The Method Of Life - Alan Watts

I suppose many of you are familiar with the work of Krishna Mori and you will of course recognize that there is something in common between what he says and what I've been saying to you but probably you will also notice that there's something different because Krishna morti is more of a purist than I Am and he takes a apparently a rather negative attitude to things that are recognizably religious that is to say he sets no store by religious literature by ceremonies by meditation practices uh religious ideas and so forth and does without them he wouldn't

dream of being involved In a ritual at least not one that would be mistaken for a religious ritual I on the other hand have a different attitude about those things because I first of all am not going to argue with anybody about their religion because everybody's religion is the same sort of thing as their life you may be living a very weird life but I could say speaking sort of from a Hindu point of view that that's your trip this round and the religious people do it too they do their meditations 40 minutes before breakfast

ah no meditate then they've got stages they can get through in it and they wonder whether so and so Soo is doing yoga with uh Mrs X and so and so is doing it with Swami B and Mrs X's followers afraid that Swami is Phony and uh it's not quite the real thing well how do you know whether he's the real thing or not well the genuine swamis can perform magic and they can uh remain undecomposed in Forest Lawn for an indefinite period without benefit of eming czy and what does that prove you see it's

the same old thing that is spiritual technology and the people who want Power Who want to get there fast I want results now the same temperament that wants it in the management of the material world wants it in the management of the spiritual world my yoga is more efficient than yours because it's faster I'm going to get there so we come to the great question where is there you're going to get that where is It what do you want where are you going very few people know some people have a precise I would say disciplined

clear sense of what they want and they get it and then they stop as GK Chesterton once wittily said progress is looking for a place to stop there very few people like that most people you see when they think of pleasure don't have any very definite Idea or else they have a definite idea which isn't really what they wanted when they get it they don't like it so they saying be careful of what you desire you may get it but fundamentally then the question arises where is there where's your Rush where are you going going

to what are you progressing stop look and listen because you may be there Already only that you don't notice it from the point of view of a starving Indian in a Kolkata slum we are all as lucky as maharajas if the generation of Maya of the world illusion is the play of the godhead then he will play the villains as well as the heroes the fools as well as the sages and the Sinners as well as the Saints and that's Why I'm not out to convert anybody or win souls because it's as if I would

go and talk to a pig and say my dear Pig you should be a cow or to a giraffe and say your neck is too long or to an elephant and say you are too heavy I try to see what people are not in the sense of trying to classify them or type Them but to see if it is possible to find what is called Divine in every disguise and be where old man Kabir was when he came to maturity he used to look around he was a Mystic who was part Hindu part Buddhist part

Islamic who lived in India in about the 15th century and he used to look around and say To Whom Shall I Preach because he saw the Beloved the godhead on all sides in every being and therefore felt it would be presumptuous to make any recommendations that's a strange State of Mind because it's so easily made over into a very shallow polyana is optimism but you know in the mythology of the Hindus they have some very nitty-gritty characters let's take KH khi the female one of shiva's Girlfriends Shakti she's really represents the the Dark Side of

Yin the feminine of feminine the spider mother the devouring feminine the Knight which sucks in all days but also uh KH is the mother of the universe but it emphasizes the dark side of the mother and she's shown with fangs black skinned in one hand she carries a Scimitar and another another a severed head and she is a bloody character and you know there are kalis all around us and it's not like saying okali is not so bad after all she has a good side the thing is to see a bad side as an aspect

of the Divine and then genuinely be able to refrain from saying I wish you would Improve and that's s it sounds sort of tough to do that so that you can see that um you might be just rubbing around in some ash it becomes perfect obvious that that's the whole point of the universe incredible I mean it's all there Infinity in the grain of sand and Everything that's it and you look at other people rushing around When people's noses when they're in that state of rushing around are more pointed somehow than they they would be

otherwise the nose seems to be leading out the eyes wildly searching and people going about their business every day serious I'm going to get there I'm going to make this thing think they're quite mad you feel sorry for them you don't feel angry At them but they're quite mad they don't realize that that now is is it that's that's where it's all going as well as where it all comes from the Alpha and the Omega is now and indeed the Angels keep their ancient places turned but a stone and start a wing the whole surround

of us is completely magical now of course we become aware That imaginative people are conscious of this imaginative people show their consciousness of it by the way they act by their taste in whatever they surround themselves with you begin to notice that there are some certain people with [Music] whom you either have great accord or great fear because they're not ordinary Because they have an atmosphere of of magic they have imagination and they're not hiding under an attempt to conform to the ideal of being ordinary and the artistic people are here there're also people you

can call relaxed people relaxed Society is a very wonderful class of people they're not on edge you know there are some people who are edgy all The time and uh you you uh you feel that your very presence around their place is a mess if you know what I mean but relaxed people have what in Arabic is called Baraka uh it means divine grace but it also means the quality of an old frying pan that is had long years of use and is just perfect that's Baraka and there are people like that too you see

and all these are the great Spontaneous virtues that cannot be contrived see we can try to produce Baraka by finding some scientific process for artificially antiquing things for putting patina on Bronze in 5 minutes for uh pre-aging wine or something like that well none of it works it's all phony because this thing can only come in the process of growth so you say well do I have to wait but the whole thing is in the Waiting I don't mean the virtue of patience I mean waiting when there is nothing to do but wait and when

you see there is nothing to do but wait then it happens but it won't be hurried because the minute you're trying to hurry it that introduces the one thing that stops IT the miracle the magic thing is Happening all the time but you can't see it when you're trying to get it and you can still less see it when you're trying to get it fast so there is no alternative but to go through the point of you can't get it at all you are going to be you the same slob you've always been see you

can't change it and all your good resolutions are just bombast and then you start to be Real so just as the in traveling or in ordinary relations with your friends every day these gorgeous things happen of themselves those are the true Pleasures so at the level of mystical experience the most astounding insights of you know where you can go into the deep most trivial everyday Affairs this is behind all those Zen stories of the monk who was sweeping the courtyard and uh small piece of broken Tile zipped out from under his broom and struck against

a bamboo and made a plop and that sound he suddenly saw as containing the entire to the universe uh one can do it from anything as I say it could be the ashes in the ashtray it could be light in a dew drop it could be the sound of a bell any point becomes the takeoff point because there's a principle in operation Which the Japanese call jigi Mug now the word g means any experience which you could identify as a thing or an event and the doubling of the word GG means between thing event and

thing event M mu means no GE means barrier or obstruction or put it in another way everything event implies all the others and here in this way you begin to see that that is actually so when you pick up a chain you pick up One link and the rest comes in this you pick up one thing event and the universe comes up with it because you see there are no separate things it's all a single unified process no longer divided into the voluntary and the involuntary the I and the U or the I and the

it because it is the big happening which is neither voluntary nor involuntary which is neither free nor determined all these are mere ideas About it and about you've abandoned all that you've abandoned philosophy totally because you see it's just a net designed for catching water and when all that's gone and that whole attempt to clutch life to capture the pleasure has disintegrated there it is is and you needn't feel anxious about will it stay it's a gorgeous thing to Feel you no longer got to worry whether it will stick around because you know that if

you do worry you'll sh it away so it's a tremendous relief you see not to have to bother with will it stick around will I lose my insight will my sator Take Wing and go off with the bats uh you need to forget it because the more you let go of it the more it Stays and you don't even have to worry about will you be sure to let go of it cuz that too is a hang up I mean I feel the same way when I'm confronted with a representative of the militant Lunatic Fringe

of protestantism a Jehovah's Witness or a southern bap Baptist or a Billy Graham type I have immense personal distaste for that kind of religion so I wonder and I look at it And I think where is the real kick in that what are those people really doing what do they get their basic pleasure from in this how can God be playing that game that's a very mysterious business so I I try to look at it that way instead of blanketly saying well all your religious gimmicks are vanity therefore cease and desist because Although Many religious

gimmicks are vanity from my point of view I yet think of Blake's saying the fool who persists in his folly will become wise and for this reason even foolish religions are ways of realization because the more far out you get from realization in a way the nearer you get To it because the path is a circle then on the other hand I suggested this morning that there's a way of looking at religion which is quite different from what will it do for me what can I get out of it what magic can I perform here

is Yoga here is meditation here is zazen ordinarily we look into those practices and say I wonder if that will do Something for me now I'm suggesting that we look at them quite differently as art forms and instead of saying what will painting do for me what will sculpture or music do for me I don't think we ask that we say I enjoy music it's it's fun it's beautiful let's do some so you're not looking for something From it and that's the attitude which I take to any practice which may be designated religious that it's

an art form that it is a a way of expressing exuberance Delight and above all the sense of wonder appreciation of the magic of being and I've often quoted that saying of velu that the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be Experienced and that people who try to explain Mysteries are people who try to destroy Mysteries and that is in a way to destroy life it's often said by men that women are mysterious is that a complaint or a compliment I take it as a compliment may they

remain mysterious and may men remain mysterious to women but you would see that it there there Seems to be after all I've said and after all that Krishna mty says there would seem to be something inconsistent in practicing meditation or uh going to church or uh participating in a ritual if we didn't do those things I think myself that life would be very much impoverished all the churches would be turned into Museums the holy scriptures would be used for fuel the rituals might live on in funny dances but we should be scrubbed clean of superstition

and I don't exactly look forward to that Prospect from an aesthetic point of view I like magical toys I don't believe in them in the sense of uh thinking they will help me in the competitive games of Life but when I see a figure of the Buddha Seated on his Lotus throne with an aial behind him an incense burning in front of him I feel some something glowing warm civilizing humanizing and also mysterious it's very hard to say what it Is or to put your finger on it because I don't think it would be there

if I could the especially the Mahayana form of Buddhism has spread a kind of Warm Glow all over Northern Asia it's such a aurban such a sophisticated religion it doesn't harass you with preachments it doesn't pursue you it doesn't make a busy body nuisance of itself And yet it Fosters the Arts it Fosters compassion and concern but not of the kind of um concern for people that shoves what is good for them down their throats and it's so it's so roomy that's why it's called the Maha Yana the great vehicle or the Great great course

it has so many different ways in it so many different practices and there's no kind of uh Scrubbing people down to the Basic Essentials it's not plagued with efficy so personally you see I dig that I also like that side of Christianity where it's expressed in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy I don't like scrubbed Christianity the Protestant kind where they take away the candles and the vestments and the mystery and the incense and make it all Rational because when you go for you ask the question what are the Essentials of a religion to my mind

when people reduce any religion to what they call the essentials they get rid of all the important things and leave in only the misleading ones because when we get it down to Essentials we say we get back to this question you see all religions offer a way of Salvation or of Liberation or whatever it may be of Union with God and the Protestant would say to the Roman Catholic well all your rituals and obscure ways are getting in the way of man reaching God directly we want to get all that crud out of the way

and find a more efficient way of getting to God so that we can reduce the course from 5 years to 10 weeks now have to take off all those Holy days too which distract from business it gives our apprentices holidays and we don't want to lose time we're we're we're on the make but you see the moment you reduce the time it takes you take out the religion because you make it into an Enterprise to get something and that's what I've been telling you all this weekend you can't do because the moment you try to

get God You assume that you aren't there when you don't try to get there's a chance that you may discover that you are there already we were thinking over l how funny it would be if we got a real speeded up easy course in meditation without tears all the nonsense taken out of it only the essentials with a big headline they laughed when I sat down to meditate so uh here all the merchants are telling you the quick Way but what is fascinating about the non-efficient religions is precisely their colorfulness all the unessential things they

do all the exuberance of flowers and smells and ornaments and color you notice in efficient religion the first thing they take away is color why do people take away Color or they say color shows the dirt you have to wash it all the time so you wear black because you live in a grimy City you don't want to show the dirt that's efficiency but color is the first thing that goes but let's suppose we look at religion in an entirely different way we have begun first of all you see with the understanding that religion is

not an Acquisition and therefore there's nothing you can do to acquire it you begin from the point of recognition that you are what you are you can't improve yourself because if you try to you'll only make yourself more tied up and then messed up so you have to recognize that because there's no alternative and then you're in position To be very simply and ingenuously aware of life without trying to do anything to it you let it happen and then it begins to show its color and then you feel intensely the Marvel and magical nature of

the world so that whatever you do by way of a religious practice is an art form like singing to express the marvelous feeling that comes out of this not to secure Yourself not to acquire anything any reward but simply [Music] to live it up it's difficult perhaps for many people to understand how you could be living it up by meditating meditation seems on the surface so so dull why sit still for a long time is that's awful you know how when they tried to make you sit still as a Child how you resented it and

be jumping around looking for this that and the other all the time course you can do that you can take up dervish dancing as a form of yoga if your temperament suggests it but what about the more ordinary still sitting kind of meditation nobody seems to realize that it's supposed to be fun you know when you have been Sick and you just have to lie in bed there's nothing else to do while everybody else in the world goes about their business and you're left with almost nothing to do except listen and you hear all the

funny little noises that you don't normally notice of not only people but also animals and birds and things going about their daily business and it suddenly occurs to you that this is an unheeded Symphony that's Going on you notice a sunlight leaving curious patterns on the painted walls maybe of a hospital room where there are patches of damp and cracks in the ceiling and because you are in a condition of complete receptivity and passivity all this starts to come to life because of course passivity is the root of life activity is the end of it

but passivity is the Beginning it's the womb from which creation starts and so in the same way when you meditate uh in some schools you will be given something to meditate on although very often when an oriental explains that he meditates and a Wester asks as he will what do you meditate on the Oriental will look vaguely surprised I don't I don't know what you mean I don't meditate on I Meditate although as I say you might be given the practice of concentrating on a visual image of a chakra or a Mandela or a syllable

