ALAN WATTS

 THE PHILOSOPHIES OF ASIA

by

Alan Watts

            CONTENTS

            Introduction

         1. The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy

  11.The Mythology of Hinduism

 111.Eco-Zen

  IV.Swallowing a Ball of Hot Iron

   V.Intellectual Yoga

  VI.Introduction to Buddhism

       VII. The Taoist Way of Karma

                      THE RELEVANCE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER ONE

When I was a small boy I used to haunt section of London around the h
Museum, and one day I came across a shop that had a notice over the
window which said: "Philosophical Instruments." Now even as a boy I knew
something about philosophy, but I could not imagine what philosophical
instruments might be. So I went up to the window and there displayed
were chronometers, slide rules, scales, and all kinds of what we would
now call scientific instruments, but they were philosophical instruments
because science used to be called natural philosophy. Aristotle once
said that
"The beginning of philosophy is wonder." Philosophy is man's expression
of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world
primarily through his intellect; that is to say, his faculty for
thinking. Thinking, of course, is a word used in many ways and is a very
vague word for most people. However, I use the word thinking in a very
precise way. By thinking, as distinct from feeling or emoting or
sensing, I mean the manipulation of symbols-whether they be words,
numbers, or other signs such as triangles, squares, circles,
astrological signs, or whatever. These are symbols, although sometimes
symbols are a little bit more concrete and less abstract than that, as
in the case of a mythological symbol, like a dragon. However, all these
things are symbols, and the manipulation of symbols to represent events
going on in the real world is what I call thinking. Philosophy in the
Western sense generally means an exercise of the intellect, and the
manipulation of the symbols is very largely an exercise of the
intellect, but it does sometimes go beyond that, as in the specific
cases of poetry and music. Yet what philosophy has become today in the
academic world is something that is extremely restricted. Philosophy in
the United States, England, Germany, and France to some extent has
fallen into the realm of two other disciplines: mathematical logic on
the one hand, and linguistics on the other. The departments of
philosophy throughout the academic world have bent over backwards to be
as scientific as possible. As William Earl, who is professor of
philosophy at Northwestern University, said in an essay called
"Notes on the Death of a Culture," "An academic philosopher today must
above all things avoid being edifying. He must never stoop to lying
awake nights considering problems of the nature of the universe and the
destiny of man, because these have largely been dismissed as
metaphysical or meaningless questions. A scientific philosopher arrives
at his office at nine o'clock in the morning dressed in a business suit
carrying a briefcase. He does philosophy until five in the afternoon, at
which point he goes home to cocktails and dinner and dismisses the whole
matter from his head." Professor Earl adds, "He would wear a white coat
to work if he could get away with it." Of course this critique is a
little exaggerated, but by and large this is what departmental academic
philosophy has become, and Oriental philosophy is simply not philosophy
in that sense. These things, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, are
sometimes also called religions. I question the application of that word
to them because I like to use the word religion rather strictly. Now I
am not going to be so bold as to venture a definition of religion that
is supposed to be true for all time. All I can do is tell you how I use
the word, and I wish to use it in an exact sense from its Latin root
which really means "a bond or rule of life." Therefore, the most correct
use of the word religion is when we say of a man or woman that he or she
has "gone into" religion; that is to say, has joined a religious or
monastic order and is living under a rule of life or is living a life of
obedience. For if Christianity is a religion, if Judaism is a religion,
and if Islam is a religion, they are based on the idea of man's obedient
response to a divine revelation. Thus religion, as we understand it in
these three forms of religion, consists really of three things we will
call the three c's: the creed, the code, and the cult. The creed is the
divinely revealed map of the universe or the nature of things. It is the
revelation of the existence of God, of Allah, of Yahweh, or as we say,
God, by His existence, by His will, and in His design of the universe.

That is the creed. To this we add the second c, the code, and this is
the divinely revealed law, or exemplar, which man is supposed to follow.

In the case of Christianity there is a certain variation in this because
the principal revelation of the code in Christianity, as well as the
cult, is not so much a law as a person. In Christianity, God is said to
be supremely revealed in the historic Jesus of Nazareth.. So the code
here becomes really the following of Jesus of Nazareth, but not so much
an obedience to a law as through the power of divine grace. Then,
finally, there is the cult, and this is the divinely revealed method or
way of worship by which man relates himself to God through prayers,
rites, and sacraments. In these particular religions these methods are
not supposed to be so much man's way of worshipping God, as God's way of
loving Himself in which man is involved. So, in the Christian religion
in the Mass we would say that we worship God with God's own worship,
following the saying of that great German mystic, Meister Eckhardt: "The
love with which I love God is the same love wherewith God loves me." So,
too, when monks in a monastery recite the divine office, the psalms are
supposed to be the songs of the Holy Spirit, and so in using the psalms
the idea is that you worship God with God's own words, and thereby
become a sort of flute through which the divine breath plays. Now
neither Hinduism, Buddhism, nor Taoism can possibly be called religions
in this sense, because all three of them significantly lack the virtue
of obedience. They do not concede the godhead as related to mankind or
to the universe in a monarchical sense. There are various models of the
universe which men have used from time to time, and the model that lies
behind the judeoChristian tradition, if there really is such a thing, is
a political model. It borrows the metaphor of the relation of an ancient
Near Eastern monarch to his subjects, and he imposes his authority and
his will upon his subjects from above by power, whether it be physical
power or spiritual power. It is thus that in the Anglican Church, when
the priest at morning prayer addresses the throne of grace he says,
"Almighty and everlasting God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only
ruler of princes, Who dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon
earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our
sovereign majesty, Elizabeth the Queen and all the royal family." Now,
what are these words? This is the language of court flattery, and the
title

"King of Kings," as a title of God, was borrowed from the Persian
emperors. "Lord have mercy upon us," is an image drawn from things
earthly and applied to things heavenly. God is the monarch, and
therefore between the monarch and the subject there is a certain
essential difference of kind, what we might call an ontological
difference. God is God, and all those creatures, whether angels or men
or other kinds of existence that God has created, are not God. There is
this vast metaphysical gulf lying between these two domains. That gives
us, as citizens of a democracy, some problems. As a citizen of the
United States you believe that a republic is the best form of
government. Yet how can this be maintained if the government of the
universe is a monarchy? Surely in that case a monarchy will be the best
form of government. Many of the conflicts in our society arise from the
fact that although we are running a republic, many of the members of
this republic believe (or believe that they ought to believe) that the
universe is a monarchy. Therefore, they are, above all, insistent upon
obedience to law and order, and if there should be democracy in the
Kingdom of God, that would seem to them the most subversive idea ever
conceived. Now I am exaggerating this standpoint a little bit just for
effect. There are some subtle modifications which one can introduce
theologically, but I will not go into them at the moment. There are at
least two other models of the universe which have been highly
influential in human history. One is dramatic, where God is not the
skillful maker of the world standing above it as its artificer and King,
but where God is the actor of the world as an actor of a stage play-the
actor who is playing all the parts at once. In essence this is the Hindu
model of the universe. Everybody is God in a mask, and of course our own
word "person" is from the Latin, persona: "That through which comes
sound." This word was used for the masks worn by actors in the
Greco-Roman theater, which being an open-air theater required a
projection of the voice. The word person has, however, in the course of
time, come to mean "the real you." In Hindu thought, every individual as
a person is a mask; fundamentally this is a mask of the godhead-a mask
of a godhead that is the actor behind all parts and the player of all
games. That is indefinable for the same reason that you cannot bite your
own teeth. You can never get at it for the same reason that you cannot
look straight into your own eyes: It is in the middle of everything, the
circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. A
third model of the universe, which is characteristically Chinese, views
the world as an organism, and a world which is an organism has no boss,
and even no actor. This is because in any organism there is not really a
boss or "top organ." In our culture we are accustomed,of course, to
think of our head as ruling the rest of the body, but there could well
be an argument about this. I am going to put up a case that the stomach
is chief because the stomach, the sort of alimentary tract with a
digesting process in it, is surely anterior to brains. There may be some
sort of rudimentary nervous system attached to a stomach organization,
but the more primitive you are, the more you are a little creature that
eats. It is a sort of tube, and in go things at one end and out the
other, and because that wears the tube out the tube finds means of
reproducing itself to make more tubes so that this process of in and out
can be kept up. However, in the course of evolution, at one end of the
tube developed a ganglion that eventually developed eyes and ears with a
brain in it. So the stomach's point of view is that the brain is the
servant of the stomach to help it scrounge around for food. The other
argument is this: true, the brain is a later development than the
alimentary tract, but the alimentary tract is to the brain as John the
Baptist to Jesus Christ, the forerunner of the "big event," and the
reason for all the scrounging around is eventually to evolve a brain.

Eventually man shall live primarily for the concerns of the brain, that
is, for art and science and all forms of culture, and the stomach shall
be servant. Now cynical people, like dialectical materialists, say that
this is a lot of hogwash. Really, all history is a matter of economics,
and that is a matter of the stomach. It is a big argument, and you
cannot decide it because you cannot at this stage have a stomach without
a brain or a brain without a stomach. They go together like a back and a
front. So, the principle of organism is rather like this: an organism is
a differentiated system, but it has no parts. That is to say, the heart
is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor is part of an
automobile engine. These are not parts in the sense that they are
screwed in. When the fetus arises in the womb there are not a lot of
mechanics in there lugging in hearts and stomachs and so forth, and
fitting them together and screwing them to each other. An organism
develops like a crystal in solution or a photographic plate in
chemicals. It develops all over at once, and there isn't a boss in it.

It all acts together in a strange way and it is a kind of orderly
anarchy. Fundamentally, this is the Chinese view of the world, the
principle of organic growth they call tao, pronounced "dow." This
Chinese word is usually translated as "the course of nature," or "the
way," meaning the way it does it, or the process of things. That is
again really very different from the Western idea of God the Ruler. Of
the tao Lao-tzu says, 'The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left
and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not ford
it over them. When merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them."

And so, the Chinese expression for nature becomes a word that we will
translate as "of itself so." It is what happens of itself, like when you
have hiccoughs. You do not plan to have hiccoughs, it just happens. When
your heart beats, you do not plan it; it happens of itself. When you
breathe, you cannot pretend that you are breathing. Most of the time you
are not thinking about it, and your lungs breathe of themselves. So the
whole idea that nature is something happening of itself without a
governor is the organic theory of the world. So, these are the two other
theories of nature that we are going to consider in the study of
Oriental philosophy: the dramatic theory and the organic theory. I feel
that ways of life that use these models are so unlike Christianity,
Judaism, or Islam, that we cannot really use the word "religion" to
describe these things. Now, what is there in Western culture that
resembles the concerns of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism? The trouble
is, on the surface, they look alike. In other words, if you go into a
Hindu temple or a special Japanese Buddhist temple you will be pretty
convinced you are in church (in sort of a Catholic church, at that,
because there is incense, chants, bowings, gongs, candles, rosaries, and
all the things that one associates with a theistic, monarchical
religion). Yet, that is not what is going on. Even though the image of
Buddha may be sitting on a throne, covered with a canopy, and royal
honors being done, there is no factor of obedience. Probably the nearest
thing to these ways of life in the West is, perhaps, psychotherapy in
some form, although not all forms of psychotherapy. The objective of
psychotherapy is, as you might say, to change your state of
consciousness. If you, in other words, are horribly depresse an you are
terrified, or if you are having hallucinations, you see a "head
shrinker" and he tries to change your state of consciousness.

Fundamentally, these Oriental disciplines are concerned basically with
changing your state of consciousness. However, here we part company
because psychotherapy is largely focused on the problems of the
individual as such, the problems particular to this individual or that
individual. Instead, these Asian ways of life are focused on certain
problems peculiar to man as such, and to every individual on the
understanding that the average human being (and the more civilized he is
the more this is true) is hallucinating. The average human being has a
delusive sense of his own existence, and it is thus that the very word
"Buddha," in Buddhism, is from a root in Sanskrit, buddb, which means to
awaken. To awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change
of consciousness with regard to one's own existence. It is to cease
being under the impression that you are just "poor little me," and to
realize who you really are, or wbat you really are behind the mask. But
there is a difficulty in this. You can never get to see what the basic
self is. It is always and forever elusive. And so, if I ask you, "Who
are you really?" And you say, "Well, I am John Doe."

"Oh? Ha-ha! You think so? John Doe, tell me: How do you happen to have
blue eyes?"

"Well," you say, "I do not know. I did not make my eyes."

"Oh, you didn't? Who else?"

"Well, I have no idea how it is done."

"You have to have an idea how it is done to be able to do it? After all,
you can open and close your hand perfectly easily. And you say, 'I know
how to open my hand. I know how to close my hand because I can do it.'
But how do you do it?"

"I do not know. I am not a physiologist."

"A physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he cannot do it any
better than you can. So, you are opening and closing your hand, are you
not? Yet you do not know how you do it. Maybe you are 'blue-ing' your
eyes, too! You do not know how you do it, because when you say 'I do not
know how I do it,' all you are saying is, 'I do know bow to do it, but I
cannot put it into words!"' I cannot, in other words, translate the
activity called "opening and closing my hand" into an exact system of
symbols, that is, into thinking. If you actually could translate the
opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols, it
would take forever because trying to understand the world purely by
thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific
Ocean out of a one-pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a
time, and in thinking about things you can only think one thought at a
time. Like writing, thinking is a linear process, one thought after
another in a series. You can only think of one thing at a time, but that
is too slow for understanding anything at all and much too slow to
understand everything. Our sensory input is much more than any kind of
one thing at a time, and we respond with a certain aspect of our minds
to the total sensory input that is coming in, only we are not
consciously aware of it. Nevertheless, you are doing it, but what kind
of "you" is this? It certainly is not John Doe. It is not that little
ego freak. There is a lot more to you than you think there is, and that
is why the Hindu would say that the real you is the Self, (but with a
capital S), the Self of the universe. At that level of one's existence
one is not really separate from everything else that is going on. We
have something here which I will not call philosophy except in the most
ancient sense of basic curiosity. I prefer to call these disciplines
ways of liberation. These are ways of liberation from maya, and the
following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying
anything, or on doing any specific rituals (although rituals are
included for certain purposes because it is a purely experimental
approach to life). This is something like a person who has defective
eyesight and is seeing spots and all sorts of illusions, and goes to an
ophthalmologist to correct his vision.

