan of the body and this plan includes the mental state but the principle of Modification is perfectly general throughout nature and represents no property peculiar to living bodies in subsequent lectures it will be explained that this doctrine involves the abandonment of the traditional scientific materialism and the substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism

in this passage he is stating in another way what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concretions that is to say of attributing physical reality To the abstractions in terms of which we describe the natural world such as things which are as I showed you units of thought thinks as inches for example are units of measurement and through the confusion of the shara as core ships key would have said the map with the territory or as Wittgenstein would have said the network with the world which we try to catch with the network you see in a

certain sense we throw networks over everything just as we throw the lines of Latitude and longitude over the surface of the globe in imagination just as we have celestial latitude and longitude and imaginary net which we cast over the Stars and discuss all the features of the physical in terms of their positions within the network which are easily measurable as well as if we had for example graph paper printed on cellophane so in doing this we tend increasingly to confuse the structure of the net with the structure Of the world that the net is used

to measure and it is as a result of that that we are as it were hypnotized by the abstract sense of individuality or rather the abstract definition of individuality and are less and less aware of what it is to be an individual concretely and so in this sense he says my own criticism of our traditional educational methods is that they are far too much occupied with intellectual analysis and with the acquirement of Formula rised information what I mean is that we neglect our strengths and habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full

interplay of emergent values and that we merely emphasize abstract formulations which ignore this aspect of the interplay of diverse values we are to exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine the general training should aim at eliciting our concrete apprehensions and should satisfy the itch of youth to be doing Something there should be some analysis even here but only just enough to illustrate the ways of thinking in diverse spheres in the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them in the traditional educational system children named the animals before they saw them but when you

understand all about the Sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth you may still miss the radiance of the sunset there is no Substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality we want concrete fact with a highlight thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness I don't always approve of Whitehead style of English I think it's a little pompous but what it's very well said yeah about is he saying in an in a kind of a pedantic and academic way what the Zen

Buddhists demonstrate for one of their principles is that when you ask a Question about the abstract that is to say about philosophy or religion you'll get an answer in the concrete and when you ask a question about the concrete you'll get an answer in terms of the abstract so then when those old Chinese masters were asked what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism they would say something like 3 pounds of flax and when working in the fields they were pruning tea bushes and the monk said to the master will you give me the Knife the

master hands in the knife blade first he says please give me the other end question is what would you do with the other end and the conversation is it was switches in that way but when he says an answer to what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism three pounds of flax one is not to suppose as one might if habituated to ordinary philosophical or religious ways of thinking one must not suppose that this is some kind of symbolism as if three Referred to the Buddha the Dharma and the Sangha the three treasures have put is

a more to the three bodies of Buddha or anything like that three pounds of flax is just three pounds of flax and even that is saying too much it's very difficult to point you see to reality itself when you try to get a dog to go and look at something by pointing at it the dog will come to your finger and will not understand the meaning of pointing so it is with humans and if we Consider that various kinds of religion the teachings of religion the rights or the sacraments of religion are fingers pointing human

beings all too readily suck those fingers for comfort instead of following or looking in the direction of the pointing so such strains our answers as three pounds of flax or whatever it may be try to jolt us out of our excessive thinking as Whitehead says our education is too bookish to come into rip to direct Contact with physical material reality but of course when I say these words physical and material they are abstract and this isn't abstract nor in that sense is it material insofar as material is an abstract idea it's a concept this is

not a concept so to wake people up to look at that requires among other things interior silence now I'm said some of this to you before what said it to some of you before but it cannot be stressed too often the Chinese sage who was a Taoist wanza said once the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror it grasps nothing it refuses nothing it receives but does not keep and this attitude in Zen Buddhism is called motion which in Japanese means no mind we would say mindlessness or thoughtlessness except that those words in our

cultural context have a pejorative sense to say that someone is thoughtless is to say That he's inconsiderate or moronic but in the Chinese sense of the term thoughtless it means having a mirror-like mind there's a verse which says the wild geese do not intend to cast their image the water has no mind to retain their reflection the same is sometimes said of the relationship of the moon to the water now this no mind means really mental silence in the sense that the mind is highly alert and highly aware but without talking to itself when It

hears it doesn't think bird it doesn't think song it doesn't think music it just thinks and so that means the absence of chattering to yourself constantly inside your head whether you're doing it in words whether you're doing it in numbers or whether you're doing it in abstract images of some other kind to become still and to reflect the world as a clear pool reflects the sky well why is that important well I can give at least two Reasons one is that if I am to talk all the time I will not have anything to talk

about except my own verbiage because I won't listen to what anybody else has to say in exactly the same way if I think all the time I won't have anything to think about except thoughts so just as I have to stop talking occasionally to hear what others have to say so I have to stop thinking occasionally they have something to think about Otherwise I am sort of like a bookworm a person who never gets out of a library reads and reads and reads but has no contact with the life that books are about now it's

very difficult you see to have a silent mind because we are creatures of habit and we think incessantly now the second reason is that we are very bothered by our thoughts one reason why Americans in particular don't like to be alone and like even if they are alone they turn on The radio or the television or read a magazine is that they are disturbed by their thoughts I'm left alone with my thoughts and I start worrying why because you live according to a world of conceptions for example let's say we what do we worry about

we worry about the future or we regret things we've done in the past but the future is not here and the past has disappeared the future in the past are as it were do not belong to the physical world they are Abstractions and what we remember of the past is a very attenuated image of it and what we predict for the future is never quite like what happens in fact it's very unlike it if I say to someone what did you do yesterday they say oh well I got up in the morning I had some