or humming a sound or some focal point but that isn't necessary when you are at the point of which I'm speaking where you are simply not doing anything even not trying to do nothing you can't then you are Sitting and you are as aware as can be of every tip of a hair and you've got nowhere to go you're not in a hurry there's a period of 40 minutes an hour or whatever it is where is only required of you that you be now normally at that moment one is impatient somehow bothered by having to

be restricted if you take it Easy you will feel no restriction I trying to think how I can explain this if you lift up a heavy weight and hold it up on the tipss of your fingers it's a big rock normally we think of that as an effort to maintain it there but there's a certain way of looking at this where you say it isn't an effort it's just going to stay there and instead of fighting against Any feeling of tension that The Rock causes you just turn that tension into it's going to stay there

it's a curious thing you can support a heavy weight for a very oddly long time doing that so in the same way when you certain even if your legs hurt or you get uncomfortable there's a certain attitude wherein that just disappears and you've got this extraordinary the only thing it does is It keeps you awake which is fine then you got this extraordinary feeling of the amazing nature of looking at reality at life without doing anything to it without any sense of hurry without any wish to improve it just let it happen and you you

can understand then why Buddha images look Blissful because cats do This cats will sit for ages and watch American Indians will do it they'll sit for hours by a roadside we think they're dumb you know sometimes I sits and thinks but mostly I just sits you think they have nothing better to do someone else was saying at lunch that if you're bothered on the phone and somebody asks you um could you come over this morning and do th and so it's perfectly legitimate to say no this is My morning for a hair appointment this is

my morning to um go down shopping Etc and I can't come but if you say uh this is my morning to be alone people would think you were very strange because you wouldn't be doing something for the world but Hermits for example and people who live solitary lives and meditate a great deal are doing an enormous amount for the World just the very suspicion that people exist like that is marvelous for everybody because it says to all of us where do you think you're going why are you making why are you raising so much dust

because you think you're going somewhere and you're already there and this dust is getting in everybody's nostrils and it is polluting everything and all because you are so Busy to put up this big thing whatever it is is getting top heavy and it's getting a bore holding the thing up so to know that there are Hermits deep in the forest is like knowing that there are still streams and flowers which no one has has ever seen we are mostly of the mentality that if we heard of a Hidden Valley full of Flowers which nobody has

ever seen we would say that should be open to the public should be bought for the nation you know and they should put in a ranger station and toilet facilities and a picnic ground it' be still worse if there were one person living in there and enjoying it all by himself let say the selfish bastard that he should live in that beautiful flowery Valley all alone open it up let's all have a Look and then when everybody's had a look the place is a desert yeah now I live opposite a forest it's in a state

park and I can see right across to that Forest it's a very big and very dense forest occupying the whole side of a valley and I think sometimes be fun to explore it and then on the other hand I decide I'm not going to I'm not going to disturb it the only one who lives there is an old sheo goat who comes out every so often and dances on top of a big rock oh of course there are birds and probably deer and skunks rabbits but nobody ever goes there you never see anybody in that

forest and it's just wonderful to leave it alone so you see here two things two trains of My thought connect the first train was you see the Folly of trying to do good and the second train is that you are doing good by doing nothing that the very hands off on this thing called life the meditative attitude which realizes to you how magical it all is also benefits other people in the same Way as the untouched forest and Wilderness land benefits people it's essential to our sanity to have those areas of uninter fered with life

so we might say that is the passive side of exuberant religion is the meditative the one activity in which we are completely here and now and not seeking any any result the other side of this exuberance Is of course the Musical dancing ritualistic side of religion when you see another kind of ritual nobody is expecting to get anything out of this ritual because it's not considered as magic it's the Japanese t ceremony it is apparently a purely secular ritual it is a way of drinking tea together sobly actually it's a Zen Buddhist ritual because in

Zen you get to a place Where there isn't any difference between religion and everyday life but they don't therefor knock the ritual out of everyday life they put the ritual into everyday life have the tea ceremony and there the beauty of gesture and of the uh primitive style vessels that are used and the serenity of doing this ritual for no reason except the ritual is a very lovely experience but you see in the life of America today and you notice it here in a rather special way there is very little joyous ritual I mean there

are Freemasons and there are Shriners and Knights of Columbus but those people laugh at their own rituals really they they they don't understand them they have no real feeling for it it's it's a kind of a clowning Affair where You dress up and you do this and you give the money to charity and so forth and in the Roman Catholic Church here they don't understand ritual so that you get the impression you see that you know you put a quarter in the slot and out comes a goodie you go to confession and uh you you

don't even make the full confession you know you just say the sins that I remember of so And so and so and the precept and it it's done see and I remember once watching a midnight mass in New York I never saw anything go so fast I don't know if any of you ever remember a story Story by alons do called bus with three low masses with a play on bus low was a the three masses of Christmas being celebrated in one hell of a hurry Because the priests and the acolytes all wanted to get

to dinner and they gave themselves such indigestion at the dinner that they died and their ghosts were compelled to celebrate Three masses through all eternity well this Mass was just like that I never seen anything like those uh I the people at the altar there was somebody the acolytes suddenly went up genuflected and vanished and it reminded me that passage in the Book of Genesis Where it says and Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him they just disappeared I mean there was nothing stately about it there was no rhythm no

sense of a dance it was let's get this thing ground out as fast as possible d [Laughter] [Music] no I can understand that being done because somebody digs a kind Of sound you see but this isn't done that way it's done to get it over with so nobody digs it this ritual is just a magic to be done as fastest possible no it's like a prayer wheel with an electric motor on it now you may laugh at prayer Wheels have you ever tried to use a prayer wheel you get one they're all over the place

nowadays you rotate it you see it has a a cylinder and a little chain and a Weight on the end of the chain and you get this thing going it says inside om you get this going and you know you've got the earth going around the Sun that's the same sort of process you got this going like this it's fascinating there's a little bit of a trick to it see you don't want the the chain to get loose and drop the the weight on the end so you've got to keep that rhythm Going once upon

a time there was a miser and Buddhist priest was his friend he thought he going to trick that Miser the Buddhist priest said to the Misa look every time you say the religious formula namu amids which means namu like hail or really means the name of amitaba the Buddha that's the great Sun Buddha I'll give you one Sin which was 100th of a yen that was a very small amount of money but all you got to say I'll give you a s the ma thought that's crazy think of all the money I'll make so he

began took out a brush see and the priest used to come and look at him every day and see this huge sheets of paper accumulated with all the counts he had done one cent each the priest is very happy one day he came there was The Miser sitting saying not it was not was not was he wasn't making any marks priest said haha and uh another day still s nothing happening at all and then one day the priest came and opened the gate uh at the end of The Garden Path and the doors flew open

and The Miser came rushing out and he embraced the priest and says oh he said I can't thank you enough you don't owe me any money at All well that explains the prayer wheel but you see if the prayer Wheels to do that thing or rather you are to do that thing you must you you can't be in a hurry you can't be trying to get anything you must be fascinated with the possibility of see and you just do this cho cho Choo CH at your wit's end it's why you're kind of a nut you

have to be you see to do this you're at your Wit's End all there is you don't have to say anything You don't have to think anything you don't have to be virtuous you don't have to believe anything all you have to is see that's that's it and so you can have a ball swinging that thing so that therefore we we we need to be delivered from utilitarian religion altogether and come to the realization that the highest form of religion is perfectly useless and this is the true nature of play and of course it's the

true nature Of the universe you see what I'm doing is I'm playing a sort of little trick here because I'm showing you the importance of the unimportant see we got ourselves down to being absolutely incapable that's what we did to begin with and showing you that that's where you really begin to live so now again we're going to get down the very highest that there is the godhead and religion and uh the Saints And angels and the uh Tiani Buddhas in their mandelas sitting at the heart of the universe and we're going to show that

they are all quite useless they serve no purpose whatever they are not good for anyone or for anything why they don't need to be they're not going anywhere because they're there and the expression the Maya of the universe which they show is not Because they have some purpose to work out it's the way you spend your time when you don't have any purpose to work out then you can afford to be devious you don't have to go the direct way if you got a purpose get there baby see like that get there but if you

don't have any purpose you wonder and you go and suddenly you say well that's the outline of a leaf and all those veins going through it see so you get the wiggly path Instead of the straight path go around in circles so the planets go around the Sun they're not going anywhere what's the sun's going around another star and all this things a great spiral nebula with its Center somewhere beyond the constellation of Sagittarius going around and around so in the religious dance we all join hands and we go around in meditation you make your

Breath go round it isn't just in and out like a pump it's not like that it's like goes like this and there's no sort of hitch between the in and the out it flows the whole way see in yoga it's called the Chinese call it the circulation of the light it's going around in Buddhism and in Hinduism they talk about the world as Sara the round the Sor round the Soro round is Distinct from the merry go round Sara the wheel of becoming the P chakra the wheel of birth and death and Sir Edwin Arnold

in his poem the light of Asia makes the Buddha say you suffer from yourselves none else compels none other holds you that you live and die and were upon the wheel and hug and kiss its spokes of Agony its Tire of Tears its Nave of Nothingness that's the rat race thinking you're going to get somewhere spin that wheel baby round and round the Wheel of Fortune where what you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings but on the other hand there are certain people who um have a different attitude to The Wheel of

Fortune let's spin it for fun let's gamble not to make money but just because it's fun to Gamble now you see there's a gamesman he's liberated he's not he's not hung up on the game so in the same way the Mandela is a symbol of the transformed Rat Race now what's the nature of the Rat Race the Bava chakra symbol of the six divisions of life with the successful people at the top they're the angels the unsuccessful people at the bottom the naraka or the the P purgatorial States of extreme suffering and then in between

are various graduated States the humans the frustrated Spirits the Furious spirits and the animals see at the top of the Gods at the bottom are the demons and the tormented Spirits so everybody is moving to get up so in a way wherever you are you're at the bottom you're tormented those gods are trying to stay up but there's nowhere higher than Heaven and the only way is down down and out so they've got that thing running see now importantly recognize on this wheel that being at the top is not being a Buddha you may be

a god you may be an angel a DEA from which we get our word divine as well as devil but you're not a Buddha you're not liberated from the wheel how do you get Off why knowing that wherever you are on the wheel is it be there let's say we're all at the bottom because on a squirrel cage wheel the running squirrel or rat always stays at the bottom see all right so you're as low as you can get that's what I was pointing out this morning can't get any lower you're in the Nara the

bottom of Hell but there you are now what happens you realize that every point on the wheel is there there and so you get a different picture of the wheel not as the significance of it is no longer in the rotary movement around it but suddenly in the movement from the center to the circumference than from the circumference to the center you get a flower the path of the petal and your wheel suddenly becomes a Mandala that is to say a circle subdivided in by petals or other symbolic petals to be a floral shape and

there you see the great Tibetan paintings of mandelas uh we go back to the five Great Buddhas dich chinor as the Japanese says in Sanskrit he's mahavana Buddha who represents the basic energy of the universe the great Sun Buddha he's in the Middle then he has around him amitaba Akia ratnas Samba ratnas sambava and Thea City and they're all these beautiful jeweled creatures in their places and you see the balanced wheel the joyous wheel so this is the transformation of the Rat Race and this also is a kind of ritualization of everyday life and this

you See just as the rat race is transformed into the Mandela so for the person who is a master of pleasure the little things of everyday life are likewise ritualized not because somebody's compulsive you know all the dishes must be without spot give me my magnifying glass not that but that doing any simple action with delight looks ritualistic if you watch a very skilled Craftsman at work or a surgeon or a good dentist or a shoe maker or a Potter who thoroughly loves the work they notice their caressing hands the Delight the CH they do

to do this thing the doing of it is more important than the Dunning of it you see they look ritualistic in their action it's a ceremony and you think he's worshiping some kind of a God that's because he's turned the rat race into the Mandela so you could can do that with everything if you're not in a hurry and you're not in a hurry if you know there's nowhere to go I mean the so of here's the end of the line and there's a place called death and a tombstone on it says well he he

did it once we write his name on the tombstone that's the end that's where you're going if you look at it from that point of view But if you're going here and you've already arrived what is proper behavior for a Buddha supposing you are as rich as Rich can be and you are the whole universe is yours supposing you've got all the time you need when you do have now's enough what what what to do you see well of course Live It Up take Delight in all the ordinary things that are to be done instead

of trying to get them out of the way so that you can do something else which is supposed to be better or more rewarding you'll see the reward is everywhere because there's no hurry in this way now the world is transformed in this way you might have a Utopia because as Gary Snider my friend has put It there is no possibility of your doing anything effective to save this world from an terrifying ecological disaster unless you know it doesn't need to be done if you can see the dissolution of this world the end of the

human race as the Kali Yuga that Hindus talk about the cosmic cataclysm which comes At the end of every 4,200 320,000 years every calber and realize that this ecological disaster is simply uh the periodical death of a world system and therefore there's nothing specially tragic about it it's the way things go just like the death of every individual you would think that such a realization would make a person cold indifferent but no if you understand that and you're not fighting it you are not afraid of It and if you're not afraid of it you can

handle it but you have to show that the preservation of the planet and of life is not a frantic Duty it's a pleasure and you won't convince everybody of the pleasure if you go and scream in the streets start throwing rocks then you saying it's your duty to Whom to whom do we owe this Duty do you owe it to yourself well that depends what you want to do do you want to go on chasing on the wheel do you want to think that um by Fierce political action we will have a better world to

live in and we'll all be so happy fiveyear plans and then another fiveyear plan and then after that another fiveyear plan it's like my music teacher when I was a child he used to Play a scale and some ridiculous ddy and you know she said now once more I played again she now just once more just once more you know Horrors but you can find or realize the great life if you're not looking for it I suppose many of you even the most penurious person in this room is by comparison of Maharaja you're there you've