Buddhism is, therefore, a corrective of psychic vision. It is to be
disenthralled by the game of maya. It is not, incidentally, to regard
the maya as something evil, but to regard it as a good thing of which
one can have too much, and therefore one gets psychic and spiritual
indigestion-from which we all suffer. Now then, I am going to go into
the very fundamental guts of Hinduism and certain documents that are
known as the Upanishads. These documents constitute what is called
Vedanta, and that is compounded of two words, veda anta. Anta means
"end," or completion or summation, and Veda is, of course, related to
the Latin videre, to see. Veda is the fundamental revelation of the
Hindu way of life contained in its earliest scriptural documents, which
are generally dated in the period between 1500 and 1200 Bc. The
Upanishads have been the summation of the Veda from over a long period
of time, beginning perhaps as early as 800 BC., although some of the
Upanishads are much later than that. However, there is always a doubt in
connection with the dating of any Hindu text because unlike the Hebrews,
the Hindus have absolutely no sense of history. They view time as
circular, as something that just goes round and round again and again,
so that what happens today is on the whole very much like what happened
yesterday, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. They view
life as a repetitious process of cycles and so there is very little
internal evidence in Hindu manuscripts to give us dates between which we
can say it must have been written because they were not interested in
references to contemporary events. In fact, until relatively recent
times, history was little more than keeping chronicles, and the Hindus
were less interested in keeping chronicles than the Chinese. In all
there is a great deal of vagueness, and this is compounded by the fact
that many of these scriptures were for hundreds of years handed down
orally and memorized before being committed to writing. So there is a
great deal of vagueness as to how old the tradition is with which we are
dealing and it may be earlier or later than the scholars generally
suppose. However it seems there was a migration into the Indian
subcontinent by peoples from the north who called themselves Aryans,
which may have occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 to 1200
BC., and they brought with them the faded tradition that merged with
whatever aboriginal religions or ways of life that were existing on the
subcontinent at that time, and produced the complex which today we call
Hinduism. I am not going into the Vedas because they comprise a
complicated piece of symbolical interpretation having to do with the
rites, the hymns, and the myths of the various so-called gods of the
Hindu pantheon. In the philosophy of the Upanishads these gods are seen
simply as so many different manifestations of one basic principle, which
is called brabman, derived from the root bra, which means to expand or
to grow. Brahman is also called atman, or paramatman, the supreme
self-the "which that which there is no whicher." The basic position of
the Upanishads is that the self is the one and only reality without
another, and that all this universe is finally brahman. The universe
appears to be a multiplicity of different things and different events
only by reason of maya, which is illusion, magic, art, or creative
power. Brahman is considered under two aspects: one is called nirguna,
and the other saguna. The word una in each case, meaning quality or
attribute, and nir, being a negative, nirguna is brahman considered
without attribute, while saguna is brahman being considered as having
attributes. In Christian theology there are exact equivalents to these
terms, which you have probably never heard of. The former is called the
apopbatic way of speaking, a Greek term, and the other is the
catopbatic. When a Christian speaks of God as the father, he is speaking
catophatically, that is to say by analogy. No theologian in his right
mind thinks that God is a cosmic male parent. All a theologian intends
to say is God is like a father. Even when it is said "God is light,"
that is still catophatic language. God is like light, but he is not
light. The apophatic language states what God is not, so such terms as
"eternal," which means nontemporal, infinite, or without limitation, are
in this sense negative. When the Hindu speaks most deeply of the
ultimate reality of the universe, he applies the phrase neti, neti,
meaning approximately "no, no," or "not this, not this." In other words,
reality-basic reality-eludes all positive conceptualization whatsoever
for the very good reason that it is what you are most basically. That is
why the Hindu describes in the Vedanta doctrine of the Upanishads the
basic energy of the universe as "the unknown." It is never an object of
knowledge, and so it is said in the Kena Upanisbad that if you think
that you understand what brahman is, you do not understand. However if
you do not understand, then you understand. For the way brahman is known
is that brahman is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who
know it not. Now that sounds completely illogical, but translated into
familiar terms you would say that your head is effective only so long as
it does not get in the way of your eyesight. If you see spots in front
of your eyes, they interfere with vision. If you hear singing and
humming in your ears, you are hearing your ears, and that interferes
with hearing. An effective ear is inaudible to itself and then it hears
everything else. That is just another way of saying the same thing, and
when we translate it into sensory terms it is not all paradoxical. It is
basic to Vedanta that brahman, this intangible, nonobjective ground of
everything that exists, is identical with the ground of you. This is put
in the formula tat tvam asi. Tat is the same as our word "that." Tvam is
the same as the Latin tuus, "thou;" asi is "at." We should translate
that into a modern American idiom as

"You're it." This, of course, is a doctrine that is very difficult for
those brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditions to accept, because it
is fundamental to Christian and Jewish theology that whatever you are,
you are surely not the Lord God. Therefore, Christians feel that the
Hindu doctrine-that we are all fundamentally masks of God-is pantheism,
and that is a dirty word in Christian theological circles because of the
feeling that if everything is God then all moral standards are blown to
hell. It means everything is as good as everything else. Since
everything that happens is really God, this must include the good things
and the bad things, and that seems to them a very dangerous idea.
Actually, when viewed from a social perspective, all religious doctrines
contain very, very dangerous ideas. However, we will not worry about
that for the moment because what the Hindu means by God, when he says
Brahman, is not at all the same thing as what a Jew means by the Lord
Adonai, because to the Jew and the Christian it means the boss, to whom
divine honors are due as above all others. The Hindu, on the other hand,
does not mean the boss. He does not mean the King or the Lord as the
political ruler of the universe. He means the inmost energy, which, as
it were, dances this whole universe without the idea of an authority of
governing some intractable element that resists his or its power. If a
Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has
discovered that he is God, we put him in the loony bin because it is
unfashionable to burn people for heresy anymore.

However, in India if you announce that you are the Lord God, they say,
"Well, of course! How nice that you found out," because everybody is.

Why then does a great problem arise? Why does it appear that we are not?

Why do we think? Why do we have the sensory impression that this whole
universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things, and we do
not see it all as one? Consider though, what do you think it would be
like to see it all as one? I know a lot of people who study Oriental
philosophy and look into attaining these great states of consciousness,
which the Hindus call nirvana, moksba, and what a Zen Buddhist would
call liberation or satori (their word for enlightenment or awakening).

Now what would it be like to have that? How would you feel if you saw
everything as really one basic reality? Well, a lot of people think that
it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of
vision suddenly became vague and melted away and we saw only a kind of
luminous sea of light. However, rather advisedly, the Vedanta philosophy
does not seriously use the word "one" of the supreme self because the
word and idea "one" has its opposite "many" on one side, and another
opposite, "none," on the other. It is fundamental to Vedanta that the
supreme self is neither one nor many, but as they say, non-dual, and
they express that in this word advita. A is a negative word like non.

Dvita is from dva, same as the Latin duo, two. So advita is non-dual. At
first this is a difficult conception because naturally, a Western
logician would say, "But the non-dual is the opposite of the dual.

Therefore, it has an opposite." This is true, but the Hindu is using
this term in a special sense. On a flat surface I have only two
dimensions in which to operate so that everything drawn in two
dimensions has only two dimensions. How, therefore, on a two-dimensional
level, can I draw in three dimensions? How, in logic, is it humanly
rational to think in terms of a unity of opposites? All rational
discourse is talk about the classification of experiences, of
sensations, of notions, and the nature of a class is that it is a box.

If a box has an inside, it has to have an outside. "Is you is or is you
ain't?" is fundamental to all classifications, and we cannot get out of
it. We cannot talk about a class of all classes and make any sense of
it. However, on this two-dimensional level, we can create, by using a
convention of perspective, the understanding of a third dimension. If I
draw a cube, you are trained to see it in three dimensions, but it is
still in two. However, we have the understanding that the slanting lines
are going out through the back to another square, which is behind the
first one, even though we are still on two dimensions. The Hindu
understands this term advita as distinct from the term @4 one' to refer
to that dimension. So when you use the word advita, you are speaking
about something beyond duality, as when you use those slanting lines you
are understood to be indicating a third dimension which cannot really be
reproduced on a two-dimensional surface. That is the trick. It is almost
as if whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference on the
surface covering an implicit unity. Only it is very difficult to talk
about what it is that unifies black and white. (Of course, in a way the
eyes do. Sound and silence are unified by the cars). If you cannot have
one without the other, it is like the north and south poles of a magnet.

You cannot have a one-pole magnet. True, the poles are quite different;
one is north and the other is south, but it is all one magnet. This is
what the Hindu is moving into when he is speaking of the real basis or
ground of the universe as being non-dual. Take, for example, the
fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel, between self and
other-I and thou-I and it. There is something that is me; there is an
area of my experience that I call myself. And there is another area of
my experience which I call not myself. But you will immediately see that
neither one could be realized without the other. You would not know what
you meant by self unless you experience something other than self. You
would not know what you meant by other unless you understood self. They
go together. They arise at the same time. You do not have first self and
then other, or first other and then self; they come together. And this
shows the sneaky conspiracy underneath the two, like the magnet between
the two different poles. So it is more or less that sort of
what-is-not-classifiable (that which lies between all classes). The
class of elephants opposite the class of non-elephants has, as it were,
the walls of the box joining the two together, just, as your skin is an
osmotic membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all
the tubes in it, and the nerve ends, and the way in which the external
energies flow through your skin into your insides and vice versa. But we
do see and feel and sense-or at least we think we do-that the world is
divided into a great multiplicity. A lot of people would think of it as
a collection of different things, a kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam
washed together in this particular area of space, and prefer to take a
pluralistic attitude and not see anything underlying. In fact, in
contemporary logical philosophy, the notion of any basic ground or
continuum in which all events occur would be considered meaningless for
obvious reasons. if I say that every body in this universe-every star,
every planet-is moving in a certain direction at a uniform speed, that
will be saying nothing at all, unless I can point out some other object
with respect to which they are so moving. But since I said the universe,
that includes all objects whatsoever. Therefore, 1 cannot make a
meaningful statement about the uniform behavior of everything that is
going on. So in the same way that your eardrum is basic to all that you
hear, the lens of the eye and retina are basic to all that you see. What
is the color of the lens of the eye? We say it has no color; it is
transparent in the same way that a mirror has no color of its own, but
the mirror is very definitely there, colorless as it may be. The
eardrum, unheard as it may be, is very definitely basic to hearing. The
eye, transparent as it may be, is very definitely very basic to seeing.

So therefore, if there were some continuum in which everything that is
going on and everything that we experience occurs, we would not notice
it. We would not be able, really, to say very much about it except,
perhaps, that it was there. It would not make any difference to
anything, except for the one all-important difference that if it was not
there, there would not be any differences. But, you see, philosophers
these days do not like to think about things like that. It stretches
their heads and they would rather preoccupy themselves with more
pedestrian matters. But still, you cannot help it; if you are a human
being you wonder about things like that. What is it in which everything
is happening? What is the ground? Well, you say, "Obviously it is not a
what because a thing that is a what is a classifiable thing." And so,
very often the Hindu and the Buddhist will refer to the ultimate reality
as no thing, not nothing, but no special thing, unclassifiable. You
cannot put your finger on it, but it is you. It is what you basically
are, what everything basically is, just as the sound of an automobile
horn on the radio is in one way an automobile horn but basically it is
the vibration of the speaker diaphragm. So we are all in the Hindu view
"vibrations of the entire cosmic diaphragm." Of course, that is analogy,
and I am using catophatic language from the point of Christianity. The
best language is to say nothing but to experience it. The nub of all
these Oriental philosophies is not an idea, not a theory, not even a way
of behaving, but it is basically a way of experiencing a transformation
of everyday consciousness so that it becomes quite apparent to us that
that is the way things are. When it happens to you it is very difficult
to explain it. So in exactly the same way, when somebody has the sort of
breakthrough that transforms his consciousness (and it happens all over
the world, it is not just a Hindu phenomenon), somebody suddenly
realizes it is all one, or technically non-dual, and really all this
coming and going, all this frantic living and dying-grabbing and
struggling, fighting and suffering-all this is like a fantastic
phantasmagoria. He sees that, but when he tries to explain it he finds
his mouth is not big enough because he cannot get the words out of their
dualistic pattern to explain something non-dualistic. But why is this
so? Why are we under this great, magnificent hallucination? Well, the
Hindus explain this in saguna language as follows. It is a very nice
explanation; a child can understand it. The fact of the matter is the
world is a game of hide-and-seek. Peek-a-boo! Now you see it, now you do
not, because very obviously if you were the supreme self, what would you
do? I mean, would you just sit there and be blissfully one for ever and
ever and ever? No, obviously not. You would play games. You would,
because the very nature of a no energy system is that it has no energy
system unless it lets go of itself. So you would let go of yourself and
you would get lost. You would get involved in all sorts of adventures
and you would forget who you were, just as when you play a game. And
although you are only playing for dimes or chips, you get absorbed in
the game. There is nothing really important to win, nothing really
important to lose, and yet it becomes fantastically interesting, who
wins and who loses. And so in the same way it is said that the supreme
self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call
the different beings in the plot, just like an artist or a writer gets
completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he is doing, or an
actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama. At first we know it is a
drama. We go to a play and we say, "It is only a play,' and the
proscenium arch tells us that what happens behind that arch is not for
real, just a show. But the great actor is going to make you forget it is
just a show. He is going to have you sitting on the edge of your chair;
he is going to have you crying; he is going to have you trembling
because he almost persuades you that it is real. What would happen if
the very best actor was confronted by the very best audience? Why, they
would be taken in completely, and the one would confirm the other. So,
this is the idea of the universe as drama, that the fundamental self,
the saguna brahman, plays this game, gets involved in being all of us,
and does it so darn well, so superbly acted, that the thing appears to
be real. And we are not only sitting on the edge of our chair, but we
start to get up and throw things. We join in the drama and it all
becomes whatever is going on here, you see? Then, of course, at the end
of the drama, because all things have to have an end that have a
beginning, the curtain goes down and the actors retire to the greenroom.