coffee I went for a stroll then I had breakfast and I dressed and brush my teeth and I went off to the office and I saw mr. so-and-so and so on you know but this is you see you're you're thinking Of you of your past day in terms of abstractions which are have none of that they're like the bones of events and have none of the flesh on when you draw an abstract picture of a human body in stick figures you know you draw a round blob for the head and then arms and legs everybody

knows that once that's a human being or meant to be or represents a human being but it's not really very like one it has none other color none of the flesh None of the beautiful texture of a human organism well so in thinking of our past as these rather attenuated dried out memories we always seem to have had a life of deprived richness and therefore as the more we identify the succession of our days with these abstractions the more we feel that was something we're missing as if you were to make a diet of dollar

bills you would suffer from malnutrition and if you were stubbornly convinced that what you needed was more You would have not only malnutrition but serious indigestion and so in the same way if you think that what you need is more time then you panic about the future you want more future and you say of something which is no good it has no future but what you should say it has no present because when you see you have a silent mind you're not thinking about the future you're not thinking about the Past you are experiencing the

present in a very complete way you are not stopping to analyse each detail you couldn't possibly ever do that but you're getting all the details without focusing on certain details which exclude your apprehension of the whole and so you're beginning to live a rich life and a real life that is completely here and now now neither Whitehead certainly nor I am taking in this an anti-intellectual position we are saying That if you do not know completely how to live in the present you have no use for plans for the future because you will never be

able to enjoy those plans when they mature because you will be there you'll be thinking about some other future what's the point and in the same way there is no purpose in the intellectual life unless you are fully aware of that which the intellectual life is about that is to say present vivid real life the intellectual life is A commentary on that is a way of measuring it and as all measurements are useful for prediction and for control that's fine but don't get so involved in prediction and control that all you are doing is controlling

controlling no like is the meaning of life just to find out what the meaning of life is but that's what happens and one of the things that is explored in the meditations and the disciplines of Zen people and other types of Eastern philosophy is the Exploration of power we've been into this a little would you really like to control everything supposing you could and every wise person of course comes to the conclusion that that's not what they want because if you controlled everything there would be no surprises but we are at present to see dangerously

living into an era of our civilization in which we are over controlled in which for example the laws cannot operate Because there is too much law in which you cannot do the simplest thing in the way of an enterprise or of business or of anything without having a battery of lawyers to tell you whether you may do it and how you may do it and the paperwork that goes with everything you do is absolutely intolerable academic paperwork is overwhelming and you will notice that the records in a Registrar's Office are kept in safes they are

so precious but the books in the library Are easily stolen that the recording of what is done is more important than what is done it's like some people who don't believe anything happens unless they've got a picture of it and who obsessively take pictures of everything we're having a lovely time and somebody comes in beautifully dressed and so on and we say oh what a pity no one brought a camera and I know the Japanese are obsessed with this because they you see there they're reacting they're copying all the Terrible features of Western culture when

they go to a great monument they photograph incessantly they don't see a thing except through the the viewfinder of the camera and this little box is going grab grab grab grab grab and instead of enjoying the gorgeous presence of this temple this garden this mountain landscape they are waiting till they get home and can go through these measly little reproductions optimism I [Laughter] Sometimes wonder about this thing I have myself never never listen to it but I know other people like to have recordings of these things so that they they miss some point they can

catch up with it again but I don't know I sometimes have nightmares about a world of echoes in which there are only echoes and echoes of echoes and echoes of echoes of echoes reverberating forever down the empty corridors of my mind [Laughter] Now here comes a problem though is how do you make your mind still the method in Zen is a method of exasperation they of course advocate various technical aids to making your mind still such as the practice of zazen which is sitting usually cross-legged on cushions in a long hall and counting your breath

so as to eliminate from consciousness any other thought than that of the counting of the breath and this eventually results in a state of stillness only That's not enough because the skillful teacher feels that this kind of stillness is not yet true stillness it's forced and he's trying to get you to a point where it will never be necessary for you to force your mind to be still but where it can be so quite naturally and he can only do that by tricks which are called upaya in sanskrit been in japanese which means kill fool

means in pedagogy upaya means the the tricks of the teachers Trade how he gets attention how he helps you to understand something in politics upaya means cunning deceit as a sort of a bad meaning in politics and so the the the Zen teacher uses all sorts of tricks to get you away from the fallacy of trying to make your mind still by force which is like trying to smooth rough water with a flat iron all you do is stir it up I am thinking that I am trying not to think I'm annoyed with myself because

I'm not successful Etc etc I should be successful all these are disturbances all these considerations they're off the point but how to get people often you have to reach a point in other words where you learn to leave your mind alone as you leave rough water alone so that it becomes smooth of itself but while you conceive you are waiting for this to happen you're still stirring it up you therefore have to get rid of the sensation that there is you the thinker Watching the thoughts you the feeler separate from and trying to control the

feelings because so long as that separation exists you'll have trouble and therefore the function of the Coens the problem like what is the sound of one hand is to lead you to the natural seeing through of debunking of the concept of the separate thinker and the separate experience er so that when you find out that the thinker and the thoughts are Not different then you'll have less and less trouble in allowing the thoughts to become quiet it's difficult for us to understand this simply because of our language when we say knowing or thinking we always