Arrived but you say it can't last eventually I'm going to turn into a corpse that's gives you the horrors or you're going to take a painful route to that end it'll be a terminal case in a hospital on the end of a lot of tubes say I don't want to disintegrate so how can I overcome that so you turn to religion and say well that's a physical demise is an unfortunate limitation of The body so I'm going to identify myself with something beyond the body so that I can believe that that will go on and

that will be the true vehicle of my personality it I shall lose all that I've acquired carrying around with me my bag of rubbish I managed to smuggle it across the border they say you can't take it with you but you can if the gods can't notice it because of the baggage is Spiritual hey do you know what the Gate of Heaven is here about the ply Gates people think Gates decorated with pearls it isn't the Gate of Heaven it says in the Book of Revelation is one pearl of course it's got a hole through

for the string you got to get through there and you can't get through if you got a lot of baggage so you got to leave your past behind to get through now what happens To you when you get rid of your past forget it all forget who you are the future of course is the past reflected in your rear Vision mirror and as mcluhan says he borrowed the metaphor from me as a matter of fact uh we like people driving looking in their rear Vision mirror so you got to let go all that past in

order to get in through the ply gate now what is what is left of you when you let go go your Past what remains no you can't bring out your education can't bring out your ancestry can't bring out your distinguished accomplishments the things you've done because it's so well you've done all that but let's see what you can do now where are you who are you when you have no Past after all there isn't any past where is it Twist your common sense around and see that you're not being shoved by the past you're just

leaving it behind like tracks it's not pushing you unless you insist on it you can always pass the buck everybody does that they say it's my I'm an neurotic mess because my mother was a neurotic mess I never had a fair chance in life and uh somebody says to your mother well you shouldn't have brought up a child like that well she says it's too Bad I know but I couldn't help it I was a neurotic mess and my father was just appalling and my mother was Dreadful and they looked back over their shoulder and

said well it was our parents every body passes the buck to the Past till it gets back to Adam and Eve and you know what happened there they passed the buck too to the serpent when God looked at the serpent he didn't ask hast thou eaten the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou sh Not eat it has looked at the serpent the serpent didn't say anything so the serpent the wiggle it really doesn't have a past because it wiggles from its head backwards to the tail and it's always the head where it

starts so are you a head or are you just a tail do you move backwards or Forwards which where you going see if you're leaving your past behind you it doesn't drive you it Wells up out of a mysterious present ever new this moment is the creation of the universe it's starting now if you look back and back and wonder whether there was a big bang a long time ago all you'll see is Vanishing traces the Big Bang is happening now this is when the world begins you're doing It when you're not doing it by

straining a you deeper than the straining you is doing all this the same you that is growing your hair and coloring your eyes and making your thumb prints and all that you don't think about it you don't strain muscles to do it but that is what is creating the world here it comes now so instead of thinking that the past is the reality Which explains everything that happens now let's look it now and see it happening where does it happen from that's a question asked only by people who think that the past causes the present

they always want to know where it comes from who started it what makes it happen supposing nothing makes it happen supposing it happens well what is it that Happens again we get to this basic question what is it that you want where is it what you looking for it's the same question as what is reality what is now what is life you won't get at it by analysis of all sorts of things into their components you won't get it by labeling it in various ways and calling it names you can only find out what it

is by looking at it by feeling it Directly and all kinds of classification where we say well it's animal vegetable mineral it's this that and the other and is putting it in boxes and tidying it up it's how you tidy up you put everything away in a box and then you have boxes inside boxes and all that sort of thing that's tied it up but when it's all put away in a boxes you can't see it instead of putting everything in boxes let's just look at it the way it Comes now that's enough for to

start with with I've therefore discussed the principle of the necessity of wiggling only when I say necessity you mustn't take that word in a calvinistic sense we'll talk about the pleasure of wiggling as a means of adaptation to the wiggly world we can consider The human being is of such a design that it perceives everything by contrast there is no way of knowing whether the real world is arranged the same way or not but we are a nervous system composed of neurons in an extraordinarily complicated pattern based on a very simple principle called is you

is or is you ain't the neuron in transmitting any Sensory input either fires or doesn't so you could represent the fact that it fires by the figure one and that it doesn't by the figure zero and out of zero and one with those two integers alone you can represent all conceivable numbers this is called binary arithmetic and it is the kind of arithmetic that is used by digital computers messages in01 language can Convey not only mathematical and verbal information but also information that comes out as television both black and white and in color and through

the same notation we can convey solid objects you can turn a solid object into terms of this notation at one end of a process and have it come out at the other end of the process engraved in plastic enlarged or diminished at will by the operation of laser beams So one is tempted therefore to think that is you is or is you ain't is fundamental to the universe the Chinese thought so and therefore devised the Yang and the yin yang meaning positive and Yin meaning negative principles upon which they base the book of changes the

eing showing the various combinations of Yang and Yin that constitute the 64 basic situations Of Life they took hexagrams hexagrams made up of six lines an unbroken line representing the Yang and a broken line representing the yin so if you have six lines with two Poss with the two possibilities for each line you get six 64 different hexagrams they use this for making decisions when it was necessary to make a decision you would by a random process arrive at one of the 64 Hexagrams and on the basis of that decide what you were going to

do it's rather like tossing a coin only this coin has 64 sides instead of two but it all comes down to is it heads or tails is it Yang or is it Yin now this seems absolutely basic to our life and it's rather awkward because when we apply this to the pursuit of pleasure it seems to be Saying yes you can have pleasure but you will not know what it is unless you can contrast it with non-pure and if you want to know pleasure then you must have non-pure if you want one end of the

spectrum you've got to know the other because you can't have a one-ended spectrum any more than you can have a magnet with one pole and that seems to put an awful Kibos on everything we're trying to do every sort of achievement every sort of progress every sort of rearrangement of things always runs into the problem that what you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings and this is dispiriting to say the least but in a way oh how true so let's look into this business rather Thoroughly because if you understand the Yang and

the yin you uh you really understand something the first point is this let me sort of clarify the situation in its most simple terms we'll take the contrast of black and white now obviously if I am confronted with a black background there's nothing particular to register upon my Attention and I'm as good as blind if I am confronted with a purely white background there is nothing in particular to to attract my attention and I am as good as blind if however I'm a naughty little boy and I'm confronted with a black wall and I have

a piece of chalk I am tempted to make a mark on it and if I am confronted with a nice clean white wall and I have a piece of charcoal in my hand I'm tempted to make A black mark because nature reps a vac vacum so here I have a black ground with a white dot on it and a white ground with a black dot interesting now of black and white which is positive and which is negative if I look at the white background with the black dot I shall be inclined to say that the

black is positive because it's the the thing it's The Mark if I look at the black background with the white dot I shall on the other hand be inclined to say that the white is the positive because it's the thing it's the Mark I can think of white as positive in general in that it's light and black is negative because it's Darkness but I can also think of white as negative because it's blank French Blanch I can think of black as positive because it's not blank it's all filled up then again I can think of

the dot as being the negation in both cases because my black background with a white dot is a picture of a wall with a hole in it and my black my white background with a black dot is a picture of a box with a hole in it but I can choose it either way I like Call White negative and black positive or vice versa but it's difficult to do both at the same time now they are of course these two as different as different can be we say it's as different as black and white or

we also say these two points of view are the poles apart and we use the word polarization rather incorrectly to indicate an increase of Discord in society whereas polarization is really a Form of Harmony the two poles of the Earth are the harmony of the Earth the two poles of the magnet are the harmony of the magnet because they're like male and female a man a woman are not the poles apart in the sense that they have no Common Ground we could say you can't have a fight between a shark and a tiger because they

have no Common Ground one lives on land and the other in the Water but there is Common Ground between poles obviously the common Earth is the common ground between the North and the South and the common magnet if it's electrical the circuit runs from the positive to the negative and the circuit won't begin to run until a negative pole is established that's what happens when you turn on the switch so therefore although the black and the white the positive and the negative are as different as different Can be they're also the same because they are

differences of one of one field and this is what makes the difference between what we'll call an exoteric point of view and an esoteric point of view in philosophy religion and so forth from the exoteric point of view the black and the white are emphasized with respect to their Difference good and bad life and death oh how different light and darkness God is light and in him is no Darkness at all that's the exoteric point of view but always behind that there's a secret every religion has a secret there's always something esoteric what is the

esoteric thing that uh is only revealed to initiates to people who can stand It it's simply that black and white although explicitly different are implicitly one because you can't have one without the other you could say black is white if by the word is you mean implies the Buddhists say emptiness is form and form is emptiness the Chinese way of saying it is not quite the English way it isn't equals it rather means uh Chinese is Saying void that form form that void in other words it implies it goes with if I may invent a

word so we say that is esoteric you mustn't let it out in church that God has a dark side as well as a light side but it says so Isaiah 457 I am the lord and there is none else I form the light and create the darkness I make peace and create evil I the Lord Do all these things well there's your answer to the problem of evil so but that you see we don't let out because someone who wants to commit a murder they say there's no reason I shouldn't commit a murder because if

I didn't if somebody didn't commit murders you wouldn't know what nice people were if somebody didn't steal or Cheat you wouldn't recognize honest men like if it wasn't a wet day occasionally you wouldn't enjoy the sunshine there's no getting around it that that's true St Paul wrestled with this problem when he saw that the law of Moses made people conscious of right and wrong I had not known that there was lust except the law had said Thou shalt not Covet so therefore he said asking rhetorically shall we sin that Grace May abound oh meito forbid

so you have to be careful that you don't let this get into the hands of children like it says on the bottle of poison keep away from children and yet we have poison and we have uses for poison so in the same way we have uses for evil in the ordinary way we do a balancing Act between them and what we do is this we establish an ingroup and say this ingroup which is us has a collective ego and it is wrong to do anything evil to any member of this group but it's all right

to do it to somebody who's not in the group therefore when we are going to be very evil to someone we have to Define that person as outside the Group and so we like when Hitler was going to persecute the Jews they were defined as not really human and likewise if we're going to persecute the Negroes we Define them as not really human people can easily see they you can imagine that because a negro looks so different from a Caucasian that he's more like an animal or you can take people who are generally thought to

be Insane and you can deprive them of civil rights without due process they're insane they're defined as not all there they're not human merely bodies their mind is absent we we used to do that with Heretics and other very seriously diseased people lepers and so on they were outcasts they were not humans and they were therefore outlawed they didn't have the protection of the ingroup so the worst thing we can do in Eating is cannibalism don't eat your own kind you may eat everything else but not your kind but that still doesn't get away from

the fact you see that you cannot eat you cannot live without eating and you cannot therefore live without death without committing murder I don't know what the Practical solution to that is except one I've suggested is that if you do eat any Living creature at least you can show your respect by cooking it well as linu Tang said a fish that is died for you and has not been well cooked is died in vain now there are very very interesting applications of this theorem let's look at some of the contrasts in terms of which we

are aware primary of course is what is myself and what is Not which is a sort of contrast not of two ends of a pole but rather of the center of a circle and the circumference of the circle of course those are two ends of the radius one end still the other end moving and we say we feel there is a great difference between myself and other I do not know your thoughts I do not feel your pleasures and pains unless I'm in a sympathetic relationship with you I don't know what you're going to do