And there the villain and the hero cease to be villain and hero, and
they are just the actors. And then they come out in front of the curtain
and they stand in a row, and the audience applauds the villain along
with the hero, the villain as having been a good villain and the hero as
having been a great hero. The play is over and everybody heaves a sigh
of relief: "Well, that was a great show, wasn't it?" So the idea of the
greenroom is the same as the nirguna brahman; that behind the whole show
there are no differentiations of I and thou, subject and object, good
and evil, light and darkness, life and death. But within the sphere of
the saguna brahman all these differentiations appear because that is out
in front that is on the stage, and no good actor when on the stage
performs his own personality. That is what is wrong with movie stars. A
person is cast to act a role that corresponds to his alleged
personality. But a great actor can assume any personality, male or
female, and suddenly convert himself right in front of the audience into
somebody who takes you in entirely. But in the greenroom he is his usual
self. So Hinduism has the idea that as all the conventions of drama go
right along with it, that all this world is a big act, lila, the play of
the supreme self, and is therefore compared to a dream-to a passing
illusion, and you should not, therefore, take it seriously. You may take
it sincerely, perhaps, as an actor may be sin cere in his acting, but
not seriously, because that means it throws you for a loop (although
that, of course is involved). We do take it seriously. But, this is one
of the great questions you have to ask yourself when you really get down
to the nitty-gritty about your own inmost core: Are you serious, or do
you know deep within you that you are a put-on?

THE MYTHOLOGY OF HINDUISM

CHAPTER TWO

I want to start out by explaining quite carefully what I mean by
mythology. The word is very largely used to mean fantasy, or something
that is definite6-ly not fact, and it's used therefore in a pejorative,
or put-down, sense. So that when you call something a mythology or a
myth, it means you don't think much of it. But the word is used by
philosophers and scholars in quite another sense, where to speak in the
language of myth is to speak in images rather than to speak in what you
might call plain language, or descriptive language. You can sometimes
say more things with images than you can say with concepts. As a matter
of fact, images are really at the root of thinking. One of the basic
waysin which we think is by analogy. We think that the life of human
beings might be compared to the seasons of the year. Now, there are many
important differences between a human life and the cycle of the seasons,
but nevertheless, one talks about the winter of life and the spring of
life, and so the image becomes something that is powerful in our
thinking. Furthermore, when we try to think philosophically in abstract
concepts about the nature of the universe, we often do some very weird
things. It is considered nowadays naive to think of God as an old
gentleman with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne and is
surrounded with winged angels. We say, "Now, no sensible person could
possibly believe that God is just like that." Therefore, if you become
more sophisticated and you follow Saint Thomas Aquinas, you think of God
as "necessary being." If you think with Buddhists you think of God as
the undifferentiated void, or as the infinite essence. But actually,
however rarefied those concepts sound, they are just as anthropomorphic,
that is to say, just as human and in the form of the human mind, as the
picture of God as the old gentleman with the white beard, or as d'Lord
in the old television show Green Pastures, wearing a top hat and smoking
a cigar. All ideas about the world, whether they be religious,
philosophical, or scientific, are translations of the physical world and
of worlds beyond the physical into the terms and shapes of the human
mind. There is no such thing as a nonanthropomorphic idea. The advantage
of d'Lord in talking about these things is that nobody takes it quite
seriously, whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be
taken seriously. That would be a great mistake, because you would think
you understood what the ultimate reality is. So, I am going to use very
largely naive mythological terms to discuss these matters. If you are a
devout Christian, you must not be offended by this. You will naturally
think that you have risen now to a more superior idea of these things
than these very simple terms derived from the imagery of the Bible and
the medieval church. I shall discuss Hinduism in the same way, and I am
going to begin with Hinduism to give you a sort of fundamental account
of what it is all about. I imagine some of you were present at the
lecture I gave in the university on religion and art, in which I
discussed the view of the world as drama. Now I want to go more
thoroughly into this, because the Hindu view of the universe is
fundamentally based on the idea of drama, that is to say, of an actor
playing parts. The basic actor in this drama is called Brahma, and this
word comes from the Sanskrit root bra, which means 44 to swell or
expand." The Hindu idea of Brahma, the Supreme Being, is linked with the
idea of the self. In you, deep down you feel that there is what you call
"I," and when you say

"I am," that in Sanskrit is aham. And everybody, when asked what his
name is, replies, "I am 1. I am 1, myself." So, there is the thought
that in all life, the self is the fundamental thing; it means the
center. The Brahma is looked upon as the self and the center of the
whole universe, and the fundamental idea is that there is only one self.
Each one of us is that self, only it radiates like a sun or a star. So,
just as the sun has innumerable rays, or just as you can focus the whole
sun through a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one point, or as an
octopus has many tentacles, or as a sow has many tits, so, in these
ways, Brahma is wearing all faces that exist, and they are all the masks
of Brahma. They are not only human faces but also animal faces, insect
faces, vegetable faces, and mineral faces; everything is the supreme
self playing at being that. The fundamental process of reality is,
according to the Hindu myth, hide-and-seek, or lost and found. That is
the basis of all games. When you start to play with a baby, you take out
a book and you hide your face behind it. Then you peek out at the baby,
and then you peek out the other way, and the baby begins to giggle,
because a baby, being near to the origins of things, knows intuitively
that hide-and-seek is the basis of it all.

Children like to sit in a high chair, to have something on the tray, and
"make it gone.' Then somebody picks it up and puts it back, and they
make it gone again. Now then, that is a very sensible arrangement. It is
called in Sanskrit lila, and that means "sport" or "play 5 " but the
play is hide-and-seek. Now, let's go a little bit into the nature of
hide-and-seek. I don't want to insult your intelligence by telling you
some of the most elementary things that exist, but, really, everything
is a question of appearing and disappearing. For example, if I sit next
to the object of my desire and I put my hand on the person's knee and
leave it there, after a while they will cease to notice it. But if I
gently pat them on the knee because now I'm there and now I'm not, it
will be more noticeable. So, all reality is a matter of coming and
going. It is vibration, like a wave of positive and negative
electricity. It is up and down, and things like wood appear to be solid,
much in the same way that the blades of a fastmoving electric fan appear
to be solid. So, the vast agitation that is going on in the electrical
structure of solid things is a terrific agitation that will not allow
the agitation called my hand to go through it. Other kinds of agitation,
like X rays, are so constructed that they can get through. So,
everything is basically coming and going. Take, for example, sound. If
you listen to sound and slow the sound down, just as when you look with
a magnifying glass you find that solid things are full of holes, when
you magnify sound you find it is full of silences. Sound is
sound-silence. There is no such thing as pure sound, just as there is no
such thing as pure something-something always goes together with
nothing. Solids are always found in spaces, and no spaces are found
except where there are solids. You might imagine there being a space
without any solid in it, but you will never, never encounter one,
because you will be there in the form of a solid to find out about it.

They go together, these things, solid and space. The positive and the
negative and the "here we are and here we aren't" all go together in the
same way, like the back and front of a coin. You can't have a coin that
has a back and no front. The only thing that gets anywhere near that is
a Mobius strip, which is a mathematical construct in which the back and
the front are the same, but that only shows in a more vivid way how
backs and fronts go together. So, the whole thing is based on that. Now,
once we have this game there are two different things, but they are
really the same. The Brahma is what is basic, but the Brahma manifests
itself in what are called the dvanva, and that makes the pairs of
opposites (duality). Dva is the Sanskrit word for "two," which becomes
duo in Latin and dual in English. Two is the basis, and you cannot go
behind two, because one has an opposite: the opposite of one is none.

Now, what is in common between one and none? No one can sayyou can't
mention it. It is called Brahma, and it is sometimes called om. Yet you
can't really think of what is in common between black and white, because
there is obviously a conspiracy between black and white; they are always
found together. Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle, and
there is always an agreement underlying this difference; that is what we
call implicit, but the difference is explicit. So, the first step in
what you might call the hide phase of the game of hide-andseek is to
lose sight of the implicit unity between black and white, yes and no,
and existence and nonexistence. Losing sight of the fundamental unity is
called Maya, a word that means many things, but primarily it means
"creative power," or "magic," and also "illusion"-the illusion that the
opposites are really separate from each other. Once you think that they
are really separate from each other you can have a very thrilling game.

The game is, "Oh dear, black might win," or

"We must be quite sure that white wins." Now, which one ought to win?
When you look at this page, you would say the reality here is the
writing; that is what is significant. Yet there are many other patterns
that you can find in which you are undecided in your mind as to which is
the figure and which is the background. It could be a black design on a
white sheet, or it could be a white design on a black sheet, and the
universe is very much like that. Space, or the background of things, is
not nothing, but people tend to be deceived about this. If I draw a
circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say that I have
drawn a circle, or a disk, or a ball. Very few people will ever suggest
that I have drawn a hole in a wall, because people think of the inside
first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides
go together-you cannot have what is "in here" unless you have what is
"out there." All artists, architects, and people concerned with the
organization of space think quite as much about the background behind
things and containing things as they do about the things so contained.
It is all significant and it is all important, but the game is

"Let's pretend that this doesn't exist." So, this is the pretending:
"Oh, black might win,' or "Oh, white might win." This is the foundation
of all the great games that human beings play-ofcheckers, of chess, and
of the simple children's games of hide-and-seek. It is, of course, the
tradition of chess that white gets the first move, because black is the
side of the devil. All complications and all possibilities of life lie
in this game of black and white. In the beginning of the game, the two
pairs are divided, that is to say, dismemberedcut, to separate. In the
end of the game, when everything comes together, they are re-membered.
To dismember is to hide, or to lose. To remember is to seek and to find.
In Hindu mythology, Brahma plays this game through periods of time
called kalpas, and every kalpa is 4,320,000 years long. For one kalpa he
forgets who he is and manifests himself as the great actor of all of us.
Then, for another kalpa, he wakes up; he remembers who he is and is at
peace. So, the period in which he manifests the worlds is called a
manavantara, and the period in which he withdraws from the game is
called a pralaya.

These go on and on forever and ever, and it never becomes boring,
because the forgetting period makes you forget everything that has
happened before. For example, although it inherits genes from the most
distant past, each time a baby is born it confronts the world anew and
is astonished and surprised at everything. As you get old, you become
heavy with memories, like a book that people have written on, as if you
were to go on writing on a page and eventually the whole thing were to
become black. Then, you would have to take out white chalk and start
writing that way. Well, that would be like the change between life and
death. In popular Hinduism, it is believed that each of us contains not
only the supreme self-the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks
out from all eyes and hears through all ears-but also an individualized
self. This self reincarnates from life to life in a sort of progressive
or a regressive way, according to your karinathe Sanskrit word that
means "your doing," from the root kre, "to do." There is a time, then,
in which we become involved and get more and more tied up in the toils
of the world, and are more subject to desire and to passions and to
getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb. Then, there follows a
later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually
evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man, a mukti. A mukti
is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or
liberation, where he has found himself. He knows who he is. He knows
that he, deep down in himself (and that you, deep down in yourself) are
all the one central self, and that this whole apparent differentiation
of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion. Now, this
is a dramatic idea. In drama, we have a convention of the proscenium
arch on the stage and we have a convention of onstage and offstage.

There is the curtain, or backdrop, in front of which the actors appear,
and behind that there is a dressing room, called the greenroom. In the
greenroom, they put on and take off their masks. in Latin the word for
the masks worn by the players in classical drama is persona. The Latin
word per means "through," and sona means "sound"-that through which the
sound comes, because the mask had a megaphone-shaped mouth that would
"throw" the sound in an open-air theater. So, dramatis personae, the
list of the players in a play, is the list of masks that are going to be
worn. Insofar as we now speak about the real self in any human being as
the person by inquiring, "Are you a real person?" we have inverted the
meaning of the word. We have made the "mask" word mean "the real player
underneath," and that shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion.

The whole point of aplay is for the actor to use his skill to persuade
the audience, despite the fact that the audience knows it's at the play,
and to have them sitting on the edge of their chairs, weeping or in
terror because they think it is real. Of course, the Hindu idea is that
the greatest of all players, the master player behind the whole scene,
who is putting on the big act called existence, is so good an actor that
he takes himself in. He is at once the actor and the audience, and he is
enchanted by his playing. So, the word maya, or illusion, also means "to
be enchanted." Do you know what to be enchanted is? It is to be
listening to a chant and to be completely involved in it-or perhaps
amazed. What is it to be amazed? It is to be caught in a maze, or
spellbound. And how do you get spellbound and what do you spell? You
spell words. So, by the ideas we have about the world and through our
belief in the reality of different things and events, we are completely
carried away and forget altog ether who we are. There is a story about a
great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one of the aspects of
the godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the creator
aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive
aspect. When Narada came to Vishnu and said, "What is the secret of your
maya?" Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. The moment he fell
under the water he was born as a princess in a very great family, and
went through all the experiences of childhood as a little girl. She
finally married a prince from another kingdom and went to live with him
in his kingdom. They lived there in tremendous prosperity, with palaces
and peacocks, but suddenly there was a war and their kingdom was
attacked and utterly destroyed. The prince himself was killed in battle,
and he was cremated.

As a dutiful wife, the princess was about to throw herself weeping on o
the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of suttee or self-sacrifice.