feel that this is a function or activity of someone who thinks and knows that's because we are tied up with this subject verb predicate language structure now the same problem is approached from a somewhat different point of view and With a different style but essentially the same principles are being used in the philosophy of Krishnamurti only it comes from it comes in a very different way because although Krishnamurti is an Indian and thus we would say in the United States a Hindu he doesn't present himself as affiliated with any kind of religious or philosophical organization

he comes on simply as mr. Krishnamurti and he doesn't present any gimmicks any obvious techniques because according to His view all these special practices are hindrances in other words supposing a group of people take up Zen Buddhism before you know where you are they have become a club a special in-group and there the Zen people and there they're going to sell this thing they're gonna say you should try as in you know you may be a Christian Scientist you may be a Catholic who may be a seventh-day Adventist you may be a theosophist and all

these ways have something to be said For them but the real thing is our Zen and then of course they all start sitting in meditation posture and they put up hanging Scrolls and burn incense and have Buddha's and gongs and so on and all that can be used as a sort of social or cultural one-upmanship and this is a very serious obstacle now then Krishnamurti comes on without any bells or robes he addresses his audience wearing gray flannel pants and a white Open shirt that's it and he talks without any spiritual technicalities or even philosophical

technicalities absolutely dispenses with them all he really does is ask questions and therefore he seems to many people as a total debunker who has nothing positive to offer his approach is invariably one of this you propose the question in other words you asked him to come here why what is it you're looking for and you ask a question for example because Actually many of his original followers came out of a Theosophical background they perpetually asked the question like is there such a thing as reincarnation will I did I have a past life will I have

a future life and instead of either saying yes or no he comes back with why do you ask is there a God why do you ask go into it go into the state of mind you have when you voice that question why you voicing well people will defend themselves for a Long time when faced with that they'll say well I'm curious or isn't it once purpose in life to find out these things he said what makes you think it's your purpose in life just someone tell you so and you believed it why do you think

that's your purpose in life you have to back off a little bit say well I suppose the real reason why I want to know whether there's going to be a future life is that I'm afraid of death why are you afraid of death I don't want to lose My continuity aha so that's the reason is it you are clinging to yourself yeah well he would say how how can you possibly understand God or anything of a spiritual nature while you're clinging to yourself aren't these two activities mutually exclusive if you want to know what truth

is you must be open to truth whatever it is but if you are if you say only that truth will be acceptable to me which supports my conception of my ego then you're not open and you say yes I See but then you say how can I be open this is why do you want to be see you're just doing the same old thing again you ask me how to be unselfish but what is your reason for wanting to be unselfish you don't want to be unselfish at all you want to find a new way

of getting round at all now in in this manner he absolutely exasperates people because he'll never agree with anything anybody says if they formerly didn't say mr. Krishnamurti is that what you mean He says no no no no no no look go into it again don't don't don't make a formulation don't come to a conclusion don't want to have a resolution of this just be if you can't open to what is to what you actually feel now don't judge it don't say it should be shouldn't be what is it say when you are in a

state of grief what is grief no don't say a word don't try to pin it down don't give a definition just experience whatever you Have labeled as grief I often ask people when they say they're anxious where are you anxious and they say all over to come now how do you know your entrance what symptoms are they going on in you to tell you you are anxious then they begin to notice things in their stomach and headaches things or whatever it may be and then they come to a more concrete apprehension of the state of

affairs that they have labeled anxiety and are in this way which is Really it is really really very like Zen because it's frustrating people come to see there's absolutely nothing they can do at all to stop being selfish so they see after a while that trying to stop being selfish is the same thing as selfishly trying to get rid of grief is grief and so when you see that there comes a point which we could get best call giving up surrender William James pointed this out likewise in his study of the varieties of religious experience

And the psychology of conversion there's the point of absolute frustration followed by surrender and then in that moment of surrender when you see you just can't do anything about it you suddenly have a quiet mind there is no further effort you see to say the thinker and the thoughts are one that's a formulation the experiencer and the experience are one experiencing you don't need to say that because that's not the point the formulation of it is Not the point it is the actual experiencing itself that is the point but you can't come to that while

you are going over in your mind all this chatter about I should accept my experience I should not accept my experience etc as a matter of fact when psychologists sometimes say you should accept yourself a lot of people just don't you know they're always fighting themselves clubbing themselves and allegedly disciplining themselves And then they get into tremendous touch-ups inside and they psychologist says now come you're human you should accept yourself you shouldn't feel guilty if you get angry it's very natural to get angry accept yourself so people try to accept themselves then they come across

the fact that there are certain things they do not and cannot accept and they have to accept the fact that they can't accept them accept that you don't accept and then that's the Same bind as Buddha put people in when he said in order not to suffer you must get rid of desire but then people find out that they desire to get rid of desire so you see that saying accept yourself is a gimmick and the are it's a no pyre and the object of it is to bring you to the state where you see

that the self which does the accepting is the one you need to accept and in this state where you're confronted with the necessity of licking your own tongue you Suddenly see that what you thought was to be accepted and what was to do the accepting or all one it's a very awkward feeling at this moment RH Blythe described it beautifully you were about to swat a fly but the fly jumped up and sat on the swatter [Laughter] you were about to punch the world in the nose and the nose became the same as the fist

and of course in that moment one feels awkward just as I described in the First talk that the situation our feeling that you and the environment are all one process at first that is non classy you just not used to feeling it that way because if the stream of thought or the stream of experience is the same as the experiencer who's in control well it's it controls itself it's what the Chinese call Iran of itself so which is their word for nature and in their organic theory of nature there is no one In control who