My actions are voluntary yours are involuntary so far as I am concerned and yet when I think it over I real realize that I could not realize self without the contrast of other I wouldn't know what I meant by myself unless I meant something contrasting by someone else or something else self means self only because other means other just in the same way as is means is only because you can think of isn't and you know isn't what what isn't Means because you know what is means and you know what is means because you know

what isn't means there's a relation and so likewise with the black and the white we see the relation but that implies that self and other are inseparable they go with each other characteristic of the difference between self and other is voluntary Behavior and involuntary Behavior what you do on the one hand and what happens to you on the other this is not always quite coterminous with the difference between self and other because when you have hiccups you feel that it happened to you but it was your hiccups or belly rumbles or um headache or whatever

what about when you breathe do you do it or does it happen to You that's a very moot case because you can feel you're doing it but you can also feel it happening to you so perhaps the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary is a little a little arbitrary a little vague certainly it is when it comes to breathing but once again I think how could I say of an act I've done it unless there were contrast trting acts of which I could say I didn't do them so I Need the involuntary if I

am to have any voluntary so that if there is an Union Union of implication between the two I get the same sort of relationship between them as I explained when I said you can use white for either the positive or the negative symbol in other words I can regard what I do as what happens to me and I can regard what happens to me as what I do it is in this sense that a Hindu or a Buddhist will say if you have an accident it was your karma because the word Karma means nothing more

than doing you had an accident it was your doing well we would say that's not fair and naive people suppose it was their doing in the sense that this mishap is a punishment for a misdeed you did at a former time that's only a superstitious meaning of karma karma means literally you did It but you did your accident in the same way you see as you do certain other things that are classified as involuntary like growing your hair or digesting your dinner because it all depends what you mean by you if you restrict self to

the voluntary then you get the distinction between what you did and what you didn't do but if the self really must include the other and The involuntary then others are your others and involuntary happenings are your Deeds that's rather interesting you may feel as a result of seeing that one of two things you may feel that you really don't do anything at all that you are in a completely deterministic Universe where everything happens that your own voluntary Decisions and deeds spring out of unconscious mental mechanisms which determine them completely so that you are at best

only a witness of what happens or you can feel the opposite of that you can feel that you are God that you're doing everything that rocks fall water is wet and fire hot because of you which is in a way True because the sun would not be light except in relationship to eyes that can see light nor would rocks be harm except in relation to relatively soft skin nor would they be heavy except in relation to a certain musculature so by the way you are you evoke the way the world is we might say there

are some vibrations out there that are really out there but These vibrations are not colored or soft or hard or light light or dark or light or heavy until in relation to some sensitive system but then again the sensitive nervous system is part of the external world and the external world is an event in the nervous system the inside of the box is outside the box and the inside and the outside is inside I mean you know uh it seems to Flip-flop perpetually they take again another contrast the solid and the space most of us

think that reality is solid rather than space we talk about hard facts we talk about impenetrable reality even brute facts the hard always seems real just like the black Mar on the white background even though it's black it's The thing even though the solid is untransparent UN luminous it seems to be more real than blue sky this is a very partial point of view can you imagine a world that was solid without any space the edges of the solid would be of course invisible there would be no edges because an edge is a point of

interface between a solid and a space so if you take away space you take away Solid right let take away solid where's the space after all you say of space it's a space between if there are no limits there's no space even if you imagine purely empty space you've always got the sense of yourself looking at it and that's the solid now that's is very awkward because um we are quite sure that space isn't there we take no account of it and Therefore get puzzled when our mathematicians and physicist begin to talk about curved space

or properties of space or expanding space you can't people say the ordinary average person you can't talk like that that's bunk space can't expand because it's not there it isn't anything it can't do anything well let's see if a solid can let's investigate a solid you know what happens when you Start going into Nuclear Physics you find that in any given solid however dense a piece of Steel it may be there's a great deal more space in it than there is any solid the distances between molecules the distances between atoms and sub atomic particles are

relatively vast in something there's a lot more nothing than there is any something because as you investigate and penetrate the solid you find it to be Increasingly spacious now what happens when we investigate the spacies how do you investigate space while you go there you bring in a solid you map it so space and solid are really like poles they they're limits and it's same with yourself and the other the organism and the environment the individual in the World go thoroughly into anyone and you get the other ask for example the question what do you

mean when you love yourself love yourself thoroughly I want you to be as completely selfish as possible tell me what do you love wowe see well I like um I like um Candy I like beautiful girls I like beef steak I like wine I Like good bread I like um the sun on a lovely landscape I like Clear Water I like music Come on talk about yourself will you for a change and I suddenly realize I can't when I love myself I think of all things other than myself that I love it's very queer but

that's what's called the basic flip-flop ability between the pairs of opposites that's why the Chinese represent them with these two Interlocked commas that suggest a kind of Rhythm so that when you get the full development of Yang you get the beginning of Yin and when you get the full development of Yin you get the beginning of Yang that is the one implies the other so they're always flipping doing a flip and doing a flip is the love that makes the world go Around you've got a double helix so the male and the female that's the

love position the double helix spiral nebuli do this so do creatures in sexual intercourse the double helix I'm chasing you you're chasing me I love you so much I could eat you I realize myself you see only through other so in this way then we get another marvelous instance of the pairs of Opposites we've got the differences and we see a Unity between then let's contrast the principle of difference with the principle of unity here we are again we know what we mean by different because we know what we mean by one so difference implies

unity and unity implies difference now what is it that lies Beyond difference and unity see we found Unity lying Beyond differences North and South the difference is united in the in their Poles of one all right now let's take difference and unity what lies between them you could say your mind as in the Magnetic Tape what lies between the on signals the one signals and the zero signals well of course the tape they're both on the tape only the tape as such Doesn't register it register is only in terms of yes or no but you

don't get a signal tape with Yes no tape because it's irrelevant makes no difference and yet if there weren't the tape there you wouldn't get any signals at all so is there something underlying yes and no life and death light and darkness well that's what we call God only we can't say anything about it because everything we say is a statement and that implies an opposite but we but as I pointed out in The beginning this is so frustrating because we want to play a game with these opposites you see it's like we have opposites

in chess the black side and the white side but we want to win and we want to win but then when we think of the other fellow we realize that if I'm going to win you're going to lose I it's rather hard isn't it Couldn't we arrange for a game in which everybody wins then nobody wins nothing happened there was no game so to try to play a no lose game is impossible we set ourselves an impossible task and that makes us feel very frustrated always frustrated because we're trying to do what can't be done

we want it good all the time want Sunshine every day okay a desert for you Now that's not what you wanted was it do you really want a world in which is all positive no nobody really does I we think we we think we do and we think we ought to but it still bothers us because after all if I come to the conclusion that there's really it doesn't make any difference it's going to be black and white black and white life and death good and evil alternately forever and ever Whatever I can't improve this

world I feel sort of sad and I'm just going to sit around and vegetate all the guts have gone out of me and yet and yet I can't put up with that I have an ite surely there must be some way of getting through so what is it is there a is there a great pleasure which lies beyond the ordinary contrast of Pleasure and Pain what do the Hindus mean when they say that Brahman the absolute reality is sat andand sat reality chit Consciousness anund Bliss what is anund what is metaphysical Bliss Joy Beyond pleasure

pain good evil has such a con perception even any meaning well in all the various accounts that are given to us of the mystical experience they have an intense joyousness the sudden realization that the dark and the light Constitute a Harmony they are not discordant that as somebody once put it to me this was a lady of 60 or so who was in an accident with an elevator and she had her leg crushed and they couldn't get a rescue crew to her for half an hour but she said during that time I had the most

extraordinary experience I realized there wasn't one grain of dust in this whole universe that is out of Place and pretty weird but from a strictly philosophical and logical point of view it doesn't mean anything if I say everything is good no sort of a Christian Science attitude it it doesn't mean anything it's no more in from a logical point of view than saying Everything is Everything doesn't tell me anything it's all good it's all happy it's All harmonious and yet if any one of you ever had an experience of cosmic Consciousness you know Jolly well

that that those are no Idle Words as you can see the positive and the negative the yes and no singing together constituting each other in this fantastic dance in which the outward Radiance flowing outward of the white light is at the same time the Withdrawal of the black outline and that withdrawal seems to be drawing aside a veil to show the white the light and if the veil didn't draw back there would be no light the veil did the drawing back for the light to shine or did the light shove the veil back if it

didn't shove hadn't got a veil to shove back where would the contrast be you see the light and the dark playing with each other so there is a concept in a Game called good sportsmanship which means that you can be a good loser that you can play the part of lose with the same enthusiasm that you can play the part of win and uh therefore what you look for is a good opponent someone will really give you a run and so what you do is you let the opponent win every so often you have to

try and keep yourself uh on top as just A little Edge on the other one you see well after a while while you see your Consciousness changes and you find you're always a little on top when you average it out and that gets boring so you're going after a while to let the other person average out but then you're going to count the spaces do you see for for a year you average out then you'll allow your H your partner to have Six months a being averaging out better and you get get a little more

Dairy and give him 7 months I'm going to catch up with you just at 11 months and I'm going to come in again and I'm going to add another 12 months in which I'm the usual winner see but the more you think of that the more you think I'm kind of a cad to be like this you're going to let the other person win that because you can't Maintain Consciousness without the contrast you see you that's why people go in for adventure why we take risks why we do absolutely foolish things toss a coin and

see what happens go uh skydiving let's go roaring around in Racing cards that's um even have wars see what happens because some people are cautious and say Life is like a fire and the thing to do is to keep it burning as long as possible there are two kinds of pipe smokers people who take enormous Puffs and having vast clouds of smoke and the pipe burns out very quickly and there other people who very slowly big puff and keep the pipe going for a long long time some people like a quick enormous flash others like

a long long slow glow who's Right who's left H you can take take it either way you may go off with a whimper but we will go off with a ban the Morning Glory blooms for an hour and yet it differs not at heart from the giant Pine that lives for a thousand years fruit fly at the one end bit lives a few hours toris at the other slow solemn tortoise who lives for 500 years but slowly maybe they both from their own Point of view live the same time maybe the fruit fly thinks a

few hours are very long and the toris thinks 500 years are but four score and 10 and All Flesh is grass from your own point of view it's always the same because it's your point of view if you are a person born to riches you will feel it's terrible to go down to Poverty but if you're born to Poverty that will be the usual State of Affairs You will think it's extremely lucky if you rise to riches but you see I haven't really answered the question is there any way around this yeah we can be

a good sport but it all comes out the same thing in the end I mean uh it balances out and so what what do you mean so what what's wrong with it doing that would you rather it was different and if you really go into your Thinking you find you can't rather that it was different when you see that you cannot have the positive without the negative and if you want the positive you'll have to take the negative you say well it's a making the making the best of it you know as if to say

well things kind of a lousy deal but I'll take it but I I would ask you what else would you have suggest me a better Arrangement and you'll suddenly find That if you do suggest what you think is a better Arrangement that it that won't be what you want it and you finally have to admit that you want it the way it is because the whole nature of wanting involves contrast you want the good to be good don't you you want it to be real yummy okay right so I'll give you nothing but chocolate a

clares with honey and a glass of champagne for breakfast every day and for lunch and For dinner you'll soon get sick of that or I'll give you a harm you just keep it up day and night pretty soon you will say well someone take me to a [Music] bar so by following this through the Relentless logic of is you is or is you ain't you come to the Curious Sensation that after all if I really go Into this problem of life it is the way I want it to be if I look at it superficially

and in the sort of short run view well it isn't the way I want it I want it changed right now see and I will you see life is like sleeping on a hard bed you lie on your left side for a while and then you say this I can't stand this anymore and turn on your right side same with Itics and you get tired of that so you say well now I'll line my left you get tired of that a little bit faster than you did before you try the right again that it's boring

so you try your back and then that begins to get rough then you turn over and lie on your tummy and then you switch to your back and then to your tummy and then you try your right side again and your left you see and and and so you proceed but what else do you Suggest I would like it to be so that I was always comfortable but you can see that if you were you wouldn't know what comfortable is so is this puzzle it's got two sides side one I cannot beat the game of

opposites I cannot have more positive than negative side two I wouldn't want it otherwise because I cannot imagine how to improve it so involv in this as a sudden and Curious initial deflation I'm out of ss when I feel there's no impression I can make on it is it and yet I find who who is this eye that's Tred to interfere and wants to be challenged and is put out of Swords well when I look for it I can't find it I cannot find an I myself opposed to they or It because how could I

have the one without the other so that feeling that I had of deflation of frustration was simply the realization there is no such thing as a separate eye if you don't want to feel that truth you will resist feeling it but if you're open this logic of the Opposites of the game of black and white will lead you ineluctably to the conclusion that you have no separate Self apart from what is called other so there you are you find that you are the vibration system which is what's going on you are the undulation the pulsation

called existence that's you and it's going and ever so many different ways well you say is that all what more did you expect well I don't know what I wanted just little something More you mean you want a surprise I think we're back where we were a little while ago but the surprise is is in a way this we are looking in this system for for that little something more which will give it [Music] meaning but we're looking for the wrong kind of meaning the meaning of This now you see it now you don't is

you is or is you ain't this pulsation the meaning of it is not apart from it away from it something different the meaning of it is the dance you see that's why we get back to the point I made this morning to get with this you got to swing and swing means I'll give it to you in a Zen story as Zen student said to his teacher it's terribly hot how do we escape the Heat he said why not go where it's neither hot nor cold he said where's that the teacher said in summer we

sweat and winter we shiver so it's a different from in Shakespeare's Richard II where Bing Brook is about to be banished and John of gaun I think it is says to him to all places under the eye of Heaven are to a wise man ports and happy Havens in other words don't think the King has banished you think that you have B banished the king you weren't F you quit by Brook require replies oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus or wallow naked in December's snow by thinking

on fantastic Summer's heat fell sorrow's tooth does never rankle more than when it bites and lanth Not the saw in other words if during the winter I think of the summer it's colder and if during the summer I think of the winter or ice cream it's hotter so that's why the Zen master replies in summer we sweat in Winter we shiver when it's hot eat Curry when it's cold try ice water oh swing with it roll with the Punch this is Judo because the colder you make it the hotter it'll get now we'll have an

intermission the human being is of such e e e e e e E e e e e e e now you must understand that yesterday I the human being now you must understand yesterday I was doing a demolition job the negative aspect of what we're Talking about the pursuit of pleasure and by approaching it from two different points of view I was explaining the fact that there really isn't anything that you can do to transform your Consciousness into shall we say the state of pleasure or anund Bliss Ecstasy especially the very high Ecstasy of everyday