But suddenly Narada woke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by
his hair by Vishnu, who said, "For whom were you weeping?" So, that is
the idea of the whole world being a magical illusion, but done so
skillfullyby whom? By you, basically. Not "you" the empirical ego, not
"you" who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories
that are strung together into what you call "my everyday self." Rather,
it is the "you" that is responsible for growing your hair, coloring your
eyes, arranging the shape of your bones. The deeply responsible "you" is
what is responsible for all this. So this, then, is in sum the Hindu
dramatic idea of the cosmos as an endless hide-and-seek game: now you
see it, now you don't. It is saying to everybody, "Of course you worry
and are afraid of disease, death, pain, and all that sort of thing. But
really, it is all an illusion, so there is nothing to be afraid of." And
you think, "Well, but my goodness, supposing when I die there just won't
be anything? It will be like going to sleep and never waking up." Isn't
that awful, just terrible-nothing, forever? But that doesn't matter.

When you go into that period called death, or forgetting, that's just so
that you won't remember, because if you did always remember it, it would
be a bore. But you are wiser than you know, because you arrange to
forget and to die, and keep going in and out of the light. But
underneath, at the basis of all this, between black and white, between
life and death, is something unmentionable. That's the real you, that's
the secret-only you don't give away the show. All of you are now privy
to a secret; you are initiates. You know this neat little thing, but you
may not have experienced it. You know about it, but you must not give
the show away. Don't run out in the streets suddenly and say to
everybody, "I'm God," because they won't understand you. So then, there
are people whom we will call farout. They are far out into the illusion,
and they are really lost; they are deeply committed to the human
situation. Opposite them are the far-in people, who are in touch with
the center. Now, the very far-out people are to be commended, because
they are doing the most adventurous thing. They are lost-they are the
explorers and are way out in the jungles. In all societies, in some way
or other, the far-out people keep in touch with the far-in people. The
far-in people are there-they may be monks, yogis, priests, or
philosophers, but they remind the far-out people, "After all, you're not
really lost, but it's a great thrill and very brave of you to think that
you are." So then, some of the far-in people act as what is called a
guru, and the function of a guru is to help you wake up from the dream
when your time comes. In the ordinary life of the primitive Hindu
community, there are four castes: the caste of priests, of warriors, of
merchants, and of laborers. Every man who belongs to the Hindu community
belongs to one of the four castes, which he is born into. That seems to
us rather restrictive, because if you were born the son of a university
professor you might much prefer to be a waterskiing instructor, and that
would mean a shift in caste from what is called the Brahmana because the
professor in Hindu life would come under the priestly caste. But in a
time when there were no schools and everybody received his education
from his father, the father considered it a duty to educate the boys,
the mother considered it her duty to educate the girls, and there was no
choice of a boy being something other than his father. He was
apprenticed to him while very young, and the child, as you know,
naturally takes an interest in what the parents are doing and tends to
want to do it, too. So, it was based on that, and although it
seemsprimitive to our way of thinking, that is the way it was. When a
man attained the age of maturity in the middle of his life, and had
raised a son old enough to take over the family business, he abandoned
caste. He became an upper outcast, called a sannyasi and he went outside
the village, back to the forest. So there are two stages of life:
grihasta, or "householder," and vanaprastha, or "forest dweller." We
came out of the forest and we formed civilized villages. The hunters
settled down and started agriculture. Then they formed into castes, and
every man, as it were, had a function: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief-but those are all parts, those are
big acts. Who are you really, behind your mask? So, in the middle of
life it is considered up to you to find out who you are. You are going
to die in a few years. Before you die, wake up from the illusion so that
you won't be afraid of death. When you become vanaprastha you go to a
guru, and the guru teaches you yoga, which is the art of waking up. In
other words, to remember, as distinct from dismember, is to find out
again that our separateness is maya, or in "seeming" only-it is not the
fundamental reality. We are all one. Now, how does the guru teach you
that? He does it mostly by kidding you. He has a funny look in his eye,
as if to say, "Brahma, old boy, you can't fool me." The basic question
that all gurus ask their students is, "Who are you?" The great guru of
modern times was Sri Ramana Maharshi. Wealthy philosophical ladies from
the United States used to go to ask him, "Who was I in my former
incarnation?" because they wanted to find out they were Cleopatra, or
something like that. He would say, "Who asked the question? Who is it
that wants to know? Find out who you are." Well, if you want to find out
who you are, you get into a very funny mix-up because it is like trying
to bite your teeth. "Who is it that wants to know who I am? If only I
could catch that thing.' And the guru really says, "But now, let's get
going on this, let's concentrate, you see and get that thing." So, he
has people meditating on their own essence, and all the time he is
looking at them with a funny look in his eye. They think, "Oh dear, that
guru, he knows me through and through. He reads all my secret and impure
thoughts. He realizes my desires and how badly I concentrate." But
really, the guru is laughing himself silly inside, because he sees that
this is the Brahma being quite unwilling to wake up, or not really
ready. Suddenly there comes a shock-the moment when you realize the
truth about that thumb you were catching. You say, "Oh dear, it's, after
all, the same hand," and there is a shock of recognition. Suddenly you
wake up and excla im, "Of course!" Now, that moment is moksha, or
liberation. We have many names for it, but no very clear names. In the
West we call it mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, or something
of that kind. We find it very difficult to express it in our religious
language because we would have to say at that moment, "I have at last
discovered that I am the Lord God." We put people in asylums who
discover this, if this is the way they express it, because it really is
for us the one sure sign of being completely out of your head. Whereas
in India when somebody says "I am the Lord God," they say, "Well,
naturally. Congratulations, at last you found out." Our idea of the Lord
God, as we shall see, is different from the Hindu idea. You notice that
Hindu images of the divinities usually have many arms, and that is
because they are conceived of as sort of cosmic centipedes. The
centipede does not think how to use each leg, just as you don't think
how to use every nerve cell in your nervous system. They just seem to
use themselves; they work automatically. Well, many things working
automatically together is the Hindu idea of omnipotence, whereas our
idea is more technical. The person in supreme control would have to know
how he does every single thing. You would ask, "God, how do you create
rabbits?" as if he doesn't just pull them out of hats like a stage
magician but actually knows in every detail down to the last molecule or
subdivision thereof how it is done and could explain it. Hindus would
say that if you ask God, "How do you make a rabbit?" he would say, "That
is no problem at all-I just become it."

"Well, how do you become it?"

"Well, you just do it, like you open your hand or close it. You just do
it. You don't have to know how in words." What we mean by understanding
and explaining things is being able to put them into words. We do that
first by analyzing them into many bits. In the same way, when you want
to measure the properties of a curve, which is complicated, in order to
say how that curve is shaped, you have to reduce it to tiny points and
measure them. So you put a grid of graph paper across, and by telling
the position on the graph of where the curve is at every point, you get
an accurate description of what that curve is, or how it is, in
scientific terms.

That is what we mean when we talk about understanding things, but
obviously there is another sense of "to understand." You understand how
to walk even if you can't explain it, because you can do it. Can you
drive a car? Yes. How do you drive a car? If you could put it into
words, it might be easier to teach people how to do it in the first
place, but one understands and learns many things about driving a car
that are never explained in words. You just watch somebody else do it,
and you do the same thing. In this way, then, the Hindu and the Western
ideas of God are somewhat different. So, when the Hindu realizes that he
is God, and that you are too, he sees the dance of God in everybody all
around him in every direction. He does not assume certain things that a
Western person might assume if they had the same experience. For
example, you know the difference between what you do voluntarily and
what happens to you involuntarily. When I see someone else move at the
far end of the room, it comes to me with a signal attached to it; that
experience is involuntary. When I move, it comes to me with a voluntary
signal attached to it. Nevertheless, both experiences are states and
changes in my nervous system, but we do not ordinarily realize that.

When we see somebody else doing something, we think that it is outside
our nervous system. It isn't at all; it is happening in our own brain.

Now, if you should discover that it is happening inside you, it might
just as well come to you with a voluntary signal attached to it. You
could say, "I've got the feeling that I'm doing everything that
everybody else is doing. Everything that I see and that I am aware of is
my action." Now, if you misunderstood that, you might think that you
were able to control everything that everybody else does, and that you
really were God in that kind of technical sense of God. You have to be
careful what sort of interpretations you put on these experiences. It is
one thing to have an authentic experience of the stars. It is quite
another thing to be able to describe accurately their relative
positions. It is one thing to have an experience of cosmic
consciousness, or liberation, but quite another thing to give a
philosophically or scientifically accurate account of it. Yet this
experience is the basis of the whole Hindu philosophy. It is as if one
comes into the world in the beginning having what Freud called the
"oceanic consciousness" of a baby, but the baby does not distinguish,
apparently, between experiences of itself and experiences of the
external world. Therefore, to the baby, it is all one. Furthermore, a
baby has for a long time been part of its mother and has floated in the
ocean of the womb. So it has the sense from the beginning of what is
really to an enlightened person totally obviousthat the universe is one
single organism. Our social way of bringing up children is to make them
concentrate on the bits and to ignore the totality. We point at things,
give them names, and say, "Look at that." But children very often ask
you what things are, and you realize you do not have names for them.

They point out backgrounds, and the shape of spaces between things, and
say, "What's that?" You may brush it aside and say, "Well, that's not
important. That doesn't have a name." You keep pointing out the
significant things to them, and above all what everybody around the
child does is to tell the child who he is, and what sort of part he is
expected to play-what sort of mask he must wear. I remember very well as
a child that I knew I had several different identities, but I knew that
I would probably have to settle for one of them; the adult world was
pushing me toward a choice. I was one person with my parents at home,
another person altogether at my uncle's home, and still quite another
person with my own peer group. But society was trying to say, "Now make
up your mind as to who you really are." So I would imitate some other
child whom I had admired. I would come home and my mother would say,
"Alan, that's not you, that's Peter. Be yourself now." Otherwise, you
are somehow phony, and the point is not to be phony but to be real.

However, this whole big act is phony, but it is a marvelous act. A
genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with
complete zip. He is what we would call committed, and yet he is freed by
becoming completely committed and knowing that the world is an act.

There isn't anybody doing it. We like to think things stand behind
processes, and that things "do" the processes, but that is just a
convention of grammar. We have verbs and nouns, and every noun can
obviously be described by a verb. We say "the mat." We can also say 14
the matting." Likewise, we can say "cating" for "cat." When we want to
say, "The cating is sitting," however, we say, "The cat sits," using a
noun and a verb-whereas it is all verb; it is all a big act. But
remember, you mustn't give the show away.

ECO-ZEN CHAPTER THREE

I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this, and when
he came in he used to be silent. He would look at the audience, gaze at
Leveryone there for a particularly long time, and everybody would begin
feeling vaguely embarrassed. When he had gazed at them for a long time
he would say, "WAKE UP, you're all asleep! And if you don't wake up, I
won't give any lecture." Now, in what sense are we asleep? The Buddhist
would say that almost all human beings have a phony sense of identity-a
delusion, or a hallucination as to who they are. I am terribly
interested in this problem of identity. I try to find out what people
mean when they say the word 1. I think this is one of the most
fascinating questions: "Who do you think you are?" Now, what seems to
develop is this: most people think that I is a center of sensitivity
somewhere inside their skin, and the majority of people feel that it is
in their heads. Civilizations in different periods of history have
differed about this-Some people feel that they exist in the solar
plexus. Other people feel that they exist in the stomach. But in
American culture today, and in the Western culture in general, most
people feel that they exist in their heads. There is, as it were, a
little man sitting inside the center of the skull who has a television
screen in front of him that gives him all messages from the eyeballs. He
has earphones on that give him all messages from the ears, and he has in
front of him a control panel with various dials and buttons, which
enable him to influence the arms and legs and to get all sorts of
information from the nerve ends. And that is you. So, we say in popular
speech, "I have a body," not

"I am a body." I have one because I am the owner of the body in the same
way as I own an automobile. I take the automobile to a mechanic and,
occasionally, in the same way, I take my body to the mechanic-the
surgeon, the dentist, and the doctor-and have it repaired. It belongs to
me, it goes along with me, and I a m in it. For example, a child can ask
its mother, "Mom, who would I have been if my father had been someone
else?" That seems to be a perfectly simple and logical question for a
child to ask, because of the presumption that your parents gave you your
body and you were popped into it-maybe at the moment of conception or
maybe at the moment of birth-from a repository of souls in Heaven, and
your parents simply provided the physical vehicle. So, that age-old idea
that is indigenous, especially to the Western world, is that I am
something inside a body, and I am not quite sure whether I am or am not
my body; there is some doubt about it. I say, "I think, I walk, I talk,"
but I don't say, "I beat my heart," "I shape my bones," and

"I grow my hair." I feel that my heart beating, my hair growing, and my
bones shaping is something that happens to me, and I don't know how it
is done. But other things I do, and I feel quite surely that everything
outside my body is quite definitely not me. There are two kinds of
things outside my body. Number one is other people, and they are the
same sort of thing that I am, but also they are all little men locked up
inside their skins. They are intelligent, have feelings and values, and
are capable of love and virtue. Number two is the world that is
nonhuman-we call it nature, and that is stupid. It has no mind, it has
emotions maybe, like animals, but on the whole it's a pretty grim
dog-eat-dog business. When it gets to the geological level, it is as
dumb as dumb can be. It is a mechanism, and there is an awful lot of it.
That is what we live in the middle of, and the purpose of being human
is, we feel, to subjugate nature, and to make it obey our will. We
arrived here, and we don't feel that we belong in this world-it is
foreign to us: in the words of the poet AE. Housman, "I, a stranger and
afraid, in a world I never made." All around us today we see the signs
of man's battle with nature. I am living at the moment in a marvelous
house overlooking a lake, and on the other side of the lake the whole
hill has suddenly been interrupted with a ghastly gash.