stands outside and above the organic system itself it's the organic consistent it controls itself it has its it's full of the same sort of balances that any organic system has because if it didn't have that it wouldn't be organic it'll be nearly chaotic so we get back you see to what is fundamental in Chinese Far Eastern psychology that any ongoing system must trust itself and therefore the the attitude of these People to human nature is the rather different from ours they would say human nature is basically to be trusted not that there's anyone outside it

trust or mistrusted but they would say if you don't trust your own nature how can you trust your mistrust how can you know that that's even that's reliable because that's all part of you now they will say yes in the in human nature there are passions there is greed there is anger there are as an aggressive tendency but What is good about human nature is it's good and bad Confucius once said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue and he exalted above mere goodness in the sense of following a legal righteousness something called in Chinese

run which means human heartedness being a complete human now a complete human is always a little bit of a rascal not too much of a rascal the point is that you have a little rascality and you like to put salt in The stew now you certainly don't want the steel to be all salt but when it's without salt it's sort of flat and don't you feel that with very good people they're awfully dull [Laughter] no aware there's a certain kind of um oppressive goodness about people of a certain kind I won't make any labels but

when you come into that there is something about it that the game you Know you're sitting on the edge of your chair young once said he met a man in whom he could find no human failings whatsoever and he was terribly disturbed because he thought really if that's possible I should put my own life in order but he said never again will I be deceived a few days later I met his wife now it wasn't that his wife said huh do you think my husband is good at huge should see him when no one else

is around except me oh no it wasn't that at All it was the wife was living her husband's shadow she was living out in her life all the things that he repressed in his and that can easily happen in a very close human association she in other words was the incarnation of his shadow we all cast a shadow and it's better to carry your own to stick it on someone else so in talking to a great Zen master he once said I really have no other ideal than to be a complete human being And so

that means not only flowers on the top but manure around the roots the totality which we true humility is after all the recognition of this situation and it's only when we get to be proud of our humility you see that we're in difficulty so I sometimes wonder a little bit with Krishnamurti whether he may not be sometimes too earnest but I realized that that is his public facade because of the tremendous earnestness with which he is trying to get his Listeners to be fully here and now and when they escaped from the moment either by

comments attempting to get definitions or even by laughing he keeps pulling them back to the absolutely immediate experience therefore within yzma he's really at his best in rather intimate sessions with people where he likes to get a sittin around in a ring with people and instead of giving a lecture conduct this dialogue back and forth the questions come and then he Throws the questioner back the question back to the question why did you ask look at it are you really listening he said most people don't listen they wait for the speaker to express their own

opinion and when he doesn't they don't listen [Laughter] they try to make sense out of the words that I was saying to you earlier on sometimes it's very important to listen to the sound of the speaker's voice Rather than trying to follow the meaning of the words Indians American Indians very often do that they want to know what a man really is like and what his true character is they listen to the sound of his voice no matter what he has to say you can be awfully distracted by what a person has to say and

not see what kind of a villain is coming up against you so in in both these cases in the case of Zen and in the case of the work of Krishnamurti we have two Examples of we could say methods in a certain sense or methods of non method by which we can do something to correct and overcome the divorce of the mind the human mind from the physical world but my let me repeat by saying the physical world I'm using a word for want of anything better Kashyap's ki called it the unspeakable world is really

rather funny that is to say the nonverbal world which is of course in a profound sense the spiritual world because it's Immaterial that is to say immaterial in the sense of unmeasured so these are studies practices disciplines or whatever you want to call them that are a very great and a special value to a culture as powerful as ours which is seriously suffering from alienation split nurse divorce of consciousness from reality well now the general trend of this seminar has been from the theoretical to The practical that is to say I started in the first

session talking to you on in a very theoretical way about the relation of the individual to the world and showing how our apprehension of our own existence is when compared with the scientific description of our relation to nature really a hallucination and then the problem is the practical overcoming of this hallucination and so I've discussed with you two approaches which are very like each other to that Objective one the essential principles of the method of Zen and the other the essential principles of the method or non method of Krishnamurti because coming to the Blaisdell Institute

are these people then people and Krishna Marie we hope so that you know don't blurt it around too much but that's what you're in for but of course the work there has a particular relevance for students for Young people and both these approaches Krishna Marie's approach and the Zen approach are very proper and appropriate for young people today one of the most balancing factors in San Francisco life at this time is the existence of a very strong movement for the practice of Zen alongside the whole wide open world of hippy 'dom and many many young

people who are what you might call in the general hippie direction and classification are as a matter of fact Being beguiled by Suzuki Roshi with the Zen Center in San Francisco to go out to Tassajara Springs at the end of the Carmel Valley and practice and meditation now this is a very extraordinary thing because the sessions in Zen meditation out at the end of the valley are tough and mr. Suzuki stands no-nonsense this is a very very I don't quite want to say serious that's the wrong word because then isn't serious let's say a very

sincere application Which requires a great deal of work because you don't only meditate you have to be responsible for the maintenance of the grounds and the buildings and everything so it's a wonderful training school for young people but they will go for this in a way that they wouldn't go for discipline under other and more traditional auspices this is something new this has a new flavor but this man Suzuki is doing wonders for young people in San Francisco the difficulty you see Is with people who get their introduction to mysticism through LSD or marijuana and

other chemicals is that they get suddenly flipped into a very high states of consciousness with no background no way to comprehend it no way to deal with it no way to bring it down to earth and therefore since there are operating in the same area where these things are happening experienced people who have long long training in knowing how to Connect the mystical was a practical this is a very good influence and in the same way I would think Krishnamurti has a comparable influence although he doesn't act as the leader of an ongoing community as