Consciousness there's nothing and I worked on this especially through an analysis of the nature of the Opposites of perception by contrast and so that leaves you flat and so from that place where we can apply the Turkish proverb he who sleeps on the ground will not fall out of bed we can proceed to the positive Aspect now what happens when we are at the end of the negative as aspect when we come to the depth of the yin motion which is the seed point of yan what happens when you are really convinced that first of

all there is nowhere to be but now impossible to be anywhere else to be conscious of anything else except what is present and that there is no Trickery which you can play on your mind whether it be by an iron forced discipline or by self hypnosis or by any kind of Hocus Pocus to bring about a Satori a state of Illumination or of cosmic Consciousness or whatever you want to call it because this will always be a case of a vicious Circle in which the person who needs to be transformed is attempting to do the

transforming in other words it's the old story of trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps trying to bite your own teeth look into your own eyes without a mirror um gild The Lily put legs on a snake beard on a unic and so [Laughter] on can't be done so at that Moment when that is clear where are you you may feel depressed and what will you do about that well there's nothing to do about it because you would have discovered at this point that the depression when it's there is the you of the

time and if you try to get out of it by some sort of Distraction you won't really do anything except cover up the dirt with white paint so if you feel let down meaningless somewhat depressed by this whole thing and you see at the same time you can't do anything about it what happens why you simply watching what's happening you don't know what's going to Happen next and it isn't just watching something that is formally identified as a depressed state because there a lot of other things going on too there's the world around you there's

your breath breathing still your eyes looking still your ears hearing still all that's going on and you don't know what to make of it anymore you can't believe anything about it because you know that's all a Hoax so there's nothing left for you to do but watch it and you have become inwardly rather quiet just because uh you're worn out there's nothing to do and you realize that all escapes lead back to the thing you were running away from you can take a detour detours detours detours but they always get shorter and you get back

to where you started So when this sort of Defeat of all Enterprises and ideals and aspirations occurs you find yourself naturally and not in an affected or forced way in the contemplative state where you're just watching what goes on and even if you're automatically thinking about it because you realize that those thoughts are fule so far as changing Anything is concerned you might as well try to sweep dust on the stairs with bamboo shadows and so you watch your thoughts as if they were the the ticking of a clock or Birds chattering outside the window

or water falling or a leaky forcet and they just chatter on and life does its thing in you watch the thoughts because they just chatter begin to go away and the past has Disappeared because you know it's just memory the future has disappeared because it hasn't happened never does you know tomorrow never comes there is no tomorrow and if you don't realize that it's useless for you to make plans for it if you do realize there's no tomorrow then maybe plans will be of use to you because when they work out you can enjoy the

result but if you're not all here You can't so tomorrow can only be handled by those who don't take it seriously so there you are now if you've read the literature which many of you have of mysticism and uh yoga Buddhism vanta so forth you know it said again and again and again that this kind of vision this way of Seeing is always dependent upon transcending your ego in one way or another giving up well here you are you've given up only you are not able to pride yourself on having achieved a great achievement and

this is the snare for all people who go into these spiritual disciplines they make a project of getting rid of their ego and they're terribly proud of it they come home and brag about how much They suffered how long they sat and that their legs hurt so much they're absolute BS and this spiritual braggy is nothing more than uh blowing up and inflating the ego to a colossal degree because the ego is undertaking uh the actually impossible but seemingly incredibly difficult task of getting rid of itself so when you run into this kind of thing

Don't be beguiled all those disciplines to get rid of your ego have as their underlying design to persuade you that it can't be done not in a merely theoretical kind of persuasion but so that you actually realize that you can no more get rid of your ego than you can put out fire with fire it is precisely you see the ambition of the ego to be eess when you find a person who is what you might call all frankly Egotistic makes no bones about it he will be less egotistic actually than people who are very

self effacing that's a curious thing people for example who speak very frankly and tell the truth and come right out and say whether they like you or whether they don't whether they want you around or whether they don't and uh you say well can I stay overnight and they say sorry but I'm tired and I don't want anybody around you think well is that Selfish but that kind of selfishness is not really selfish because with a person like that you always know where you are nobody likes to impose on anyone else and you can't impose

on that kind of person that makes for a very comfortable relationship so you owe it to other people to be as egotistic as you are then they know where you stand but if you come out full of love and full of good intentions and make promises to all kinds of people and say oh you'll do This that and the other for them and then you forget about it or you're too lazy or you think you would rather not they've been relying on you for your promises and then you let them down simply because you weren't

selfish when it was time to be selfish so you know if somebody asks you will you help me will you give me some money or something like that if you're not going to do it say no and you shouldn't be ashamed of Saying no because if you're going to do no eventually do it now but if you say well I'll think it over I'll go back and look at my bank balance that means uh no but I don't want to say so and people are always fing each other up that way so it's very important

to be as egotistic as you are because the ambition to be less egotistic than you are is a form a very Insidious form of egotism and there is nothing more Reprehensible than the ambition to be a saint so you found that out you see not by going through some project some Fierce discipline to get rid of your ego unless of course you were the kind of nut who had to go through that and couldn't find it any other way that's why I have nothing against uh gurus who put people through all sorts of complicated obstacle

races because those people asked for It they wouldn't have respected the guru unless he had made things difficult it's on the principle of anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined there it is because let me repeat the point you are responsible and when you go to a guru you did it and you gave him authority to take charge of your Spiritual Development and he's going to show you that the Authority was always yours but he can't do that by just talking he has to carry the absurd things you are doing to

their logical extreme so that you will find out you are making yourself miserable he will increase your tendency to do so until you find out that it's you who are doing it well I say you find out it's you who are doing it who is you we never have to Define this because It's become like a point in modern geometry or mathematics in the old ukian system we said a point is that which has position with no magnitude a kind of absurd definition but in mathematics today we don't Define a point at all we say

it's a limit of size and uh it's much more useful that way so when I use the word you you know what I mean but I'm not going to Define It because then we get thinking about is the U Immortal or Immortal or Mortal or Immortal is it Eternal or non-eternal is it separate or is it one with etc etc etc and all these are silly questions the word I as William James said is a uh pronoun of position like this or here or like the it in it is raining so when I say I

know I do I'm not thinking that there is some agent I who is the doer of Deeds I do I say means the saying is coming from here as distinct from over there and there is no disjunction between the ey and the saying I am what I say because the saying is the act this is I while I say it so with the rest of the body I'm heading I'm heting I'm stomaching boning and that's the eye while it's happening this particular boning and Stomaching and heing and braining you see it's all process all Wiggles

but so then when you find naturally that the supposed eye the mythical soul in the body ego in the brain or whatever it is uh is fictitious is a social convention like the equator and can't do anything except uh the thought that it can do something simply gets your psychic processes going In a vicious circle so then at that moment you are in the contemplative State naturally you are neither trying to do something about it you are certainly not trying to do nothing about it because you find the only thing you can do now this

is interesting what the only thing you can do is let it happen whatever is going on let it happen and you're not even letting how could you stop It because if you try to stop it that trying to stop is all part of The Happening see so what have you discovered when there is absolutely nothing to do except it happens whatever it does happen you suddenly discover that you are what happens that you're not limited to what goes on inside your skull that the wind blowing outside the Cars pouring down the road the uh rattle

of human life the sunshine and all that that that the there is no you there is no real it uh that is apart from that then stay with that a while just don't don't try and get that recognition back as something you had remembered you had suddenly this flash this Insight of Satori and then you think oh let's let's hold on to that I don't want to forget That let's make a note of it see a you're still trying to pull a trick here see what happens next don't stay with that uh go on the

moment is always new always fresh whatever is going on don't try to fix it into any mold and say aha that state of mind is Satori see I that that I must keep don't keep anything you can't it's it's just like um pouring water into a bottomless bucket let it flow through Let It Go On and as you go on you see something is coming to you all the time you don't know what it is you don't know what's going to happen next so you just watch but don't slide back you're always right where it's

happening right at the critical moment which is the moment and don't worry about whether you're right or whether you're wrong whether this is what you're supposed to do or not supposed to do There is no script unless you insist on making somebody else's script your script and you see it coming at you and yet you realize it's not coming at me from somewhere or someone else this spontaneous arisal is me there isn't any me besides this so when the chickens clock outside that's just the same as my having belly rumbles it's all me from each

one of our Points of view now then as you well know those things in life which are most pleasurable almost invariably happen unexpectedly they are not contrived when I take students with me to Japan the first thing I tell them when we sit down together is that this is not going to be a scheduled Tour except within certain rather vague limits many people when traveling in foreign countries see nothing because they see what they're supposed to see somebody tells them when you go to India you've got to see the Taj Mahal you must see the

caves that are J you must see the burning guts at bernas and so on and they all go and see that so that they can say I've said it I've seen it and then they take these Little black boxes which are capturing devices for grabbing experience and they fascinated go around click click click click click click like this and never see anything they're always looking at the aperture figuring and uh see that that's right and so on and and it's an absolute drag taking a camera especially if you are not a professional photographer you know

you just have to preserve this memory of this one thing Once in a lifetime I got a chance to see the Taj Mahal click what I say to these people is look the Japanese have a phrase which is like our phrase just follow your nose they say follow your feet because unlike the United States Japan is a very easy place to wander in I mean here it's very difficult to WAND it takes narrow streets funny Courtyards uh curly kind of places for Effective wandering here you're not allowed to wander if you go wandering in any

nice part of town the police will stop you because uh where are you going not nowhere particular well that's very suspicious not to be going anywhere particular where are you from have you got a paper that proves that you are there paper always being more reliable than People and so and everything is straightened out you know it's the shortest distance between two points Gaza fast as possible no wandering alowed but in Japan you still can wander it's a miracle you can still but you can and you can take a side turning and not knowing where

the faintest idea where you're going and suddenly you discover the most amazing Garden in a Courtyard or a funny little restaurant where the most unusual food is being served or a bar where there's room only for two people to sit and they are serving broiled sea snails or a shop where rare Pottery is being sold and although the shopkeeper can't speak a word of English you go in and the utmost courtesy is shown to you brought out tea to drink And uh very pleasant friendly surroundings you didn't get sh shown this you followed your feet

and discovered it now all the best things on any Journey I've ever taken were unscheduled and most of the scheduled things were a disappointment because of a big buildup of expectation and then flop so therefore the essential principle of the posi positive side of the pursuit of pleasure you see is the Unscheduled life now of course for the convenience of other people some schedule is always necessary but it's best to make it a kind of humdrum habit uh thing and don't get uptight about it because it is nothing more just as the skeleton is a

framework for the flesh so a schedule is bones for Wiggles snakes on ladders and uh we need some bones you see otherwise everything gets too gooey but don't take your bones too seriously always always allow for the unexpected because this is true at the level of the most simple sensuous Pleasures as well as at the level of high mystical experience so the paradoxes that come into mystical Literature such as that he that would save his life must lose it or loose it or the highest knowledge is non knowledge in the um Kaa upanishad where it

is explained that Brahman the Supreme is known to those who know it not all that sort of paradox it's simply this you see that the cosmic Consciousness is what arises of Itself when you see that nothing arises at all except what arises of itself in other words life isn't something on the one hand happening to you on the other or being done by you on the one hand to it on the other the whole thing you and it is a spontan anous occurrence that is going on and the word spontaneous in Chinese is means of

Itself means in Chinese what is so of itself and it's their word for nature and be careful to remember what I said yesterday that the happening the spontaneous is not something you can precon conceive and by preconceived it imitate spontaneity by going against social convention because then you are merely acting out the obverse of the convention and being conditioned by it as ever the truly spontaneous can only Happen of itself and you cannot arrange it so then you may say well now does that mean as we say in kind of everyday talk just take things

as they come mean uh just um live dayt day so on and uh then I know if a person asks that that they don't take things as they come what they do have is they have a concept Of what it would be like to take things as they come and they would say well the ordinary person is anxious and full of uh plans and schemes and therefore let's be the opposite of that be take things as they come see that's the same as fake spontaneity because this true taking things as they come doesn't mean that

you imitate a Placid attitude or that you have some kind of Expected Behavior like say one expects of a psychotherapist a certain kind of act which he puts on to accommodate you if you say to a psychotherapist you know um I have just raped my daughter and murdered my wife he says [Laughter] mhm and uh you know that's an amazingly unhuman reaction so also then you see you you you people have preconceived notions of a of a Mystic or a Buddha or a sage and they think uh he has no emotion and so if when