They have made level lots for building tract homes of the kind you would
build on a flat plain. This is called the conquest of nature, and these
houses will eventually fall down the hill because the builders are
causing soil erosion and they are being maximally stupid. The proper way
to build a house on a hillside is to do it in such a way as to effect
the minimum interference with the nature of the hill. After all, the
whole point of living in the hills is to live in the hills. There is no
point in converting the hills into something flat and then going and
living there. You can do that already on the level ground. So, as more
people live in the hills, the more they spoil the hills, and they are
just the same as people living on the flat ground. How stupid can you
get? Well, this is one of the symptoms of our phony sense of identity,
of our phony feeling that we are something lonely, locked up in a bag of
skin and confronted with a world, an external, alien, foreign world that
is not us. Now, according to certain of these great ancient
philosophies, like Buddhism, this sensation of being a separate, lonely
individual is a hallucination. It is a hallucination brought about by
various causes, the way we are brought up being the chief of them, of
course. For example, the main thing that we're all taught in childhood
is that we must do that which will only be appreciated if we do it
voluntarily. "Now darling, a dutiful child must love its mother. But
now, I don't want you to do it because I say so, but because you really
want to." Or

"You must be free." This also is seen in politics"Everybody must vote."
Imagine, you are members of a democracy, and you must be members of the
democracy-you are ordered to.

You see, this is crazy. Also

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Is that a commandment or a joke?
However, if you suggest that the Lord is joking, most people in our
culture are offended, because they have a very moronic conception of God
as a person totally devoid of humor. But the Lord is highly capable of
joking, because joking is one of the most constructive things you can
do. So, when you are told who you are, and that you must be free, and
furthermore that you must survive, that becomes a kind of compulsion,
and you get mixed up. Of course, it is very simple to get mixed up if
you think you must do something that will only be required of you if you
do it freely. These are the sort of influences, then, that cause human
beings all over the world to feel isolated-to feel that they are centers
of awareness locked up in bags of skin. Now, this sensation of our
identity can be shown and demonstrated to be false by some of the
disciplines of our own science. When we describe a human being or any
other living organism from a scientific point of view, all that means is
that we are describing it carefully. We are going to describe very
carefully what a human being is and what a human being does. We find
that as we go on with that description, we can't describe the human
being without describing the environment. We cannot say what a human
being is doing without also saying what the world around him is doing.
Just imagine for a moment that you couldn't see anything except me. You
couldn't see the curtain behind me, or the microphone. You could only
see me, and that is all you could see. What would you be looking at? You
wouldn't see me at all, because you wouldn't see my edges, and my edges
are rather important for seeing me.

My edges would be identical with the edge of your eyesight, with that
vague oval curve which is the field of vision. What you would be looking
at would be my necktie, my nose, my eyes, and so on, but you wouldn't
see my edges. You would be confronted with a very strange monster, and
you wouldn't know it was a human being. To see me you need to see my
background, and therein lies a clue of which we are mostly ignorant. In
Buddhist theory, the cause of our phony sense of identity is called
avidya, meaning "ignorance," although it is better to pronounce it
"ignorance." Having a deluded sense of identity is the result of
ignoring certain things. So, when you look at me, I cause you to ignore
my background, because I concentrate attention on me, just like a
conjurer or stage magician misdirects your attention in order to perform
his tricks. He talks to you about his fingers and how empty they are,
and he can pull something out of his pocket in plain sight and you don't
notice it-and so magic happens. That's ignorance-selective
attention-focusing your consciousness on one thing to the exclusion of
many other things. In this way we concentrate on the thingsthe
figures-and we ignore the background. So, we come to think that the
figure exists independently of the background, but actually they go
together. They go together just as inseparably as backs go with fronts,
as positives go with negatives, as ups go with downs, and as life goes
with death. You cannot separate it. So there is a sort of secret
conspiracy between the figure and the background: They are really one,
but they look different. They need each other, just as male needs
female, and vice versa. But we are, o rdinarily, completely unaware of
this. So then, when a scientist starts carefully paying attention to the
behavior of people and things, he discovers that they go together, and
that the behavior of the organism is inseparable from the behavior of
its environment. So, if I am to describe what I am doing, am I just
waving my legs back and forth? No, I am walking. In order to speak about
walking, you have to speak about the space in which I am walking-about
the floor, about the direction, left or right, in relation to what kind
of room, stage, and situation.

Obviously, if there isn't a ground underneath me, I cannot very well
walk, so the description of what I am doing involves the description of
the world. And so, the biologist comes to say that what he is describing
is no longer merely the organism and its behavior. He is describing a
field, which he now calls the organism/environment 5 and that field is
what the individual actually is. Now, this is very clearly recognized in
all sorts of sciences, but the average individual, and indeed the
average scientist, does not feel in a way that corresponds to his
theory. He still feels as if he were a center of sensitivity locked up
inside a bag of skin. The object of Buddhist discipline, or methods of
psychological training, is, as it were, to turn that feeling inside
out-to bring about a state of affairs in which the individual feels
himself to be everything that there is. The whole cosmos is focused,
expressing itself here, and you are the whole cosmos expressing itself
there, and there, and there, and there, and so on. In other words, the
reality of my self fundamentally is not something inside my skin but
everything, and I mean everything, outside my skin, but doing what is my
skin and what is inside it. In the same way, when the ocean has a wave
on it, the wave is not separate from the ocean. Every wave on the ocean
is the whole ocean waving. The ocean waves, and it says, "Yoo-hoo, I'm
here. I can wave in many different ways-I can wave this way and that
way." So, the ocean of being waves every one of us, and we are its
waves, but the wave is fundamentally the ocean. Now, in that way, your
sense of identity would be turned inside out. You wouldn't forget who
you were-your name and address, your telephone number, your social
security number, and what sort of role you are supposed to occupy in
society. But you would know that this particular role that you play and
this particular personality that you are is superficial, and the real
you is all that there is.

SWALLOWING A BALL OF HOT IRON

CHAPTER FOUR

The inversion, or turning upside down, of the sense of identity, of the
state of consciousness that the average person has, is the objective of
Buddhistic disciplines. Now, perhaps I can make this clearer to you by
going into a little detail as to how these disciplines work. The method
of teaching something in Buddhism is rather different from methods of
teaching that we use in the Western world. In the Western world, a good
teacher is regarded as someone who makes the subject matter easy for the
student, a person who explains things cleverly and clearly so you can
take a course in mathematics without tears. In the Oriental world, they
have an almost exactly opposite conception, and that is that a good
teacher is a person who makes you find out something for yourself. In
other words, learn to swim by throwing the baby into the water. There is
a story used in Zen about how a burglar taught his child how to burgle.

He took him one night on a burgling expedition, locked him up in a chest
in the house that he was burgling, and left him. The poor little boy was
all alone locked up in the chest, and he began to think, "How on earth
am I going to get out?" So he suddenly called out, "Fire, fire," and
everybody began running all over the place. They heard this shriek
coming from inside the chest and they unlocked it, and he rushed out and
shot out into the garden. Everybody was in hot pursuit, calling out,
"Thief, thief," and as he went by a well he picked up a rock and dropped
it into the well. Everybody thought the poor fellow had jumped into the
well and committed suicide, and so he got away. He returned home and his
father said, "Congratulations, you have learned the art." William Blake
once said, "A fool who persists in his folly will become wise." The
method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools
persist in their folly, but very rigorously, very consistently, and very
hard. Now, having given you the analogy and image, let's go to the
specific situation. Supposing you want to study Buddhism under a Zen
master-what will happen to you? Well, first of all, let's ask why you
would want to do this anyway. I can make the situation fairly universal.

It might not be a Zen master that you go to-it might be a Methodist
minister, a Catholic priest, or a psychoanalyst. But what's the matter
with you? Why do you go? Surely the reason that we all would be seekers
is that we feel some disquiet about ourselves. Many of us want to get
rid of ourselves. We cannot stand ourselves and so we watch television,
go to the movies, read mystery stories, and join churches in order to
forget ourselves and to merge with something greater than ourselves. We
want to get away from this ridiculous thing locked up in a bag of skin.

You may say, "I have a problem. I hurt, I suffer, and I'm neurotic," or
whatever it is. You go to the teacher and say, "My problem's me. Change
me." Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he will say, "Well, I have nothing
to teach. There is no problemeverything's perfectly clear." You think
that one over, and you say, "He's probably being cagey. He's testing me
out to see if I really want to be his student. I know, according to
everybody else who's been through this, that in order to get this man to
take me on I must persist." Do you know the saying, "Anybody who goes to
a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined?" There is a double take
in that saying. So, in the same way, anybody who goes with a spiritual
problem to a Zen master defines himself as a nut, and the teacher does
everything possible to make him as nutty as possible. The teacher says,
"Quite honestly, I haven't anything to tell you. I don't teach
anything-I have no doctrine. I have nothing whatsoever to sell you." So
the student thinks, "My, this is very deep," because this nothing that
he is talking about, this nothing that he teaches, is what they call in
Buddhism sunyata. Sunyata is Sanskrit for "nothingness," and it is
supposed to be the ultimate reality. But if you know anything about
these doctrines, this does not mean just ccnothing there at all" or just
"blank," but it means "nothing-ness." It is the transcendental reality
behind all separate and individual things, and that is something very
deep and profound. So, he knows that when the teacher said, "I have
nothing to teach," he meant this very esoteric no-thing. Well, he might
also say then, "If you have nothing to teach, what are all these
students doing around here?" And the teacher says, "They are not doing
anything. They are just a lot of stupid people who live here." He knows
again this "stupid" does not mean just straight stupid, but the higher
stupidity of people who are humble and do not have intellectual pride.

Finally, the student, having gone out of his way to define himself as a
damn fool in need of help, has absolutely worked himself into this
situation. He has defined himself as a nut, and then the teacher accepts
him. The teacher says, "Now, I am going to ask you a question. I want to
know who you are before your mother and father conceived you. That is to
say, you have come to me with a problem, and you have said, 'I have a
problem. I want to get one up on this universe.' Now, who is it that
wants to get one up? Who are you? Who is this thing called your ego,
your soul, your 1, your identity, for whom your parents provided a body?

Show me that. Furthermore, I'm from Missouri and I don't want any words
and I want to be shown." The student opens his mouth to answer, but the
teacher says, "Uh-uh, not yet; you're not ready." Then he takes him back
and introduces him to the chief student of all the so-called Zen monks
who live there together, and the chief student says, "Now, what we do
here is we have a discipline, but the main part of the discipline is
meditation. We all sit cross-legged in a row and learn how to breathe
and be still: in other words, to do nothing. Now, you mustn't go to
sleep and you mustn't fall into a trance. You have to stay wide awake,
not think anything, but perfectly do nothing." During meditation, there
is a monk walking up and down all the time with a long flat stick, and
if you go to sleep or fall into a trance, he hits you on the back. So
instead of becoming dreamy, you stay quite clear, and wide awake, but
still doing nothing. The idea is that out of the state of profoundly
doing nothing, you will be able to tell the teacher who you really are.

In other words, the question

"Who are you before your father and mother conceived you?" is a request
for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity. It is as if I were to
ask, "Look now, will you be absolutely genuine with me? No deception
please. I want you to do something that expresses you without the
slightest deception. No more role-acting, no more playing games with me;
I want to see you!" Now, imagine, could you really be that honest with
somebody else, especially a spiritual teacher, because you know he looks
right through you and sees all your secret thoughts. He knows the very
second you have been a little bit phony, and that bugs you. The same is
true of a psychiatrist.

You might be sitting in there discussing your problems with him and
absentmindedly you start to pick your nose. The psychiatrist suddenly
says to you, "Is your finger comfortable there? Do you like that?" And
you know your Freudian slip is showing. What do fingers symbolize, and
what do nostrils symbolize? Uh-oh. You quickly put your hand down and
say, "Oh no, it is nothing, I was just picking my nose." But the analyst
says, "Oh really? Then why are you justifying it? Why are you trying to
explain it away?" He has you every way you turn. Well, that is the art
of psychoanalysis, and in Zen it is the same thing. When you are
challenged to be perfectly genuine, it is like saying to a child, "Now
darling, come out here and play, and don't be self-conscious." In other
wor s I could say to you, "If any of you come here tonight at exactly
midnight, and put your hands on this stage, you can have granted any
wish you want to, provided you don't think of a green elephant." Of
course, everybody will come, and they will put their hands here, and
they will be very careful not to think about a green elephant. The point
is that if we transfer this concept to the dimension of spirituality,
where the highest ideal is to be unselfish and to let go of one's self,
it is again trying to be unselfish for selfish reasons. You cannot be
unselfish by a decision of the will any more than you can decide not to
think of a green elephant. There is a story about Confucius, who one day
met Lao-tzu, a great Chinese philosopher. Lao-tzu said, "Sir, what is
your system?" And Confucius said, "It is charity, love of one's
neighbor, and elimination of self-interest." Lao-tzu replied, "Stuff and
nonsense. Your elimination of self is a positive manifestation of self.

Look at the universe. The stars keep their order, the trees and plants
grow upward without exception, and the waters flow. Be like this." These
are all examples of the tricks the master might be playing on you. You
came to him with the idea in your mind that you are a separate,
independent, isolated individual, and he is simply saying, "Show me this
individual." I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan, and he became
pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is. On his way
to an interview with the master to give an answer to the problem, he
noticed a very common sight in Japan, a big bullfrog sitting around in
the garden. He swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in
the sleeve of his kimono. Then he went to the master to give the answer
of who he was. He suddenly produced the bullfrog, and the master said,
"Mmmmm, too intellectual." In other words, this answer is too contrived.