Suzuki does this is a more or less touch-and-go thing a few meetings a few encounters and that's the end of it it's up to you after that but both these directions of presenting the problem of self-realization are certainly not frivolous and certainly Require a great deal of self-examination and this is a great problem which faces us now among young people who are in revolt against all sorts of things that in the lives of their fathers and mothers they feel to be false they are in revolt against what Buddhists call samsara samsara means the wheel of

birth and death but samsara really is the same thing as a squirrel cage a rat race where you are working and working and working for you Really know not what a process of gaining money or status or whatever it is not really to be enjoyed because one feels a little bit too guilty to enjoy it but to bring up children to give them expensive and glorious college education so that they can bring up their children to do the same things and it just goes on and on and on and on like this and so against

this rat race against the absorption say of the of the executive in paperwork and Abstractions against the complete dissolution of the family by reason of husband's absorption in business wife's absorption in Women's Clubs children's absorptions in a school where they're not cared for by their parents the revolt against all that sort of thing is going on but it's just not enough to revolt it's just not enough to [Music] take various drugs which open your mind to new dimensions it's not enough to Challenge everybody standards in clothing in housing in family arrangements and so on behind

or behind and beyond all that there must be some way of bringing it all to earth grounding it as I've intimated already the fascination of young people today for the mystical and for chemical mysticism is very dangerous like every worthwhile Enterprise is dangerous if they weren't doing that there'd be driving hot rods and perhaps skydiving Anyway something dangerous the young always have to be involved in something dangerous the disadvantage of exploration of the inner world is of peculiar danger simply because it goes into that aspect of our being about which we know least our own

in a life our minds but it is of the utmost importance that those adventures be accompanied with some kind of discipline now discipline is a dirty word today Among young people when you say discipline it means you know don't do it and so I substitute for the word discipline the word skill because there is no pleasure in this world without skill and skill is a an attractive word discipline is a pushaway word see and you are all of you as I look around to estimate the ages of people in this room you're all involved with

young people and you must be very conscious as you all are very conscious of the strife the Discord the gap between generations and so what I I'm my self regard my function to be a bridge person I've worked all my life to be a bridge between East and West and now it's thrown in my lap the job of being a bridge between the young and the old and so now I'm talking to them a relatively older group and I want to say some very serious things to you about how to handle what is happening among

young people especially as since this is under the auspices of at the Blaisdell Institute which is concerned with the university and therefore with the education of young people in relation to everything I've been talking about because the young are interested deeply and seriously interested in the transformation of consciousness in breaking out from the narrow situation of the alienated individual against the world but in doing this they are showing the usual excesses and imbalances of things the Young people always do they're not experienced they're not material therefore just for the very reason that they're not mature

they have the guts or the fool hardness if you want to call it that to go out on these expeditions but it was always so in the year 6000 BC an Egyptian priest was complaining of the decadence and irresponsibility and the discipline of the young so what to do under these circumstances we you must not give up your own ground in the sense That that there is as I said a very definite need for a discipline for something that will act in the same way in as in radio the ground wire acts to the antenna

it's not enough to have a way out experience and come back and say to your friends man it was a gas because it is immemorial wisdom that everybody who takes a heroic journey must bring something back because if he doesn't nobody knows he's taken it he may have lied he may say he may just have said That he went to the land of the demons and fought with the Dragons and then crossed the perilous bridge and came into the fairy Palace bring back a fairies feather prove it this is not merely to prove it is

also to do another thing which is the whole work of art what is art art is what Christians call the process of incarnation the making of the Divine Word into the flesh the expression in a material form of vision and to do that Is very difficult on a hundred micrograms of LSD you may very well have seen the vision of God in a dirty old ashtray you can you imagine that that's possible but it is because what is an ashtray ashes the decay the falling apart the burning away the turning of a lie more or

less alive or at least moist leaves of tobacco into dust and as you begin to think about that from a certain point of view it becomes a parable of the process of existence what is this Turning of everything into dust at first sight it looks as if it were a kind of a doom everything is just going into dust dust dust dust and blowing away and you realize that's what you're doing and by smoking these cigarettes you're slowly committing suicide giving yourself lung cancer or something then you may remember the words of C ji-yong that

life is an incurable disease with a very bad prognosis which lingers on for years and invariably ends with death Everything you do is bad for you like the little boy four years old who'd got sunburned and his skin was peeling and he looked in the mirror and said so young and wearing out already [Music] you know all energy wears you out everything is going into dust but as I was suggesting this morning when you understand that a life is that that your birth was being kicked off a precipice that you're going to ashes Remember this

ceremony in the Catholic Church on Ash Wednesday and everybody kneels before the altar and the priest puts cigarette ash or rather the burnt palm leaves previous farm Sunday on their forest instead remember oh man the dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return you remember the poem of G K Chesterton about dust what a vile dust the preacher said he thought the whole world woke he goes on and he talks about everything Being a kind of trembling dust and he ends up by saying talking of that final day known not the final day the

first day when God was with the Angels when God to all his paladin's by his own splendor swore to make a fairer face than heaven of dust and nothing more so it is to the to the extent you see this is there's a kind of a paradox in all this to the extent that you completely accept the dissolution of everything into dust that by doing that you let go Of that clinging to prominence to yourself to security which releases all the images of life to the degree the formula then is to the degree that you