Zen Masters for example get angry they get so angry that the the the the room rattles and uh but when it's over it's it's gone it's like a child's emotion you know a child can flare up and scream and suddenly it's vanished people think well he ought to have more control over himself isn't he Supposed to have all that Yogi self-control and all that uh no emotion and be completely Serene and Placid under all circumstances R rubbish uh that would be to say that a stone Buddha is as good as a living one that is

to say we will test your virtue by taking out our stopwatch and we will bang you about and see how long it takes you to scream if you don't scream at all then Of course you win but it doesn't make much difference uh you might as well be dead is that a test of anything it's simply a test of insensitivity so don't think therefore that there is some kind of stereotype of what this state is we don't know what this state is and those who have tried to write it down and explain it have always

said but it's ineffable and what I'm trying to Describe is I'm doing my best but I know I can't really get it across so you would say then going back to the point that I'm making here the person who said well it's just taking things as they come and and by that you think of something like um yeah you get up and brush your teeth and take a shower and look out of the window and uh then you put on your pants and uh have a boiled egg for breakfast and then get on the Bus

and go and do some business and so on and that's that's it but that is not it because when when you are in the state that I'm talking about what from the former point of view would have appeared to be nothing more than ordinary everyday life is suddenly seen to be a magical process e E e e e e e e e we can consider the pursuit of pleasure in two broad senses one which might be called Lower and the other which might be called higher although I'm not very happy with That classfication there is

the pursuit of material pleasure an art very much neglected in this day and age because it must be carefully distinguished from the pursuit of theoretical pleasure the pursuit of material pleasure is an art requiring a difficult discipline much devotion and much Skill and it ranges through all the activities of man engineering cookery clothes architecture love making and the so-called Fine Arts music literature painting sculpture and so forth but we are living in a culture where the pursuit of material pleasure is as I say neglected in pursuit of a symbolic Pleasure which of course like many

religions has its Prat [Laughter] because a monetary unit is of course useful in exactly the same way that inches and hours days months pounds grams and other units of measure are useful but nobody has yet made a claim to fi by collecting inches I have more inches than You because it is not a matter of social agreement that the possession of inches represents the possession of wealth it is a matter of social agreement and this is the only validity for money having any value whatsoever is that everybody agrees that the chips are worth so much

and money is exactly like poker chips except there's an agreement between all of us that we will accept them in liew Of goods and services but goods and services constitute real wealth and we are living in a society where we eat the menu instead of the dinner because we are more interested in accumulating the tokens of wealth than wealth and this flows over from symbols such as money itself into many other dimensions of life because we tend on the whole to confuse symbol with reality the idea that this world that we See with our five

senses is a material world is merely an idea materialism as a philosophy of nature dialectical materialism naturalistic materialism ism is a point of view it's a concept it's very very highly abstract notion so equally is the notion that this world that we see with our five senses is basically mental or spiritual that also is a concept the actual world is neither Spiritual nor material there is no way of saying what it is because it is like mystical experience ineffable it cannot be effed or spoken from the Greek fi to say so that world which is

neither spiritual nor material is the neglected world most people think of it as material but it's very much overlooked symbols are Substituted for it that is to say we have symbolic Goods people live in symbolic homes Drive symbolic automobiles wear symbolic clothes which are valued for what they cost rather than for their quality and this is of course as I've insisted perhaps adosa especially manifested in what we eat we our standards of cooking are Improving thanks to Gourmet magazine and uh a few redoutable people on the radio like Julia Charles but by and large the

food of even wealthy people is disgraceful it is simp symbolized by Bread which is supposed to be our staff of life and we eat nothing but a kind of consumable Styrofoam fortified with vitamins and you can read the list of them on the Rapper as if it were medicine also in the pursuit of pleasure in the form of the Fine Arts we don't really enjoy it an enormous number of reasonably affluent people who attend concerts and go to exhibitions of paintings go there because they think they're improving their minds that in some way doing things

like that is good for you people go to church For the same reason that's the last reason for going to church because it's good for you that is an absolutely morbid interest because it distracts you from what is going on if you listen to b because you think it's good for you you're not listening in order to listen to b you have to swing with it and then you forget all about whether it's good for you or not in fact it Feels more like things that are bad for you when you swing with bark it

begins to feel like sex and as everybody knows that's terribly bad for you so I'm not going to dwell at any very great length on the niceties and the disciplines of the pursuit of pleasure in that so-called lower sense I only want to say in passing that if you don't Have the realization that the pursuit of material pleasure requires a certain degree of aestheticism you won't be able to pursue any other or higher kind of pleasure because asceticism is not unpleasant asceticism is like an olive between wines it cleanses the pallet and what's the matter

with olives it is like taking some sort of Exercise which can be very pleasurable indeed provided you don't do it grimly there is a dreadful exercise being used today called jogging which is absolutely nothing to recommend it because to begin with when I watch people jogging they obviously show they don't know how to run they're running mostly on their heels and that jars the bones all the way through and up sets the uh vertebral Discs and so on and there's a certain Grim determination about joggers they tend to run in straight lines which they believe

to be the shortest distance between two points our straight line is not the shortest distance between two points on Earth because Earth is wiggly it is not a flat surface except by courtesy of bulldozers and occasional freaks of nature this world as I keep repeating is a fundamentally Wiggly Phenomenon but wherever human beings have been around you will see they have a passion for idanis everything is ruled out in straight lines and put in boxes and grid patterns of streets are laid across the surface of the Earth and that tells you human beings have been

there why this passion for ukian order because Mr euklid had a very very simple mind and tended to think in these rather uninteresting shapes instead of in Curvaceous Wiggles now nobody would fall in love with a ukian woman uh what we appreciate about women is their curvaceousness their wiggliness and wiggliness offends some people because they are not sure about it they can't figure it out you never know quite what it's going to do next that's why people often don't like snakes because a snake is the great Symbol of Wiggly Vitality of undulation of waves and

all this world is fundamentally a system of wave vibrations and if you cannot wave with it if you are rigid you will all always be resisting life so wiggliness and going with wiggliness in other words do you swing is fundamental to the pleasure of life but you see where we think that order and getting things in order is getting them squared away we're always Saying let's get it squared away let's get it straight and so there are certain kinds of people who are called straights and squares who do not swing and as a result of

that uh they are out of harmony with a wiggly universe and their attitudes range from cookery at one end to religion at the other because a square religion is one that is to too Abstract that resists the flow element of life it wants a canal instead of a river and it conceives Heaven as a city rather than a Rose Garden Paradise is a garden and all the trouble began when people substituted the heavenly City for the Paradise Garden when in other words popes began to be called Urban and unbelievers were called Pagan because a paganus

is a country dweller a man of The Wiggles as distinct from a man of the streets a liver under the sky instead of one who lives in a box because the Box you see is the great symbol of classification what box are you in all words are labels on intellectual boxes is it animal is it vegetable is it mineral three Boxes is it solid or is it a gas is it Republican or is it Democrat is it capitalist or is it Con communist is it Christian or is it Heathen is it male or is it

female all boxes and so because we think in boxes we live in boxes all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same and whereas certain kinds of fish live in beautiful shells glorious spirly Wiggles on them And lovely colors and uh but we tend to want everything straightened out you see and that rigidity is always in a fight with the surrounding fluidity and so we are as it were land lobers rather than men of the of the waves and the the British have always made a great thing about this because they've

always Associated Freedom with the ocean Who are so free as the sons of the waves and Britain's never never never shall be slaves because of this seamanship now we think you see of the sea as fluid and the land as solid and nothing could be further from the truth as you've all experienced recently in Southern California the Earth is not very solid it flows where I live in Sorito we have along the Waterfront a lot of land that has been reclaimed and not so long ago they built a marina quite close to us where they

dredged out mud to make the marina not realizing that land is liquid therefore the land adjoining the water is sinking to fill up the hole made by Excavating for the marina people just don't think of things like that because they think of land as solid and so in Religion we are seemingly looking for solids for something upon which I can take my stand for a firm foundation for the Rock of Ages or even poor old Paul till for the ground of being but we are not living in that sort of universe we're living in a

fluid Universe in which the art of faith is not in taking one's stand but in learning to swim you don't cling to you don't try to Stand on Water by breathing and by a certain relaxation you learn to trust the water to support you this is even more true in flying in the air gliding especially or in sailing in all those Arts there is an adaptation to the fluid and that is the major thing that we have to learn if we want to survive as a species and survive happily nobody Wants just to go on

one wants to go on in an elegant way and even that passion for survival is something against pleasure because nothing ruins pleasure more than the anxiety to go on having it more more more because that shows when you ask for more more more and have the anxiety to go on that you're not having it now you always think it's coming that you want jam tomorrow is more pleasing Than Jam today and if we say of something that is useless it has no future that's the most awful thing you can say about it I would rather

say of something that's no good it has no present not that it has no future because a future is merely a promise in the same way as this symbol is merely a promise to pay promises promises promises so Therefore it is fundamental to pleasure that one learns to wiggle and not be stiff and rigid as we would say let go relax that doesn't mean become droopy relax means to become Supple it also means to learn the strength of your weight how to use weight how to flow with gravity water for example always flow with gravity

and it Wiggles it takes the course of least Resistance and yet has tremendous strength but we in our white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethical system not to mention our Irish Catholic one which is really the same thing only a little bit more fancy and dressed up in lace uh is to take the line of least resistance is considered cowardly and Despicable go straight Bing right through with the bulldozer ahead why go straight well you got to get there Fastest way shortest distance between two points and I get back to jogging that is not the right way to

run the right way to run is to dance to dance across the countryside and anyone who dances across the the countryside will outwit and outtime the jogger I don't know if any of you witnessed the World Cup in soccer last year on television it was won by the Brazilian Team and I have never seen such soccer that's not the way they taught us to play it in school as the sports writer in the London Times put it they danced their way to Victory because the whole thing was like very fine basketball where instead of being

this sort of tough pushing to Victory they were lilting with the ball and the most incredible teamwork of subtle passing Bouncing it off almost any part of the body with a capacity to give it Direction with one's back with one's shoulder with one's hip anything head it was a a beautiful art and a magnificent spectacle but you see we are not taught to do things that way because we are taught that life is serious and therefore must be done in an efficient way but according to ukian ideas of Efficiency in ancient times when people worked

they used to sing hardly anybody sings anymore except at a performance of some kind or or something like that imagine a bank teller singing as they were counting out the money oh the King was in his Counting house counting out the money 5 10 and 20 30 40 50 you know um why not what would happen if you were confronted by a singing Bank Tiller would complain to the management and say this is money is very serious I'm to could sing about everything will go wrong can you imagine a stock broker's working song I uh

have seen people I once had my shoe shined in a New York Subway that was a most extraordinary performance you know and he was swinging and imagine supposing you were a bus driver you know most people when they Drive a bus and through City traffic they are cursing and swearing and being angry and fighting the clock all the way through town well it's a disaster but imagine driving a bus with the idea that going from here to there it wasn't the point wasn't to get there but the point was to go and dance ing that

bus through the streets with an very very skillfully accurate traffic dodging and when you Get to a stoplight and there the jam you play a little tune on the horn or you pass jokes to the cab driver near you or you play with the passengers see anything can be turned into juggling into playing with balls that's why we say have a ball so this bus driver is swinging through the streets and he Prides himself in the Marvel of his torian art but people don't do that because Work is not supposed to be pleasant because you

get paid for it you're not supposed to get paid for enjoying yourself see that's what I do but I think I'm smart I talk to you not because I think I'm doing you any good but because I like talking about these things and if you pay me for it then I make my living as simple as that I'm a sort of philosophical Entertainer but that's the point that The transformation of work is swinging it and the curse of work that came in the story of Genesis you see work became a curse because the tree of

knowledge was the knowledge not of Good and Evil in the ordinary sense but of the advantageous and the disadvantageous the words in Hebrew refer to the art of Metallurgy that's where the trouble Begins when we use technology to get there fast and the faster we get there the less worth is the place of arrival because you've eliminated the distance between and that's what makes the difference between here and there the distance if you take it away then there is the same as here so there was no point going there there's no point going from here

To Honolulu none whatever it's the same place to all intents and purposes certainly no point in going from Los Angeles to Tokyo I mean there are a few nice little bars in Tokyo where you can get sushi but you can get them in Los Angeles now because Tokyo's come to Los Angeles so it's practically the same place and both have the same smog the police in Tokyo wear gas masks when they're directing Traffic you know crazy is this wealth to have a $150,000 House in Beverly Hills and live in poison gas crazy that's wealth so

work then being regarded as a method of getting there effectively a lot of businessmen imagine that they are practical people I don't go for philosophy and that kind of thing I'm a practical man I like to get things done What what is practical well you made money but that's not practical until you spend it till you enjoy it and it's very difficult to enjoy money money is a great responsibility besides if you get lots of it you're afraid somebody's going to take it away it gives you the Jitters you know lots of people think that

if they had a little more money Their problems would be solved and they get and they worry about their health there's always something to worry about if you're the worrying kind always and it can get worse instead of getting better by achieving all those things you think will stop you worrying so the first principle in we could call it the art of pleasure is you must swing and that means or at least it looks like Superficially that you mustn't take anything seriously you must realize that life is a form of dancing and dancing is of

course not serious and that's why it's prohibited by Baptists and gloomy people of that kind they don't approve of dancing even in the Catholic Church we don't normally see priests dancing I mean it's not because it's sexy You Can Dance Without Partners of the opposite sex You Can Dance by Yourself but it's considered undignified this was all started by one of David's wives when I think her name was it wasn't ba Sheba I forget which one it was perhaps somebody remembers it better than I do anyway he danced before the Ark of the Covenant and

she reproved him for being undignified because he didn't sit stiff and rigid but what is the virtue in being stiff and Rigid as ler said man at his birth is Supple and tender but in death he is rigid and hard plants when young are juicy and soft but when old they are br brittle and dry and thus suppleness and softness are the signs of life but rigidity and hardness are the signs of death I suppose some men confuse psychic rigidity with getting a hard On or at least substitute it for it as they substitute guns

rocket ships and other things of that kind to manif EST in masculinity which isn't really there but certainly women should uphold to us I mean the real secret of women's Liberation is the liberated woman the woman who is the human serpent the wiggly one the gentle one who has the power of water and we should look to that as ler Again said the valley Spirit does not die the valley spirit that is the spirit of the valley that is the feminine that's distinct from the mountain which is the male and so while being a man

you should have a certain feminine element because then you will become a universal Channel hold to the masculine yes the mountain is necessary for there to be a valley you can't have valleys without Mountains but unfortunately the gorgeous music of handle has prevented us from realizing the horror of that biblical passage every Valley shall be exalted and every Mountain laid low and the rough places made plain why it's happening all over California so the feminine in the sense of the lilting the playful the curvaceous the soft is the neglected principle by all us Ukian and

it is the principle of life and of nature but the problem that exists for rigid people and we all get rigid in the sense of resistance resistance to life resistance to change is how on Earth do I stop that syndrome which makes me go uptight how do I stop that because it's useless almost useless and do you know that your basic Sense of ego of existing here and of being I as distinct from all all that do you know it is muscular tension of a certain kind that is your the physical basis of your sense