It is too much like Zen. "You have been reading too many books. It is
not the genuine thing," the master said. So, after a while, what happens
is the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his true
self. Not only is there no way of doing it, there is also no way of
doing it by not doing it. To make this clearer, allow me to put it into
Christian terms: "Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God." What are you going
to do about that? If you try very hard to love God you may ask yourself,
"Why am I doing this?" You will find out you are doing it because you
want to be right. After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, and
if you don't love him, you're going to be in a pretty sad state. So, you
realize you are loving him just because you are afraid of what will
happen to you if you don't. And then you think, "That is pretty lousy
love, isn't it? That's a bad motivation. I wish I could change that. I
wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart." But, why do you want
to change? You realize that the reason you want to have a different kind
of motive is that you have the same motive. So, you say

"Oh for heaven's sake, God, I'm a mess. Will you please help me out?"
Then he reminds you, "Why are you doing that? Now, you are just giving
up, aren't you?

You are asking someone else to take over your problem. " Suddenly you
find you are stuck. What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened
to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it
down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron
bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an
iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and
so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against
it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now,
what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I
cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of
course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is
no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing
it, because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you
suddenly wake up, you think, "Whew, what a relief." That is called
satori. When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you
are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience
locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing,
to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it. So, it
isn't there, and when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a
new sense of identity. You realize that what you are is the whole world
of nature, doing this. Now, that is difficult for many Western people,
because it suggests a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual
is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces. However, when your own
inner sense of identity changes from being the separate individual to
being what the entire cosmos is doing at this place, you become not a
puppet but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever.

This is the same paradox that the Christian knows in the form,
"Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it." Now, I think that this is
something of very great importance to the Western world today. We have
developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of
changing the physical universe than have ever existed before. How are we
going to use it? A Chinese proverb says that if the wrong man uses the
right means, the right means work in the wrong way. Let us assume that
our technological knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are
going to use this knowledge? Are they going to be people who hate nature
and feel alienated from it, or people who love the physical world and
feet that the physical world is their own personal body? The whole
physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one's extended
body. Now, at the moment, the general attitude of our technologists who
are exploring space is represented in the phrase "the conquest of
space." They are building enormous, shelllike, phallic objects that
blast into the sky. This is downright ridiculous, because no one is
going to get anywhere in a rocket. It takes a terribly long time to even
get to the moon, and it is going to take longer than anybody can live to
get outside the solar system, just to begin with. The proper way to
study space is not with rockets but with radio astronomy. Instead of
exploding with a tough fist at the sky, become more sensitive and
develop subtler senses, and everything will come to you. Be more open
and be more receptive, and eventually you will develop an instrument
that will examine a piece of rock on Mars with greater care than you
could if you were holding it in your own hand. Let it come to you. The
whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world
will succeed only in destroying the world, as we are doing. We use
absurd and uninformed and shortsighted methods of getting rid of insect
pests, forcing our fruit and tomatoes to grow, stripping our hills of
trees and so on, thinking that this is some kind of progress. Actually,
it is turning everything into a junk heap. It is said that Americans,
who are in the forefront of technological progress, are materialists.

Nothing is further from the truth. American culture is dedicated to the
hatred of material and to its transformation into junk. Look at our
cities. Do they look as though they were made by people who love
material? Everything is made out of ticky-tacky, which is a combination
of plaster of paris, papier-mich6 and plastic glue, and it comes in any
flavor. The important lesson is that technology and its powers must be
handled by true materialists. True materialists are people who love
material-who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals and,
above all, the earth-and treat it with a reverence that is due one's own
body.

INTELLECTUAL YOGA

CHAPTER FIVE

The word yoga, as most of you doubtless know, is the same as our word
yoke and the Latin word jungere, meaning "to join. " join, junction,
yoke, and union-all these words are basically from the same root. So,
likewise, when Jesus said, "My yoke is easy," he was really saying, "My
yoga is easy." The word, therefore, basically denotes the state that
would be the opposite of what our psychologists call alienation, or what
Buddhists call sakyadrishti, the view of separateness or the feeling of
separatenessthe feeling of being cut off from being. Most civilized
people do in fact feel that way, because they have a kind of myopic
attention focused on their own boundaries and what is inside those
boundaries. They identify themselves with the inside and do not realize
that you cannot have an inside without an outside. That would seem to be
extremely elementary logic, wouldn't it? We could have no sense of being
ourselves and of having a personal identity without the contrast of
something that is not ourselves-that is to say, other. However, the fact
that we do not realize that self and other go together is the root of an
enormous and terrifying anxiety, because what will happen when the
inside disappears? What will happen when the so-called I comes to an
end, as it seems to? Of course, if it didn't, and if things did not keep
moving and changing, appearing and dissolving, the universe would be a
colossal bore. Therefore, you are only aware that things are all right
for the moment. I hope most of the people in this gathering have a sort
of genial sense inside of them that for the time being things are going
on more or less okay. Some of you may be very miserable, and then your
problem may be just a little different, but it is essentially the same
one. But you must realize that the sense of life being fairly all right
is inconceivable and unfeelable unless there is way, way, way in the
back of your mind the glimmer of a possibility that something
absolutely, unspeakably awful might happen. It does not have to happen.

Of course, you will die one day, but there always has to be the vague
apprehension, the hintegedanka, that the awful awfuls are possible. It
gives spice to life. Now, these observations are in line with what I am
going to discuss: the intellectual approach to yoga. There are certain
basic principal forms of yoga Most people are familiar with batba yoga,
which is a psychophysical exercise system, and this is the one you see
demonstrated most on television, because it has visual value. You can
see all these exercises of lotus positions and people curling their legs
around their necks and doing all sorts of marvelous exercises. The most
honest yoga teacher I know is a woman who teaches hatha yoga and does
not pretend to be any other kind of guru. She does it very well. Then
there is bhakti yoga. Bbakti means "devotion," and I suppose in general
you might say that Christianity is a form of bhakti yoga, because it is
yoga practiced through extreme reverence and love for some being felt
more or less external to oneself who is the representative of the
divine. Then there is karma yoga. Karma means "action," and
incidentally, that is all it means. It does not mean the law of cause
and effect. When we say that something that happens to you is your
karma, all we are saying is that it is your own doing. Nobody is in
charge of karma except you. Karma yoga is the way of action, of using
one's everyday life, one's trade, or an athletic discipline (like
sailing or surfing or track running) as your way of yoga, and as your
way of discovering who you are. Then there is raja yoga. That is the
royal yoga, and that is sometimes also called kundalini yoga. It
involves very complicated psychic exercises having to do with awakening
the serpent power that is supposed to lie at the base of one's spiritual
spine and raise it up through certain chakras or centers until it enters
into the brain. There is a very profound symbolism involved in that, but
I am not going into that. Mantra yoga is the practice of chanting or
humming, either out loud or silently, certain sounds that become
supports for contemplation, for what is in Sanskrit called jnana. jnana
is the state in which one is clearly awake and aware of the world as it
is, as distinct from the world as it is described. In other words, in
the state of jnana, you stop thinking. You stop talking to yourself and
figuring to yourself and symbolizing to yourself what is going on. You
simply are aware of what is and nobody can say what it is, because as
Korzybski well said, "The real world is unspeakable." There's a lovely
double take in that. But that's inana, that's zazen, where one practices
to sit absolutely wide awake with eyes open, without thinking. That is a
very curious state, incidentally. I knew a professor of mathematics at
Northwestern University who one day said, "You know, it's amazing how
many things there are that aren't so." He was talking about old wives'
tales and scientific superstitions, but when you practice jnana, you are
amazed how many things there are that aren't so. When you stop talking
to yourself and you are simply aware of what is-that is to say, of what
you feel and what you sense-even that is saying too much. You suddenly
find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also
has disappeared the socalled differentiation between the knower and the
known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the
thinker and the thought. They just aren't there because you have to talk
to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They
are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop,
all that goes away, and you find you're in an eternal here and now.

There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are
supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in
order to think that you're supposed to do something you have to think.

It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very
preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but
think, as you're advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and
gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like
a university library that grows by itself through a process that in
biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells
into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very
often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the
books that are in there. They write books about books about books and
the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and
rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I
love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts-it is fun, like playing
poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets
increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about
words. If we stop that temporarily and get our mind clear of thoughts,
we become, as Jesus said, "again as children" and get a direct view of
the world, which is very useful once you are an adult. There is not much
you can do with it when you are a baby, because everybody pushes you
around; they pick you up and sit you there. You can't do much except
practice contemplation, and you can't tell anyone what it is like. But
when, as an adult, you can recapture the baby's point of view, you will
know what all child psychologists have always wanted to know-how it is
that a baby feels. The baby, according to Freud at least, has the
oceanic experience, that is to say, a feeling of complete inseparability
from what's going on. The baby is unable to distinguish between the
universe and his or her action upon the universe. Most of us, if we got
into that state of consciousness, might be inclined to feel extremely
frightened and begin to ask, "Who's in charge? I mean, who controls what
happens next?" We would ask that, because we are used to the idea that
the process of nature consists of controllers and controllees, things
that do and things that are done to. This is purely mythological, as you
find out when you observe the world without thinking, with a purely
silent mind. Now then, jnana yoga is the approach that is designed for
intellectuals. There is an intellectual way to get to this kind of
understanding. A lot of people say to me, "You know, I understand what
you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it. I
don't realize it." I am apt to reply, "I wonder whether you do
understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel
it." The intellect, or what I prefer to call the intelligence, is not a
sort of watertight compartment of the mind that goes clickety, clickety
all by itself and has no influence on what happens in all other spheres
of one's being. We all know that you can be hypnotized by words. Certain
words arouse immediately certain feelings, and by using certain words
one can change people's emotions very easily and very rapidly. They are
incantations, and the intellect is not something off over there.

However, the word intellect has become a kind of catchword that
represents the intellectual porcupinism of the academic world. A certain
professor at Harvard at the time Tim Leary was making experiments there
said, "No knowledge is academically respectable which cannot be put into
words." Alas for the department of physical education. Alas for the
department of music and fine arts. That is very important, because one
of the greatest intellects of modern times was Ludwig Wittgenstein. And
as you read the end of his Tractatus, which was his great book, he shows
you that what you always thought were the major problems of life and
philosophy were meaningless questions. Those problems are solved not by,
as it were, giving an answer to them but by getting rid of the problem
through seeing intellectually that it is meaningless. Then you are
relieved of the problem. You need no longer lie awake nights wondering
what is the meaning of life, and what it is all about, simply because it
isn't about anything. It's about itself, and so he ends up saying,
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." A new successor
to Wittgenstein, an Englishman named Spencer-Brown, has written a book
called Laws of Form, and if any of you are mathematically minded I would
firmly recommend it. He makes this comment about Wittgenstein: "True,
there are certain things of which one cannot speak. For example, you
cannot describe music." That is why most of the reports of music critics
in the newspapers seem completely absurd. They are trying to convey in
words how a certain artist performed, and they borrow words from all
other kinds of art and try to make some show of being clever about it.

But there is no way in which the music critic, in words, can make you
hear the sound of the concert. By writing certain instructions on paper
telling you certain things to do, those sounds can be reproduced though,
so musical notation is essentially a set of instructions telling you
certain things to do, and if you do them, you will gain an experience
that is ineffable and beyond words. Spencer-Brown points out that all
mathematics is basically a set of instructions, like "describe a circle,
drop a perpendicular." So, if you follow certain instructions, then yod
will understand certain things that cannot be described, and that, of
course, is what yoga is all about. All mystical writing, really, is
instructions. It is not an attempt to describe the universe, to describe
God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows that cannot
possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek root muin,
which means "silence." Mum's the word; shut up. I should talk, but
that's it. Be quiet. Then you will understand because the instructions
are to listen. Listen, or even look. Stop, look, and listen-that is
yoga-and see what is going on. Only don't say, because that will spoil
it. Somebody came to a Zen master and said, "The mountains and hills and
the skyare not all these the body of Buddha?" And the master said, "Yes,
but it's a pity to say so." For those of you who are mathematically hip,
by reading Spencer-Brown's book Laws of Form, you can go through an
intellectual process that is very close indeed to jnana yoga. As a
matter of fact, I was so impressed with it that I went over to England
especially to see this fellow. He is quite remarkable, a youngish man
adept at all sorts of things. In the book, he starts out with the
instruction to draw a distinction, any distinction you want, between
something and nothing, between the inside and the outside, or what have
you. Then he takes you through a process of reasoning in which he shows
you that once you have made that step, all the laws of mathematics,
physics, biology, and electronics follow inevitably. He draws them out
and he gets you into the most complicated electronic circuitry systems
that necessarily follow from your having drawn a distinction. Once you
have done that, the universe as we know it is inevitable. After that he
says, "I haven't told you anything you didn't already know. At every
step when you saw that one of my theorems was correct, you said, 'Oh, of
course.' Why? Because you knew it already." And then at the end of it,
where he has shown you, as it were, the nature of your own mind, he
raises the question, "Was this trip really necessary?" So now he takes
us in the reentry and says, "You see, what has happened through all this
mathematical process, and also in the course of your own complicated
lives where you have been trying to find out something that you already
knew, is the universe has taken one turn." That is the meaning of
universe; it has taken a turn on itself to look at itself. Well, when
anything looks at itself it escapes itself, as the snake swallowing its
tail, as the dog chasing its tail, as we try to grab this hand with
that. It gets some of it, but it doesn't get it, and so he makes the
amazing remark, "Naturally, as our telescopes become more powerful, the
universe must expand in order to escape them." Now, you will say this is
subjective idealism in a new disguise. This is Bishop Berkeley all over
again saying that we create the universe out of our own minds. Well,
unfortunately it is true, if you take mind to mean "physical brain" and
"physical nervous system." If you listen to Karl Pribram's lectures at
Stanford, you will find him saying the same thing in neurological terms.