are willing to become dust to that degree you are alive and that's how a person could see the vision of God in an ashtray now I've spent a few minutes taking some trouble with words to explain the ashtray as a vehicle of the vision of God now if you're a painter it's not just enough to take a pedestal I mean let's say you're a sculptor you're a person who presents objects of art you can't just get away with putting a nice walnut cube beautifully polished filthy ashtray on it enclose it in a glass case put

a label on it and say beatific vision that will shock people a little bit I might give them pause but if you're really skillful you will understand how to paint an old ashtray or photograph it in such a way that people's hearts will stop Look at that and then but to do that it will be necessary for you to show all the individual little pepper of pepper and salt pepper patterns in ash as a collection of tiny jewels which is how you can see them but you'll have to represent that and carry it out and

bring it through just in the same way as the people who painted Persian miniatures which are painted jewelry would look at trees and grasses and rocks and suddenly show them as full of Interior light enchanted divine by a very skillful technique but you have to have that technique to bring it through some for some possessions some complete mastery of an artistic technique is necessary for the bringing through of the vision so then our young people have stumbled on a key to the vision psychedelic chemicals and such things but they will not be able to bring

it through unless they also have the skills and therefore the the attitude of the Older generation in this situation will actually be one of great concern and worry as to what this kind of easy mysticism - easy mysticism shall we say is going to bring about all this has become terribly popular for the simple reason that human beings need religion are starved for it and that the churches have not delivered they have not delivered the experience therefore alternatives are being explored it's quite natural but you as I repeat you Are rightly and properly concerned as

to what will be the outcome and the only way to make a good job of it is instead of saying suppress the whole thing which never works anyway is to emphasize the point alright alright you've done this this is what you've seen you've had these experiences but there is a great deal more to it than that in my own study of these kind of experiences I could not have really really enjoyed them unless I had before That time being trained in all sorts of ways not only to understand the doctrines and the symbolism of religions

mythologies but also simply to speak and write because unless you know the art of language or you know the art of numbers or whatever it is whatever is the vehicle through which you express yourself you can't bring it forth there one of the great puzzles of life as they consider people who had a great love affair Dante and Beatrice everybody Knows about that love affair because Dante could express it so gorgeously the supposing system people who had a love affair and all the guy could ever say to the girls [Laughter] this is a real puzzle

because is that guy any less in love with the girl and Dante was with Beatrice perhaps it was the same degree of love but obviously the the the effect for mankind of Dante's love with far greater than the Guy who can only say see one they they both go into the paradise they both go into the beatific vision but one brings it back and shares it and this is the distinction which is made in Buddhism between two kinds of Buddhas there's the Buddha who attains Nirvana for himself he's called a practical Buller and there is

the Buddha who crosses and sees Nirvana and comes back to share it with the whole universe with everybody with all sentient beings He's called Bodhisattva and it so turns out that in the literature of Mahayana Buddhism pratyekabuddha is almost a term of abuse whereas a bodhisattva is the ideal form of man because the Bodhisattva realizes that he does not have the vision really if law but let me put it in this way I don't have it if you don't have it because I have it only to the extent that I can give it away that

I can give it up and to I'm quoting Gary Snyder up And to all others but in order that people may master these disciplines and this is the responsibility of the older generations it must be understood that working on the disciplines is fun and this is the task of all good teachers all good really gifted and great teachers there are people who never have to resort in their classes to artificial methods of imposing discipline they need no Proctor's they need no punishments they need no bribes because the good Teacher is the person who makes the

work of learning the discipline so completely fascinating that the student is embroiled the reason being that are learning a discipline is not a matter of forcing yourself and here the English language leaves a little bit to be desired we have a paucity of words for effort for application for concentration we can talk about when we when we're talking with children you must apply yourself now it's perfectly true nothing In the way of a skill will be achieved without practice but if practice is strained still nothing will be achieved by it except resentment many a little

boy learns to hate the violin or the piano because it was drummed into him this is you got to do you got to apply yourself to it that a director that are driving it home but on the other hand if there is a way of fascinating a child with the discipline of any musical instrument or What-have-you then they can apply themselves day after day after day after day and be fascinated with the discipline so this is the skill of the teacher this is upaya I use the Sanskrit word this morning skillful means to get the

student to love the art because to remember this principle if your student does not learn to love the discipline he will never be any good at what you're teaching him now you may know that Certain kinds of scholars do work that most of us would think very tedious they are let's supposing I took a field about which I know a few smatterings which is the study of Chinese Chinese scholarship is very difficult you have enormous amount of characters to study and you have to look up things in dictionaries and consult volumes of this and volumes

of that but the true scholar is a person who just loves doing that he will spend a whole afternoon going after one Character through all sorts of things sifting this reference and that reference and he will he'll be having more fun than someone at a bowling alley doing just that and from the standpoint of an external observer who has no particular interest in this they'll say oh how hard he's working you know in my private life I must confess Q I've had a terrible time with this because I love my work and people who had

absolutely say no comprehension or interest in what I'm doing would wonder how do I keep up the pace how can I possibly is that in the other I love it but then there are other people who say you never do a lick of work in your life you're playing all the time just goofing off it's too easy for you you see because you love it but that's the only way to get it done and done well because if you if you if if you have something that is say a good marriage a good marriage is

not the result of forcing yourself into That marriage are you seriously supposing that if you say to your husband or wife darling do you really love me and the partner answers I'm trying my best to do so this isn't simply not a satisfactory marriage we are not going to get beautiful work by mere effort against the grain when you who could tell a cook instantly by tasting one mouthful of a dish whether it was cooked out of a sense of duty or cooked out of love now But a person say who cooks out of true