of identity it is for example you can try this experiment maybe we'll just try it it's the simplest thing to do uh I just want you to look a little downwards at whatever view is just in front of your eyes just allow your eyes to rest on that Just let the light the color play with your eyes see just rest it easy now supposing I said now I want you to look hard at it pay attention to be totally attentive and aware of what is in front of you so look hard now do that do

whatever you would do if somebody told you to look hard now don't do it just see don't look now again look Hard and now don't do it so what's the difference between the two states what did you do when you were look looking hard that you didn't do when you were looking easy where huh how do you tense your brain what did you tense huh Muses muscles around the eyes anything else temples temples yes narrow your Focus to one thing instead of your focus yes that was a muscular action you see one one where do

you feel concentration you all go tense tense all over but you see muscular tension in your jaw in your focal muscles has absolutely nothing to do with seeing the focal muscles of the ey all they do is simply um open or close the aperture or move the lens in such a way That it becomes InFocus it doesn't need any effort to do that in fact the effort you make when you look hard distracts from your seeing accurately but we are constantly making efforts to do everything we do for example to will something we make all

this absurd muscular straining grit your teeth doesn't help you to do anything and all this accumulates as a constant strain between the eyes in Here and that's what you call eye it's that sensation of totally unnecessary strain that exists all the time that is the ego the physical reference of the idea ego just that unnecessary strain cuz that tells you you exist teacher I'm trying at least me be for effort and uh it it doesn't work so we could say psychic staring is the ego that we feel as being the center of Myself which is

opposed to and which is resisting all that is defined as not myself and so that rigidity of holding against life so that I maintain my shape my form my place all the time that constant resistance makes you uptight and unable to swing through fear of what will happen if you let it wiggle and so therefore a non- wiggly person is unadaptable mechanical like Behavior Patterns that have to go on on on regularly always the same chug chug chug chug chug and they're not adaptable and it doesn't hold up as we watch you see it isn't

holding up the cracks are in the Pavements and you know the grass comes through we're squaring all the fish out of existence what what will there be to Eat somebody said we're going to be left with nothing but crows crab grass and inedible fish so this is is is the you you may say it's a square world but then you can always not by preaching in at people and condemning them but by wooing them you can get them to come off it see that's the thing that I've often said that preaching is no good because

on Sunday you go to church And the preacher is B and lays down the law law law in other words he throws the book at you look at a church the minister wears the same robes as the judge he's got the book up there and not only does it tell you what to do he tells God what to do and his endless talkfest goes on and uh when you get to sing you sing hymns well hymns are religious nursery rhymes they all have Dreadful tunes and Stupider words and that's all the singing you it may

be the choir does an Anthem nobody dances and there's nothing mysterious going on except in the Catholic church and they're trying to get rid of it and no translate the mass into English that everybody understands it and finds out a last what it meant after All so Sunday is supposed to be the day to swing is that God worked for six days and the seventh day rested there this time out time out from being rational and methodical and efficient it's like a Migra it's like a uh the old meaning of an orgy a carnival you

got to be Crazy a little because if you're not crazy at regular intervals you become insane cuz you're too rigid you don't swing in the wind and th so you're going to collapse but again the problem remains for the rigid person and we all have a rigidity how on Earth do we release it because I noticed that people who undertake programs of der rigidifying themselves May be psychoanalysis it may be therapy of some other kind it may be exercises it may be sensory awareness training it may be encounter groups it may be yoga all sorts

of der rigidifying processes are done in such a grim mood I know as a book called you must relax [Laughter] because then people get into these things and they start playing games you know it's like people who Retire and they think they're going to have fun so they get on the golf course early in the morning and instead of enjoying golf which is entirely possible they begin to think not in terms of Athletics but of Mathletics what is my score see they gamble on it and that gives it the interest of uh of the Prat

of the abstract aspect you see how much what is my measure do I matter that matter is the same as the Word meter see measure do I matter and so they get this religion of golf and are playing all sorts of social games tied in with it see it's very serious then when golf is over they'll go to the bridge table when they're completely worn out they'll get vaguely drunk and this Grim pursuit of pleasure goes on e E e e e e e e e e e e e E e e e e e

e e e e e e e Two essential features of the philosophy of Illusion re question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not that is to say whether the plot is Comic or tragic any other way of looking at things is kind of skits side it looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a baron Tree they just got settled there you know they don't belong the sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether well where is

this other domain and how does it relate to this one are they separate I showed you that even when we say that two domains are the poles apart the very fact that their poles shows that they have a hidden connection and the hidden connection is the big thing in life all you junkies Know that and uh so in other words we get a pattern of organization that is radial rather than an assemblage as if the universe were really a Multiverse a lot of things that got collected together out of the infinite wastes of space and

sort of began to Mander around each other whereas the other pattern which is so much more sensible is Central uh and Radial and I showed you how the crystals And the stars and the octopuses and even the human beings are all radial structures of course we don't see our radial relationship to the totality of the universe because it isn't obvious it's obvious that a tree is an arm of the earth reaching up and waving at the sky and a mountain is another kind of radiation from the earth and so is a leg from a body

and hair and things like that but what what makes human beings as The highest of the mammals so uh conscious of being independent is that they are topologically an enclosed surface you see which wanders around independently of the ground what we don't notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all that wandering around uh is something that is entirely related to there being some ground in other words when you run up a hill uh the hill also runs you up It the hill Rises and lifts you as you run you see and

uh if you understand that you don't take a hostile attitude to mount and Hills you're grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air because that's presumably why you went up that the thing was high it was lifted up you wanted to be lifted up it lifted you up you had to cooperate of course I always like the illustration that I've used before perhaps you Haven't heard it of the thle down the thistle down too comes moving through the sky I once was playing with a with a thing you know and just

came out of the blue sky and I caught it like that pulled it under my nose and I it it started to to pull to get away see looked as if it were a butterfly or something that pulls away when you catch it by the leg and I thought oh no of course that's not the thistle down it's the Wind well which was it you know in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen there were two monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind whether it was the wind

or the flag that was moving and he said it's neither it's the mind and so in a way the same thing was true about the thistle down the mind is the moving thing because which point of view will you take which attitude of Mind will you take towards this is it the wind moving the thistle down or is it the thistle down that is moving itself with the wind after all when you see a Sailing Boat and there's a man in the Sailing Boat who is moving the boat is it the wind moving the boat

or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a sail much smarter way of getting around than rowing you don't have to work it's Intelligence you see the mind that moves the boat and uh so in the same way I thought you know this thistle down has some kind of intelligence it's radial it's organized it's beautiful and uh it's used that to sail itself With the Wind to enable itself to pull like a little organism playing with the wind and so in just the same way each one of

us uh uses the universe to get Around and the universe uses us to play with and to make games and patterns and to do its stuff so uh because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin that is a very deceptive thing because the skin is not really the boundary of man you'll notice that in various periods of art human beings have been shaped in different Ways and uh have been more or less transparent at some times at other times opaque and uh sometimes the emphasis has been on the state of mind

which this human being is in at other times the emphasis is on the bodily confirmations and so on in uh the work of painters today one sees images that at first sight one doesn't recognize as being human there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years ago called the new image of man and uh these things didn't look like human beings at all some of them did but but that's because what does a human being look like that depends on your point of view you see if you are prejudiced

that a human being is only what is inside his skin then you think that when anybody Paints the human being Beyond those boundaries that he's lost the image of Man he hasn't necessarily lost it at all all you see there's an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man I don't know if youve ever heard that said that man is the microcosm and that the universe as a whole is the macrocosm now as you Plum out into the universe and explore it astronomically it gets very Strange you begin to see

things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote how could they have anything to do with us they are so far off and so unlikely and in the same way when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and Wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image look at a spermato Zone under a Microscope that little tadpole and how can that the creeps sometimes the foreign feeling about yourself if you feel your own pulse or if

you're able to look at an x-ray in some way of your inner organs working so they're all strangers to us we don't know about them and they give us the creeps as if they were you know coming across some weird insects in the dark uh that sort of Feeling but what we will always find out in the end you see when we meet the very strange thing and we look into the distant reaches of space there will one day be the dawning recognition that's me why that's me and the the whole game of the universe

you see is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can that's how one keeps variety going that's how one Keeps Wonder going and all kinds of uh exciting developments how different can you get in the beginning the Lord said get lost to himself see so uh we we shall find for example that space that you see all around you and containing you and you can in feel space in many ways space is not only something that comes through the eyes the movement of Your arms if with closed eyes for a blind person is

his way of knowing space and you can hear space audibly lots of uh sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces and silence that goes with sound corresponds to space and even St Thomas aquinus that old Catholic Theologian said that good derives its virtue from Evil just as it is the silent pause that gives sweetness to the Chant so but space you see that seems to contain space is one's mind this was common sense to people living uh in the early Renaissance for example at the time of Dante there are many references in

Dante's poetry to the identity of mind and space and in likewise in a 8th Century text in China the Sutra of the six Patriarch he Likens the nature of mind to the nature of space he says just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the people and the mountains and the forests so the nature of mind the nature of Consciousness the nature of oneself contains all these things so you see that if you think that way you have an image of man that is global that is very Different from

the image in which man is defined as bounded by his skin that's a Prejudice we think now for example I have my own private thoughts well nobody has private thoughts because one thinks in images and words and these words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in which you live we think Thoughts the the domain of mind is very similar to The Grid structure of an electric power supply system you know what happens is there's a network of power stations and Transformers so arranged that if one of them gives out

and fails to supply a certain area immediately the grid connects them with other sources of power well in rather a similar way our minds are Connected let's take one very obvious example of it what um northr fry calls the order of words the order of words is all existing literature both rhetoric what is spoken of course and what is written down down now it's his theory that as a scholar of literature and the history of literature he can take any piece of writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was Written because everything

that is written and said is inescapably related to the whole order of words and it's amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away because he can say well obviously he has read this thinking say of a particular novelist or poet so it must come after the date when that novel was published but he couldn't possibly use An expression like that to say for example that it was a capital day he would never he would never use that expression living say in contemporary 20th century America that's a victorianism or it's an Edwardian

way of talking and so in all sorts of little Clues like that the scholar can pin down a piece of writing to When It Was Written you see that is because every individual piece of writing is a Function of all writing that's being done well now that's a very specific and uh almost crude illustration of something that's going on in a far more complicated way than that it isn't only all writing all thinking is being done in relation to the total order of thought and uh in a still more subtle way all living is being

done in relation to the total order of life to what the shardan calls the Biosphere and it goes way beyond that because of the vast interplay of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields which Embrace everything that there is that is why the Ancients when a person was born cast his horoscope that was a map of the universe at the time of that person's birth and therefore it was a drawing of his Soul because the soul is not inside the body the body is inside the soul the soul your soul is the whole universe

as it is focused upon your organism now of course astrology is a very primitive science and it interpreted the influence of the universe upon the individual in very crude ways and it works mostly by good guesswork on the part of the astrology uh if you know how to tell fortunes at a fair uh you will find out A great deal about how all these predictive uh psychic Sciences work because the the client invariably gives himself away either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his anxiety to conceal it they work equally well

now but but there is you see underneath the astrological notion a sound idea that the true map of the soul is the picture of the universe Surrounding the individual it isn't necessarily the your soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born you see it goes along all the time you live because the whole thing expresses itself through you and therefore in that sense the the the map of the Stars the horoscope Etc was an image of man in just the same way way as we regard a Picture

of the human body as an image of man and it's an image from a different point of view it's a bigger image it shows in other words that your mind is very largely outside your body after all it's inside too it's simultaneous you see I cannot think I can't have a mind without seeing feeling and relating to other people people without all the social institutions not only language but the Laws the Customs the gestures the rituals by which we relate to each other all those things compose the mind for the mind is a huge network

of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity my mind and matter are of course polar they go together there are two ways of thinking about the same thing or shall we say two dimensions of the same thing just like length and Breadth or just shall we say like shape and color you see nobody ever saw a shape that wasn't colored nobody ever saw a color that wasn't shaped and yet we can see there's a very clear difference between color and shape but they always go together they're always found together well it's the same

sort of relationship between mind and Matter and the difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other and saying well the world is only material or saying on the other hand that it's only mental is the same difference you would have in trying to reduce all shapes to colors or all colors to shapes so perfectly and yet stay so marvelously different that's why the Buddhist say difference is identity identity is difference it sounds goofy but it makes A great deal of sense because what it's saying in is a relational thing that you

don't know what identity is unless you know what difference is and you don't know what difference is is unless you know what identity is that relationship between soall opposites is called in the Chinese technical DST vocabulary Mutual arising so they say to be and not to be arise mutually high and low are mutually Posited long and short are mutually delineated and so on now what we see then is the totality of the cosmos focused at each point you see uh gives rise to the illusion of the independence of the point from the whole just as

the human being by virtue of having an enclosed Epidermis and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground presents the illusion of being separate and so that's why I asked uh V to do these demonstrations last night because he showed visually the inter dependence of the figure and the background and how the two play together how you can switch from paying attention to one to paying attention to The other and in each case it's significant that is an art that we have lost in our day-to-day perception of life and

it leads practically speaking to the serious problem of E logical blindness that is to say to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer from especially in our culture that they are inseparably related to their physical environment it looks as if we aren't it looks as if we can go out with Bulldozers and insecticides and uh every kind of a gadget and make over our physical environment as it boots our whims but then we discover to our consternation that we've upset all sorts of balances that the house we made such a nice flat lot