It is the structure of your nervous system that causes you to see the
world that you see. Or read J. Z. Young's book Doubt and Certainty in
Science, where all this is very clearly explained. It is the same old
problem in new language, only it is a more complicated language, a more
sophisticated, up-to-date, scientifically respectable language. It is
the same old thing, but that is yoga. Yoga, or union, means that you do
it. In a sense, you are God, tat tvam asi, as the Upanishads say, "You
are making it." So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their
disciples and say, "I am God. I have realized." But the important thing
is that you are realized. Whether I am or not is of no consequence to
you whatsoever. I could get up and say

"I am realized," and put on a turban and yellow robe and say

"Come and have darsban, I'm guru, and you need the grace of guru in
order to realize," and it would be a wonderful hoax. It would be like
picking your pockets and selling you your own watch. But the point is,
you are realized. Now, what are we saying when we say that? We are
obviously saying something very important, but alas and alack, there is
no way of defining it, nor going any further into words about it. When a
philosopher hears such a statement as tat tvam asi, "You are it," or

"There is only the eternal now," the philosopher says, "Yes, but I don't
see why you are so excited about it. What do you mean by that?" Yet he
asks that question because he wants to continue in a word game; he
doesn't want to go on into an experiential dimension. He wants to go on
arguing, because that is his trip, and all these great mystical
statements mean nothing whatsoever. They are ultimate statements, just
as the trees, clouds, mountains, and stars have no meaning, because they
are not words. Words have meaning because they're symbols, because they
point to something other than themselves. But the stars, like music,
have no meaning. Only bad music has any meaning.

Classical music never has a meaning, and to understand it you must
simply listen to it and observe its beautiful patterns and go into its
complexity. When your mind, that is to say, your verbal systems, gets to
the end of its tether and it arrives at the meaningless state, this is
the critical point. The method of jnana yoga is to exercise one's
intellect to its limits so that you get to the point where you have no
further questions to ask. You can do this in philosophical study if you
have the right kind of teacher who shows you that all philosophical
opinions whatsoever are false, or at least, if not false, extremely
partial. You can see how the nominalists cancel out the realists, how
the determinists cancel out the free willists, how the behaviorists
cancel out the vitalists, and then how the logical positivists cancel
out almost everybody. Then someone comes in and says, "Yes, but the
logical positivists have concealed metaphysics," which indeed they do,
and then you get in an awful tangle and there is nothing for you to
believe. If you get seriously involved in the study of theology and
comparative religion, exactly the same thing can happen to you. You
cannot even be an atheist anymore; that is also shown to be a purely
mythological position. So you feel a kind of intellectual vertigo that
is as in a Zen Buddhist poem, "Above, not a tile to cover the head.

Below, not an inch of ground to stand on." Where are you then? Of
course, you are where you always were. You have discovered that you are
it, and that is very uncomfortable because you can't grab it. I have
discovered that whatever it is that I am is not something inside my
head-it is just as much out there as it is in here. But whatever it is,
I cannot get hold of it, and that gives you the heebie-jeebies. You get
butterflies in the stomach, anxiety traumas, and all kinds of things.

This was all explained by Shankara, the great Hindu commentator on the
Upanishads and a great master of the non-dualistic doctrine of the
universe, when he said, "That which knows, which is in all beings the
knower, is never an object of its own knowledge." Therefore, to everyone
who is in quest of the supreme kick, the great experience, the vision of
God, whatever you want to call itliberation-when yt)u think that you are
not it, any old guru can sell you on a method to find it. That may not
be a bad thing for him to do, because a clever guru is a person who
leads you on. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty. I've got something very
good to show you. Yes. You just wait. Oh, but you've got to go through a
lot of stages yet." You say

"Ah, ah, ah, ah. Can I get that? Oh, I want to get that." And all the
time it's you. I was talking to a Zen master the other day, and he said,
"Mmmmm. You should be my disciple." I looked at him and said, "Who was
Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way, and he burst into
laughter and gave me a piece of clover. So long as you can be persuaded
that there is something more that you ought to be than you are, you have
divided yourself from reality, from the universe, from God, or whatever
you want to call that, the tat in tat tvam asi. You will find
constantly, if you are interested in anything like this-in
psychoanalysis, in Gestalt therapy, in sensitivity training, in any kind
of yoga or what have you-that there will be that funny sensation of what
I will call "spiritual greed" that can be aroused by somebody indicating
to you, "Mmmm, there are still higher stages for you to attain. You
should meet my guru." So, you might say, "Now, to be truly realized you
have to get to the point where you're not seeking anymore." Then you
begin to think, "We will now be non-seekers," like disciples of
Krishnamurti, who because he says he doesn't read any spiritual books
can't read anything but mystery stories, and become spiritually
unspiritual. Well, you find that, too, is what is called in Zen "legs on
a snake." It is irrelevant. You don't need not to seek, because you
don't need anything. It is like crawling into a hole and pulling the
hole in after you. The great master of this technique was a Buddhist
scholar who lived about 200 AD. called Nagarjuna. He invented a whole
dialectic, and he created madhyamaka, where the leader of the students
would simply destroy all their ideas, absolutely abolish their
philosophical notions, and they'd get the heebie-jeebies. He didn't have
the heebie-jeebies. He seemed perfectly relaxed in not having any
particular point of view. They said, "Teacher, how can you stand it? We
have to have something to hang on to."

"Who does? Who are you?" And eventually you discover, of course, that it
is not necessary to hang on to or rely on anything. There is nothing to
rely on, because you're it.

It is like asking the question, "Where is the universe?" By that I mean
the whole universe-whereabouts is it in space? Everything in it is
falling around everything else, but there's no concrete floor underneath
for the thing to crash on. You can think of infinite space if you
like-you don't have to think of curved space, the space that goes out
and out and out forever and ever and has no end: What is that? Of
course, it is you. What else could it be? The universe is delightfully
arranged so that as it looks at itself, in order not to be one-sided and
prejudiced, it looks at itself from an uncountable number of points of
view. We thus avoid solipsism, as if I were to have the notion that it
is only me that is really here, and you are all in my dream. Of course,
that point of view cannot really be disputed except by imagining a
conference of solipsists arguing as to which one of them was the one
that was really there. Now, if you understand what I am saying by using
your intelligence, and then take the next step and say, "I understood it
now, but I didn't feet it," then next I raise the question, "Why do you
want to feel it?" You say, "I want something more," but that is again
spiritual greed, and you can only say that because you didn't understand
it. There is nothing to pursue, because you are it. You always were it,
and to put it in Christian terms or Jewish terms, if you don't know that
you are God from the beginning, what happens is that you try to become
God by force. Therefore you become violent and obstreperous and this,
that, and the other. All our violence, all our competitiveness, all our
terrific anxiety to survive is because we didn't know from the beginning
that we were it. Well, then you would say, "If only we did know from the
beginning," as in fact you did when you were a baby. But then everybody
says, "Well, nothing will ever happen." But it did happen, didn't it?

And some of it is pretty messy. Some people say, "Well, take the Hindus.

It is basic to Hindu religion that we are all God in disguise, and that
the world is an illusion." All that is a sort of half-truth, but if that
is the case-if really awakened Hindus by the knowledge of their union
with the godhead would simply become inert, why then Hindu music, the
most incredibly complex, marvelous technique? When they sit and play,
they laugh at each other. They are enjoying themselves enormously with
very complicated musical games. But when you go to the symphony
everybody is dressed in evening dress and with the most serious
expressions. When the orchestra gets up, the audience sits down, and it
is like a kind of church. There is none of that terrific zest, where the
drummer, the tabla player, laughs at the sarod player as they compete
with each other in all kinds of marvelous improvisations. So, if you do
find out, by any chance, who you really are, instead of becoming merely
lazy, you start laughing. And laughing leads to dancing, and dancing
needs music, and we can play with each other for a change.

INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM

CHAPTER SIX

The idea of a yana, or vehicle, comes from the basic notion or image of
Buddhism as a raft for crossing a river. This shore is ordinary everyday
consciousness such as we have, mainly the consciousness of being an ego
or a sensitive mind locked up inside a mortal body-the consciousness of
being you in particular and nobody else. The other shore is release, or
nirvana, a word that means literally "blow out," as one says, whew, in
heaving a sigh of relief. Nirvana is never, never to be interpreted as a
state of extinction or a kind of consciousness in which you are absorbed
into an infinitely formless, luminous ocean that could best be described
as purple Jell-O, but kind of spiritual. Horrors! It is not meant to be
that at all. Nirvana has many senses, but the primary meaning of it is
that it is this everyday life, just as we have it now, but seen and felt
in a completely different way. Buddhism is called in general a dharma,
and this word is often mistranslated as "the law." It is better
translated as "the doctrine," and still better translated as "the
method." The dharma was formulated originally by the Buddha, who was the
son of a north Indian raja living very close to Nepal who was thriving
shortly after 600 BC. The word buddha is a title. The proper name of
this individual was Gautama Siddhartha, and the word buddha means "the
awakened one," from the Sanskrit root buddh, which means "to wake" or
"to know." So, we could say buddha means "the man who woke up." The
Buddha was a very skillful psychologist, and he is in a way the first
psychotherapist in history, a man of tremendous understanding of the
wiles and the deviousness of the human mind. Buddhism is made to be
easily understood. Everything is numbered so that you can remember it,
and the bases of Buddhism are what are called the four noble truths. The
first one is the truth about suffering, the second is the truth about
the cause of suffering, the third is the truth about the ceasing of
suffering, and the fourth is the truth about the way to the ceasing of
suffering. So let's go back to the beginning-suffering. The Sanskrit
word is duhkha. It means suffering in the widest possible sense, but
"chronic suffering" or "chronic frustration" is probably as good a
translation as any. Buddhism says the life of mankind and of
animalsindeed also of angels, if you believe in angels-is characterized
by chronic frustration. And so, that constitutes a problem. If any one
of you says, "I have a problem"well, I don't suppose you would be here
if you didn't in some way have a problem-that is duhkha. Now, the next
thing is the cause of it. The cause of it is called trishna. Trishna is
a Sanskrit word that is the root of our word thirst, but means more
exactly "craving," "clutching," or "desiring." Because of craving or
clutching we create suffering, but in turn, this second truth is that
behind trishna there lies another thing called ignorance-avidya, or
"nonvisioned." Vid in Sanskrit is the root of the Latin videre and of
our vision. And a in front of the word means "non." So, avidya is
not-seeing, ignorance, or better, ignorance, because our mind as it
functions consciously is a method of attending to different and
particular areas of experience, one after another, one at a time. When
you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything
else. That is why to know is at the same time to ignore, and because of
that, there arises trishna, or craving. Why? Because if you ignore what
you really know, you come to imagine that you are separate from the rest
of the universe, and that you are alone, and therefore you begin to
crave or to thirst. You develop an anxiety to survive, because you think
if you are separate, if you are not the whole works, you're going to
die. Actually, you're not going to die at all. You are simply going to
stop doing one thing and start doing something else. When you die in the
ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing, in this case called Alan
Watts, but you do something else later. And there is nothing to worry
about at all. Only when you are entirely locked up in the illusion that
you are only this do you begin to be frightened and anxious, and that
creates thirst. So, if you can get rid of ignorance (ignorance) and
widen your mind out so as to see the other side of the picture, then you
can stop craving. That does not mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner
anymore, and that it won't be nice to make love, or anything like that.

It doesn't mean that at all. It means that enjoying your dinner and
making love, and generally enjoying the senses and all of experience,
only become an obstacle to you if you cling to them 'tn order to save
yourself. However, if you do not need to save yourself, you can enjoy
life just as much as ever: you don't have to be a puritan. So, then,
that is the state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything.

Supposing you are in business and you have to make money to keep a
family supported-that is the thing to do, but don't let it get you down.

Do it, in what the Hindus call nishkama karma. Nishkama means
"passionless" and karma means "activity." That means doing all the
things that one would do in life, one's business, one's occupation, but
doing it without taking it seriously. Do it as a game, and then
everybody who depends on you will like it much better. If you take it
seriously, they will be feeling guilty, because they will say, "Oh dear,
Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us," and they become
miserable. They go on, and they live their lives out of a sense of duty,
which is a dreadful thing to do. So, that is nirvana, to live in a
let-go way. The fourth noble truth describes the way or the method of
realizing nirvana, called the noble eightfold path. The eightfold path
is a series of eight human activities, such as understanding or view,
effort, vocation or occupation, speaking, conduct, and so forth, and
they are all prefaced by the Sanskrit word samyak, which is very
difficult to translate. Most people translate it as "right" in the sense
of correct, but this is an incomplete translation. The root sam in
Sanskrit is the same as our word sum through the Latin summa. The sum of
things means completion, but it also conveys the sense of balanced or
"middle-wayed." Buddhism is called the Middle Way, and we'll find out a
great deal about that later. Every Buddhist who belongs to the Theravada
for Hinayana] school in the south expresses the fact that he is a
Buddhist by reciting a certain formula called tisarana and pancha-sila.

I am talking Pali now, not Sanskrit. Tisarana means the three refuges,
and pancha-sila means "the five precepts."

Buddharn saddanam gacchame Dbarmam saddanam gacchame Sangam saddanam
gacchame

That means

"I take refuge in Buddha; I take refuge in the method, the dharma; I
take refuge in the sangha" (which means the fraternity of the followers
of Buddha). He then goes on to take the five precepts: "I promise to
abstain from taking life," "I promise to abstain from taking what is not
given," "I promise to abstain from exploiting my passions," "I promise
to abstain from false speech," and

"I promise to abstain from getting intoxicated" by a list of various
boozes. Now, every Buddhist in the Southern school says, "Mahayanists
have a different formula." This is the method, and the method, the
dharma, is therefore a moral law, but it isn't just like the Ten
Commandments-it is quite different. You do not take the five precepts in
obedience to a royal edict. You take them upon yourself, and there is a
very special reason for doing so. How can you fulfill the precept not to
take life? Every day you eat. Even if you're a vegetarian, you must take
life. This is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism.
Buddhism is a method-it is not a doctrine. Buddhism is a dialogue, and
what it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it would state
at the end. The method of Buddhism is, first of all, a relationship
between a teacher and a student. The student creates the teacher by
raising a problem and going to someone about it. Now, if he chooses
wisely, he will find out if there is a buddha around to use as the
teacher, and then he says to the buddha, "My problem is that I suffer,
and I want to escape from suffering." So, the buddha replies, "Suffering
is caused by desire, by trishna, by craving.