love will of course encounter days on which it is difficult but somehow the overall love of the art will manage to get him through those days when it's difficult and so was marriage and so with the mastery of any other art but it is on the end of the older people it is up to the teachers the parents to present the disciplines of life as something that not just that you ought to know but as something that it is Beautiful to understand now let's look at the coal question from quite another point of view one

certain way of approach is appropriate for the young but what about what way of approach is appropriate for the older so that they shall be able to take this approach to the young many of us who are older inherit teachings of discipline which were all forced on us and we've learned to grow up dull and rigid and so I could say things to this audience that I would not possibly say in an audience of students it's up to you to loosen up and to become a little mad there's no point saying that to a younger

audience because they're going to do that anyway but a great problem for the generation of parents and grandparents his psychic rigidity because we have been indoctrinated for a long time you're not being able to trust ourselves and this morning I was discussing you know Chinese ideas about trusting human nature about spontaneity the disciplines of spontaneity and so on and so forth now this becomes a peculiar importance to people who have passed the threshold of the middle of life cause in the first half of life if you lived your life properly you're supposed to have set

up yourself in the world and have established your business your profession or whatever it was and you've gone to the second half of life you've Got to get ready to die now are you ready to die right now would you like posing I mean we were going to be annihilated by an atomic bomb and say five minutes supposing we're going to be an I annihilated by an atomic bomb in five minutes what would you think you ought to do between now and then RH Blythe asked this question to was then master what would you do

he said our practice our Zen meditation Blythe was disappointed in his answer because he had put it would you like to listen to your favorite music would you like to make love to a beautiful woman what would you just go on sort of with everyday life as if nothing had happened like somebody winding up his watch on his way to execution he wants a stay a Zen mistress there are such good ladies old nun you know who was a great Zen teacher where do you think you're gonna go when you die she said I don't

think I'm gonna go anywhere he said in that case I'll go with you she said oh that's so nice that's the first time a man has ever wanted to go anywhere with me but you see in in it is traditional all all cultures have understood this in some way or other that when you enter the second half of life if the business of that part of life is to get ready to die that sounds to us terrible to prepare for death it suggests preachers coming around and saying are you ready to meet Your maker you

know ooh and so as a result of that in our culture death is a thing that is completely swept under the carpet you go to hospital and they don't tell you you're gonna die they pretend it's gonna be all right don't worry and all your friends and relatives come around when you're lying in bed with cancer on the end of a lot of tubes and were the kind of weak smiles on their faces say well won't it be nice in two weeks from now when you're feeling Better will down to the beach and and you

know very well deep down even if you won't admit it that things are pretty rough especially when they start talking like that we seriously need an entirely new approach to death we need entirely new hospitals we need sanitary Oh for the dying we're dying is made into a work of art and their real achievement well when you're going to die and it becomes Fairly certain this is the end I'm talking about this specifically because if you understand the last minute then you can kick it back into that hole of the second half of life which

is the preparation for the last minute but if you thing is to understand the last minute first let's say we take an entirely different attitude to death and say now look quite different the way we say to the young is build up your strength and your skills so that you can Take on responsibilities but death is where you're going to be absolved of all responsibilities there'll be no need for you anymore quite a different theme but a very liberating one if you can learn to enjoy it now a man the British obstetrician like grantly dick-read

has taught women how to have children without resisting it so that they don't talk about the pangs of childbirth but they talk about the tensions about really learning the Kind of masochistic masochistic ecstasy from having a baby now some new physician has got to come onto the scene now and tell us exactly the same thing about the pains of death death is not a disease death is very healthy justice chiropractors everybody has to die you can't possibly call it a disease you may die as a result of a disease or of an accident or anything

but death itself is not a disease it is simply the other end of life opposite Birth and instead of regarding it as something to be put off and simply really disregarded death is something for which one should train oneself as a very valuable experience because death is the automatic taking away of all your attempts to cling on to life all that frightened clutch is simply going to be broken well it's pretty rough to have it broken why don't you let go first so in that case then when somebody is about to die Instead of the

friends and relations coming around and consoling him and saying you know you're gonna be alright they come around instead and say wow II this is the great moment for you you know here is the colossal opportunity for you to realize who you really are because all that you thought you were is gonna disappear what he supposed gonna be left so you can have your choice in my ideal sanitarium for the dying of the way you Want to die whether you want to die in a religious way with candles and priests and chants and meditations or

whether you want to die or an enormous and glorious champagne party the principle is pretty much the same do you really let yourself go do you cooperate with what nature is doing in you nature is giving you by death the opportunity to let go of all this nonsense now when you've passed the middle point of life you can see it coming you begin to read The obituaries and this friend and that friend has disappeared and uh-huh and you know it's on the way now instead of avoiding this what about it because it nature is in

this fact assisting you to let go of yourself making it easy what is very difficult for the young it's hard for the young to face death because they feel there is a there's a timeliness about death I'm too young to die cut off so soon and there's so much promise so much potentiality It's very tough but as we get older nature helps us we realize that well we've had it past the middle of life every day is gravy but you're being helped you see to this act of release so as one of the Zen poets

said while living be a dead man thoroughly dead and then whatever you do just as you will will be right so there's a kind of higher zombie-ism [Laughter] who are dead while alive those who have Given themselves up to death and will therefore look forward to death as the great enlightenment the great awakening and this requires no hocus-pocus no beliefs in immortality that you can't really be convinced about it's simply that it's even better for you if you have no beliefs in an afterlife if you're willing to let the future go completely and abandon any