for on the hillside suddenly SL slides down the hill when there's a rainstorm because we took away all the Shrubbery that was binding the Hill together and you know this happens in Hollywood every day [Laughter] and and nobody ever seems to learn and that's you see there this immense importance of overcoming uh the illusion of separateness but people are afraid of that because they think it's communistic they think that uh the West the the grand style the Great thing about Western Civilization is its stress on individual personality and its value and that we have created

the ideal of personal Integrity that is to say that the most important thing in the world is the individual all Collective it is corporations States and so on exist as Servants of the individual and if they get in his way and they interfere with his private Enterprise whatever that that may be uh it's a bad thing man the individual is the crown of creation from this point of view and therefore When anybody suggests that individual man is not what you thought was an individual but is in some way um United with grounded in the totality

then if you're this kind of rugged individualist you mix up your vocabul And you call the totality the Collective Now the collective and the totality are two completely different things the idea of collectivism is based on individualism it's the idea that the Society of mankind and the physical environment be Beyond it is a collection with nothing of the kind that's that's the that's the idea of Cosmic flum and jsum that all floated together into a Collection and that's the obverse of individualism you know American individualism is the same philosophy as Marxist collectivism seen from the

other side because they're both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality now what people don't understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter of being isolated it's a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one's Relationship to the whole surrounding Cosmos let's suppose that I'm uh preparing to make a date with some lady and she's such an individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself she never thinks about anything that isn't herself but she's an awful bore she has nothing to say she's not interested in any books

in any landscapes in any works of art in any literature and any other people she's a total bore but the more on the other Hand she would uh be interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself the more of a colorful personality she becomes so the the the rule is to get away you see from these ideas of the IND individual uh as finding his individuality and uniqueness through Independence but rather finding his individuality and uniqueness through being related because you see that's what Makes a look at look at the word

relation from another point of view when we talk about our friends and relations supposing I come across some individual who I can't make out what kind of a thing he is I can't make out where he came from from his accent isn't American it isn't British it isn't particularly middle western it certainly doesn't have the overtones of New York or New England he just talks flat and as to his style of clothing it's utterly Nondescript well I think this is pretty much of a bore what I like to see in an individuality in in a

physical individual is ways that I can relate him to his ancestry that he has this little subtle accent or this mannerism or this centricity or whatever it is that connects him with a great background you see but it's his connection with his background that makes him so significant if I can't see that connection he becomes Uninterested so there is no thought in this approach to devalue the individual what really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or political philosophy that overstresses his isolation and this is something that uh Californians in particular need to

take note of and Uh because many many people feel you see that the development of technology and of centralized government is a direct threat to the value of Personality well in some ways it is but that is only because technology is being developed by personalities who don't understand what personality is they're working on the old individualist Dash collectivist Point of View they're the same so then you see this is then the illusion created that the individual is operating all by himself that actions and thoughts and uh Deeds proceed solely from inside his skin so that

we can say there's where it started you see well that's the game of praising and blaming the game of who started it who can we give candy to who can we bang on the head Uh in other words somebody has to be it as in The Farmer in the Dell you know and finally you get the end the cheese stands alone the cheese stands alone hi ho the the cheese stands [Laughter] alone well why who started it the group well uh another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility if they see through

the illusion of separateness that no philosophy of History has really succeeded in making Anybody more or less responsible in other words uh let's say that you are a Christian a Catholic of the oldfashioned medieval type who believes that you've got an individual soul with Free Will and that you're under responsibility to God to obey his law and that if you don't the most disastrous consequences imaginable will befall you you will fry in Hell forever there's no Evidence whatsoever that believing in that made people any more virtuous than they are today none at all indeed clergy

who believed in all this owned whouses and uh all kinds of things um uh they were just as contemptuous of Law and Order as anybody could be now and part of the reason was of course that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty like the hbomb uh it's just too big to think About and really brings Justice into disrespect because it uses such crude and clumsy methods you know it's like uh using a hit a steam Hammer to drive in tax responsibility is a thing like a nice face which you either have or haven't

uh certain backgrounds certain interests certain awarenesses of Relationship create responsibility in some human beings and they they live that way not because they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible it's because they're intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all around that's all there is to it and uh of course that's all is a big All but you you won't another what I'm saying is the people who are frightened that people will other people will abandon responsibility never did have

any way of thinking that would guarantee that people would be responsible there is no such guarantee if there were we should be automat now I want to switch to another aspect of Illusion the quickness of the hand deceives the eye and that is of course the great illusion of what we call matter density impenetrability opacity I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter because I'm a materialist that is to say I like material and though I may seem to you to be quite self-contradictory For example a wine should have body pure alcohol

doesn't and it's terribly important in human character for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism between sensuality and spirituality you see people who are purely sensuous and materialistic get very boring you can fill your lives with all good Things with uh Alpha Romeos and highi and wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and crisc and uh dry martinis and Chanel Number Five you know and after a while if that's all you've got it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the Martinas tastes like medicine and somehow you get a

distaste for life and even for mountains and trees and Waters and then on the other hand the purely spiritual approach to things is uh too rarified too Earnest too abstract too uh purely ukian and uh the people who are intensely spiritual and don't have any sensuality are always desperately serious colorless lacking in humor and never are able to meet one as man to man with a kind of a friendly Lear in his the eye that's terribly important yes they live at a level of the Frantic intensity I see these two extremes need each other say

spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp and sensuality needs a a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the Stars you know to wonder about the sensualist as such the materialist as such has no Wonder and the Mystic the pure Mystic has no body he's pure alcohol spirit so if then one should say that material is an illusion this seems to be selling out to the spirit people and to the mystics and so Christian Scientists are generally speaking as personalities Totally lacking in in materialism and they're prissy and uh lacking

in color and their churches are very very disagreeable they're all reading desks and they're too bookish and they they have no ritual no ceremonies no no Verve you see it's all cereal and uh likewise um when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism they go into this same Ultra mysticism they start disbelieving in all material Pleasures as crutches and it's very bad to have crutches you see uh you shouldn't take aspirin when You' got a headache you shouldn't wear glasses uh you shouldn't um show dependence on anything you mustn't like your food too

much because that's becoming uh gluttonous so you eat very plain food which is not spiced and You eat it out of a sense of Duty that is to keep the body functioning uh you drink only water because other drinks might cause certain dependences and give you too much pleasure and because the idea is you see you've got to control your mind mind and keep it absolutely calm and still so that you are not dependent on matter and that's all together the wrong approach because uh well I mean it is a game you can play it

is one of these Possible things I mean you can play the Jehovah's Witness game you can play the three speed in three seed in the spirit Baptist game all these are various things which you can play just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or uh fishing or something like that but what happens is you see that the the notion that the material world is an illusion is turned into a judgment of value if it's an illusion therefore it's Bad I ought not to be under this illusion well the reality of the matter

is that if you see that the material world is an illusion you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn't a true materialist therefore is one who knows that material is an illusion then he's not afraid of it then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest because you see if you're a false and a fake materialist what's Happened you've borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac an impressive house a ranch style with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool and you've bought uh a

lot of stock and you somehow wangled the money and borrowed it and you keep lying a away nights wondering if you're going to make the payments well there's no point in that at all what how can you possibly enjoy all those jaars if that's the kind of jaars you want to enjoy you got to worry About whether you pay for it or not and you get hopelessly involved you get commitments here commitments there and find you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself the only way to enjoy material and is to to disbelieve in it

just as one can disbelieve in money uh then you you can have zest for it you see otherwise it's much better to be poor I mean if you if you have no taste For the this kind of life and uh no real interest in it but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons much better to stay poor not have any of that stuff at all so then this is the important thing I'm trying to say material is an illusion but a great illusion and the point is to swing it and not

to run away from it on the one hand or to get stuck on it in the other then you can play with it just like a Wheel going round the wheel is too loose on the axle it wobbles all over the place if it's too tight it won't revolve but you kind of sit loose you see to this thing not too loose though now in what way then is the material world an illusion well we know a lot about this now from our physics and we know that what we call solidity is force contained Force

the agitation of particles or wavicles or whatever they are are at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations so that when I put my foot on the floor the reason it doesn't go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can Penetrate like an airplane propeller you can't put your head through it without getting it chopped off only that if it were going far faster still it wouldn't even cut your head off it

would just be like banging your head against the brick wall and it has to be going fast too within an extraordinarily small and restricted space the airplane propeller is whizzing around through a considerable space in relation to the Size of a head but if it were going much faster but through much smaller spaces you see then it would be like banging your head against the brick wall so what we've got in our so-called physical objective world is um the a behavior of energy where the where matter arises from it through its behavior in restricted spaces

density is a quality of space Rather than a quality of matter if you see what I mean I gave the illustration of the airplane propeller to try and show that so that uh all this is an electronic diaphanous World very similar to uh other creations of electronic patterns the dance of forms on the TV screen the uh rainbow Uh the Aurora Borealis uh it's all fundamentally like that only we are of the same kind of jazz you see our bodies are this dance too and therefore the the the physical world feels real to us in

other words it feels solid because we are something of the same kind if we were on a different wavelength we'd walk right through it in the same way as radio waves come right through the House they are of such a nature that they can penetrate the in the spaces the interstices or uh in some way uh Jazz signals through and uh but we are on the same wavelength you see as the wall and so don't go through it but nevertheless uh the the whole Cosmos is therefore a function of energy or you could say of

light something like light and therefore we and it are all Diaphanous now it's easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren't so dense there's only one other creature as intelligent as man and this lives in a medium that is less dense and this is the dolphin the dolphin is a mammal and many millions of years ago it seems that Dolphins were living on the land but they are very clever and they decided that the land was no Place to live because getting food was difficult and you had to Lug yourself

around and uh there were many many bad shows about the land it had very curious changes of temperature it became unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot and you had in fact to work but no sensible person ever works I never work I get paid for playing and everybody should do that that's the the mark of an educated man Is that eventually he gets a job where he's paid for playing and a worker or a proletarian isn't necessarily a poor man lots of poor I mean a poor man like say uh s morganth or Eric Barker around

here they're not proletarians proletarian is a person who is feted to the process of work that is to say to doing chores every day that he really doesn't like and that aren't in the least interesting in order to go on Living so the PO the the the Dolphins decided this is ridiculous this land existence and they went back to the water and it's pretty easy to fish you see there are plenty of fish in the water and things to eat as we know the ocean is the greatest food supply in the world and when they'd

eaten a few fish or whatever they need they decided just to have a balll so the dolphin can get a breast of a ship get one of the the wakes coming Out on the side can set its tail at an angle of 26° no and be pushed Along by the ship and it's not going anywhere there's no reason to go along there you know as if it had to get to another part of the sea the sea is pretty much the same all through but they're just going boom and they chatter and dance and they

they're they're really highly civilized beings and so uh please don't anybody ever kill dolphins or be unkind to Dolphins because they're exemplary high-minded creatures and we shall soon discover this as soon as we can set up communication with them they will tell us all about it and we will uh then invent new style of civilization based on FR frolic but you see the they they they dance in the in the mode of water now human beings as Toby has pointed Out as their civilization progresses they begin to lose their roots and they are less and

less tied to the land they go into the air and what's going to happen uh as if man develops without blowing himself to bits if he can get over the hurdle you see that dangerous point is that gradually all roads are going to disappear and the Earth will have centers of human habitation you see but No roads they'll be as obsolete as railroad tracks because everybody will fly and once you the the medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of water and as we fly you see on the land your values are

all values of permanence solidity firmness they're architectonic in the sense of our great stone structures pyramids and things like that but in the air and on the water all values are Fluid and what you have to know to be a good Airman is of course Stars like white throats and other migrating birds migrate by the Stars imagine but once you start relating yourself to the Stars you realize that you're living in a universe where directions are all relative and you become a being capable of existing in nons solidity and that's why Buckminster Fuller you know

believed That all Technics and really all culture came from the Sea The Men Who first learned to sail were the wise men he has a fantastic idea that there were initiates great priests who were ship's captains and that though some of their humble Sean didn't know all the secrets but these priests were the first people who knew that the world was round and that uh that gives one an entirely different theology you see and if you Believe that the world is flat and uh so from the the the priests of the ocean the landsmen learned

how to use [Music] cranes blocks and tackles how to build how what a good house an overturned ship made and so to this day a cathedral has a Nave as its Central Auditorium Nave from Latin navis ship showing the connections between ships and the first Temples so Fuller goes on to say now if you're a good architect as the ancient Architects learn from the ocean first thing you should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane Factory and understand the the the beautiful thing that man has made in a

fine fine airplane you see which is as great as a bird in its own way because that's the architecture of insecurity and that really lives with Insecurity well let's have an intermission I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of Illusion the question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not that is to say whether the plot is Comic or tragic and if it's tragic you see is it must we say that it's ultimately Tragic and the question and if it's tragic you see is it must we

say that it's ultimately tragic and the question of who are you and uh are we to say that I myself right down at root am just a little kind of jerk of something kind that really has nothing to do with this Cosmos but just arises in it and is here on sufferance for a short period and then absolutely nothing follows you see or the alternative to that is what I really Am the same as the whole thing that is the works the it or whatever you want to call it Rahman God the da the great

void the Buddha nature I don't care the self anything any name you want and uh whereas that attitude you can look at it from various points of view in judging it you can say it's wishful thinking you can say that it's uh insufferable Pride but the point of the matter is as I tried to show e