future any anything that you could want to grasp for yourself or to preserve for yourself You recognize that you're being forced to let it go there is no promise of any future beyond the grave see I'm not saying that there isn't I'm saying that the psychological state of not expecting anything of facing death as if it were really at the end and you don't resist this you end you have the ability to end this is central and Krishna Modi's thought you'll find that if you do that something flips inside you as a result of which

you have no Further questions you who he will say to yourself well now for the first time I realize what life is well it's all about because I'm not looking to the future to answer my question I know there is no future I end up come like that in all future is cut off so if you do that you see you then and let go of yourself now then if you can let go of yourself especially in the second half of life in that way you cease to be cute to be rigid what young people

don't like about Old people is that they're rigid they're stuffy they it's like Ogden Astro the trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat and our one understands this to some extent it's very hard for let's say a woman who was once very pretty and it's now afflicted with rheumatism and what have you pains all the time the to put up with a great deal of noise and dance and stuff going on and if this tracks through your head all the time and therefore you put on an Expression that makes you look

stuffy you can't help it it's a very it's very rough but if you're not racked with pain all the time you're enjoying a reasonably healthy old age you don't be on the defensive so to this part of life one must say it is important to be a little mad when a bridge built of Steel doesn't swing in the wind it's gonna crash it has no give and so likewise people who don't have any give are in danger of being insane In order to be sane you must have it just as I said the the stew

has to have a little salt in it the good human being has to have our little rascality in them so the same person especially the mature person must have a little craziness and just as it says in the book of Genesis that God ordered that every seventh day should be a holiday one seventh of your life should be madness otherwise he'll be crazy because too rigid and therefore it's important for all of us who are set In our ways who are habituated to certain patterns of life and we cling to these to get off it

not all the time but about a seventh of the time and learn to swing [Laughter] and that means that the art of meditation shall we say for the older people is not necessarily what the art of meditation is for the younger people it's the older people who need to be present that are happening well you Don't know what's gonna happen where anything might happen where you simply allow what it is in you to do whatever it likes Chinese say it yet sir old gentleman said I let my mouth say whatever it wanted to say I

let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear I let my eyes see whatever they wanted to see I let my feet go wherever they wanted to go then I didn't know whether the wind was riding on me or whether I was riding on the wind after all you are all Practice people mature people who can be trusted upon to behave themselves and not like the month of Siberia bursts from the cell and devour the father superior you you're all mature and therefore you can trust yourselves to let go a bit and to be a

little mad and so I've just written a book published a book called nonsense and it consists of a lot of ditties that are unashamedly absurd we're saying that this is these Are great ditties for people to use while driving cars and shaving and washing dishes and so on and you can invent your own just like mine but don't do it within the hearing of a psychiatrist now I'm just giving a sort of trivial illustration of the principle that in order to release your creative energy you have first of all to get some something going and

it doesn't matter what you do provided you get it going in the first place in other words break up The crystallisation get the water flowing again then you can canalize it after that and do specific and intentional things with it but the first thing that is necessary is to have some psychic freedom because culture and age and habit you to certain ways of life give you one terrific hang-up one terrific block and you work on in a certain pattern of behavior and the stream simply isn't going through you and this will as a matter of

fact if you Do let it up you'll live much longer [Laughter] well I won't I won't argue that rather technical point number but all I'm saying is that however whatever the relation of chemicals is to the scene quite aside from that it is more important for the older than for the younger to have disciplined craziness discipline craziness there is a group of people for example who are called Sioux blood I I don't belong to soup would I Know advocacy for them but they have a wonderful idea they have gatherings for what they call the Lottie

Hawn and they last for half an hour and during that time somebody who is what is called on a helper says begin and from that moment on for half an hour you do anything you feel like doing except with one reservation you don't touch anyone else but otherwise you'll make any noise you feel like making you do any gestures to Any movements and everybody rolls around on the floor and chance and bellows and squeals and dances and some people just curl up in a corner and groan and then at the end of half an hour

the helper says finish and everybody immediately assumes they're all in a social role well things like that are excellent because they what they do is this they release in us again the stream of spontaneous life become again as a child when children do things like that and Once you've got it going once you've got it released and moving you can canalize it but if it isn't going there's nothing to canalize so I'm simply saying that this is all extracurricular what I'm saying in this fourth meeting you see is that it's the last session so it's

strictly extracurricular everything that I said before this and the first three things has to do with the University and with blasdell and all that kind of thing but this has to do with you Who come here and we are all quietly here together that if you don't have that safety valve that outlet which is not just a safety valve in the sense that it's blowing off something that's accumulated that's too much it's a safety valve in an entirely different sense it's a way of reviving again and having something going to canalize and to express in

a creative way and it goes along all that kind of thing you see that non-programmed spontaneous Activity which is pure nonsense goes along with everything that I've said heretofore about nonverbal experience and the importance of re-establishing contact with the spontaneous world the nonverbal world the super irrational world not merely as something to contemplate while sitting quietly in meditation but something with which to participate actively you can you see how thoughtless awareness but you can also have thoughtless gestures you can make Thoughtless or meaningless noises whatever now I know that such a proposal goes ill with

many older people's images of themselves as responsible citizens mature of people so on and so forth but you've always got to have that little secret part of your life you don't have do it out in front of garden everybody see that that's asking too much but you must have that secret corner in your life where you can be the skeleton in your own closet [Laughter] be crazy otherwise you won't be saying