If you can stop desiring then you will solve your problem. Go away and
try to stop desiring." He then gives him some methods of how to practice
meditation and to make his mind calm in order to see if he can stop
desiring. The student goes away and practices this. Then he comes back
to the teacher and says, "But I can't stop desiring not to desire. What
am I to do about that?" So the teacher says, "Try, then, to stop
desiring not to desire." Now, you can see where this is going to end up.

He might put it in this way: "All right, if you can't completely stop
desiring, do a middle way. That is to say, stop desiring as much as you
can stop desiring, and don't desire to stop any more desire than you can
stop." Do you see where that's going to go? He keeps coming back because
what the teacher has done in saying

"Stop desiring" is he has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is
called a koan. This is a Japanese word that means "a meditation
problem," or more strictly, the same thing that case means in law,
because koans are usually based on anecdotes and incidents of the old
masters- cases and precedents. But the function of a koan is a challenge
for meditation. Who is it that desires not to desire? Who is it that
wants to escape from suffering? Here we get into a methodological
difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question of

"Who are you?" The Hindu says, "Your self is called the atman, the self.
Now, strive to know the self. Realize I am not my body, because I can be
aware of my body. I am not my thoughts, because I can be aware of my
thoughts. I am not my feelings for the same reason. I am not my mind,
because I can be aware of it. Therefore, I really am other than and
above, transcending all these finite aspects of me." Now, the Buddhist
has a critique of that. He says, "Why do you try to escape from yourself
as a body?" The reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape
from it. "Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?"
The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to
escape from them. You don't want to have to be afraid. You don't want to
have to be in grief or anger, and even love is too muchit involves you
in suffering, because if you love someone you are a hostage to fortune.
So, the Buddha says the reason why you believe you are the atman, the
eternal self, which in turn is the brahman, the self of the whole
universe, is that you don't want to lose your damn ego. If you can fix
your ego and put it in the safe-deposit box of the Lord, you think
you've still got yourself, but you haven't really let go. So, the Buddha
said there isn't any atman: he taught the doctrine of anatman, or
nonself. Your ego is unreal, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing
you can cling to-no refuge, really. just let go. There is no salvation,
no safety, nothing anywhere, and you see how clever that was. What he
was really saying is that any atman you could cling to or think about or
believe in wouldn't be the real one. This is the accurate sense of the
original documents of the Buddha's teaching. If you carefully go through
it, that is what he is saying. He is not saying that there isn't the
atman or the brahman, he's saying anyone you could conceive wouldn't be
it. Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one, because believing is
still clinging. There is no salvation through believing, there is only
salvation through knowledge, and even then the highest knowledge is
nonknowledge. Here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the Kena
Upanishad, "If you think that you know Brahman, you do not know him. But
if you know that you do not know the Brahman, you truly know." Why? It
is very simple. If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it,
and you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need to look at
themselves. That is the difference of method in Buddhism. Now,
understand "method" here. The method is a dialogue, and the so-called
teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the dialogue.

When they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason is
that the books only give you the opening gambits. Then, having read the
book, you have to go on with the method. Now, you can go on with the
method without a formal teacher. That is to say, you can conduct the
dialogue with yourself or with life. You have to explore and experiment
on such things as "Could one possibly not desire?"

"Could one possibly concentrate the mind perfectly?"

"Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?" And you have to work
with it so that you understand the later things that come after trying
these experiments. These later things are the heart of Buddhism. So
then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice of Buddhism
continued as a tremendous ongoing dialogue among the various followers,
and eventually they established great universities, such as there was at
Nalanda in northern India. A discourse was going on there, and if you
looked at it superficially, you might think it was nothing but an
extremely intellectual bull session where philosophers were outwitting
each other. Actually, the process that was going on was this: the
teacher or guru in every case was examining students as to their beliefs
and theories and was destroying their beliefs by showing that any belief
that you would propose, any idea about yourself or about the universe
that you want to cling to and make something of-use for a crutch, a
prop, or a security-could be demolished by the teacher. This is how the
dialogue works, until you are left without a thing to hang on to. Any
religion you might propose, even atheism, would be torn up. They would
destroy agnosticism and any kind of belief. They were experts in
demolition, so they finally got you to the point where you had nothing
left to hang on to. Well, at that point you are free, because you're it.
Once you are hanging on to things, you put "it" somewhere else,
something

"I" can grab. Even when you think, as an idea, "Then I'm it," you are
still hanging on to that, and so they are going to knock that one down.
So, when you are left without anything at all, you've seen the point.
That's the method of the dialogue, essentially. That is the dharma, and
all Buddhists make jokes about this. Buddha says in The Diamond Sutra,
"When I attained complete, perfect, unsurpassed awakening, I didn't
attain anything." Because to use a metaphor that is used in the
scriptures, it's like using an empty fist to deceive a child. You say to
a child, "What have I got here?" The child gets interested immediately
and wants to find out, and you hide it. The child climbs all over you
and can't get at your fist. Finally, you do let him get it, and there's
nothing in it. Now, that is the method again. "Teacher, you have the
great secret, and I know you have it. There must be such a secret
somewhere somebody knows." And that secret is, "How do I get one up on
the universe?" I don't know that I'm it, so I'm trying to conquer it. So
the teacher says, "Keep trying,' and he gets you going and going and
going and goin@which shows you that in the end there is nothing to get,
there never was any need to get anything and never was any need to
realize anything, because you're it.

And the fact that you think you're not is part of the game. So don't
worry. Many of the problems that are now being discussed by modern
logicians are, unbeknownst to them, already in the ancient Indian books:
problems of semantics, of meaning, and of the nature of time and memory.

All these were discussed with very, very meticulous scholarly
sophistication, so it is my opinion that this was a very fertile period
of human history, and that the philosophy in which it eventually
emerged-the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism-is as yet the most mature
and really intelligent theory of human life and of the cosmos that man
has ever devised. It is characteristic of this point of view that it
adheres to the Middle Way, but the Middle Way does not mean moderation.

It means the bringing together of opposites, of what we might call in
our world spirit and matter, mind and body, mysticism and sensuality,
unity and multiplicity, conformity and individualism. All these things
are marvelously wedded together in the world view of Mahayana.

Fundamental to Mahayana Buddhism is the idea of what is called the
bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a person who has as his essence (sattva),
bodhi (awakening). It is usually used to mean a potential buddha,
someone who is, as it were, just about to become a buddha. That was the
original sense, and part of the Pali canon is a book called the
Jatakamala, the tales of the Buddha's previous lives-how he behaved when
he was an animal and as a man long before he became Buddha. In all these
stories, he is represented as sacrificing himself for the benefit of
other beings, but since he had not yet become a fully fledged buddha, he
is called in these stories a bodhisattva. That really means "a potential
buddha," but the point is that as a potential buddha, as a bodhisattva,
he is always involved in situations where he is feeding himself to the
hungry tigers and so on. Now, in the course of time, the term
bodhisattva underwent a transformation. A bodhisattva matures and
becomes a buddha, and what does that mean popularly? It means that
whoever is fully awakened to the way things are is delivered from any
necessity to be involved in the world anymore. In other words, you can
go on to a transcendent level of being where time is abolished, where
all times are now, where there are no problems, where there is perpetual
eternal peace-nirvana in the sense of the word parinirvana, meaning
beyond nirvana, super nirvana. So, if you are fed up with this thing and
you don't want to play the game of hide-and-seek anymore, you can go
into the parinirvana state and be in total serenity. However, and again
I am talking in the language of popular Buddhism, a person who stands on
the threshold of that peace can turn back and say, "I won't be a buddha,
I'll be a bodhisattva. I won't make the final attainment, because I
would like to go back into the world of manifestation (called samsara)
and work for their liberation." So, then, when a Mahayana Buddhist does
his formula for puia, he says, "Sentient beings are numberless, I take a
vow to save them. Deluding passions are inexhaustible, I take a vow to
destroy them. The gates of the method, the dharma, are manifold, I take
a vow to enter them. The Buddha way is supreme, I take a vow to complete
it." Of course all this is impossible. Numberless sentient beings,
because they are numberless, can never be delivered. Deluding passions
which are inexhaustible can never be eradicated. So, this then is their
formula. The bodhisattva who returns into the world and becomes involved
again is in fact regarded as a superior kind of being to the one who
gets out of it. The person who gets out of the rat race and enters into
eternal peace is called pratyeka-buddba, which means "private buddha," a
buddha who does not teach or help others, and in Mahayana Buddhism that
is almost a term of abuse. Pratyeka-buddha is a class with unbelievers,
heretics' infidels, and fools, but the great thing is the bodhisattva.

All beings are thought of in popular Buddhism as constantly
reincarnating again and again into the round of existence, helplessly,
because they still desire. They are, therefore, drawn back into the
cycle. The bodhisattva goes back into the cycle with his eyes wide open,
voluntarily, and allows himself to be sucked in. This Is normally
interpreted as an act of supreme compassion, and bodhisattvas can assume
any guise. They can get furiously angry if necessary in order to
discourage evil beings, and could even assume the role of a prostitute
and live that way so as to deliver beings at that level of life. They
could become an animal, an insect, a maggot, or anything else, and all
deliberately and in full consciousness to carry on the work of the
deliverance of all beings. Now, that is the way the popular mind
understands it. Therefore, the bodhisattvas are all revered, respected,
worshiped, and looked upon as we look upon God in the West-as saviors,
as the Christian looks upon Jesus. Underneath this myth there is a
profound philosophical idea going back to the Hindu philosophy of
advaita and non-duality-namely, that the apparent dualism of "I" and
"thou," of the knower and the known, the subject and the object, is
unreal. So, also, the apparent duality between maya, the world illusion,
and reality is unreal. The apparent duality or difference between the
enlightened and the ignorant person is unreal. So, the apparent duality
of bondage and deliverance, or liberation, is unreal. The perfectly wise
man is the one who realizes vividly that the ideal place is the place
where you are. This is an impossible thing to put in words. The nearest
I could get to it would be to say that if you could see this moment that
you need nothing beyond this momentnow, sitting here, irrespective of
anything I might be saying to you, of any ideas you might have rattling
around in your brains-here and now is the absolute "whicb in which there
is no whicher." Only, we prevent ourselves from seeing this because we
are always saying, "Well, there ought to be something more. Aren't I
missing something somehow?" But nobody sees it. Now then, the most
far-out form of Mahayana Buddhism is called the Pure Land school,
jodo-shin-sbu. jodo means "pure land" and sbin-shu means "true sect."
This is based on the idea that there was in immeasurably past ages a
great bodhisattva called Amitabha, and he made a vow that he would never
become a buddha unless any being who repeated his name would
automatically at death be born into the Pure Land over which he
presides-that is, a kind of paradise. He did become a buddha, and so the
vow works. All you have to do is repeat the name of Amitabha, and this
will assure that without any further effort on your part you will be
reborn into his western paradise when you die, and in that paradise,
becoming a buddha is a cinch. There are no problems there. The western
paradise is a level of consciousness, but it is represented in fact as a
glorious place. You can see the pictures of it in Koya-san, wonderful
pictures where the Buddha Amitabha is actually a Persian figure related
to Ahura Mazda, which means "boundless light." The Daibutsu of Kamakura,
that enormous bronze buddha in the open air, is Amitabba. So, there he
sits surrounded with his court, and this court is full of upasaras,
beautiful girls playing lutes. And as you were born into the paradise,
what happens when you die is you discover yourself inside a lotus, and
the lotus goes pop, and there you find yourself sitting, coming out of
the water, and here on the clouds in front of you are the upasaras
sitting, strumming their lutes, with the most sensuous, beautiful faces.

Now, to get this, all you have to do is say the name of Amitabha. The
formula is Namu Amida butsu, and you can say this very fast, "Namu Amida
butsu, Namu Amida butsu, Numanda, Numanda, Numanda." When said many,
many times, you are quite sure it is going to happen. Actually, you only
have to say it once, and you mustn't make any effort to gain this
reward, because that would be spiritual pride. Your karma, your bad
deeds, your awful past, is so bad that anything good you try to do is
done with a selfish motive, and therefore doesn't effect your
deliverance. Therefore, the only way to get deliverance is to put faith
in the power of this Amitabha Buddha and to accept it as a free gift,
and to take it by doing the most absurd things-by saying

"Namu Amida butsu." Don't even worry whether you have to have faith in
this, because trying to have faith is also spiritual pride. It doesn't
matter whether you have faith or whether you don't, the thing works
anyway, so just say "Namu Amida butsu." Now, that is the most popular
form of Buddhism in Asia. The two most vast temples in Kyoto, the
initiant Higashi Honganii temples, represent this sect, and everybody
loves Amitabha. Amida, as they call him in Japan-boundless light,
infinite Buddha of Compassion, is sitting there with this angelic
expression on his face: "It's all right, boys, just say my name, it's
all you have to do." So when we add together prayer wheels, Namu Amida
butsu (the Japanese call it Nembutsu) as the means of remembering
Buddha, and all these things where you just have to say an abbreviated
prayer and the work is done for you, wouldn't we Westerners, especially
if we are Protestants, say, "Oh, what a scoundrelly thing that is, what
an awful degradation of religion, what an avoidance of the moral
challenge and the effort and everything that is required. Is this what
the bodhisattva doctrine of infinite compassion deteriorates into?" Now,
there is a profound aspect to all that. just as there is desperation and
despair, nirvana desperation and despair of the horrors, so there are
two ways of looking at this "nothing to do, no effort to make" idea,
depending completely on the savior. For, who is Amitabha? Popularly,
Amitabha is somebody else. He is some great compassionate being who
looks after you. Esoterically, Amitabha is your own nature; Amitabha is
your real self, the inmost boundless light that is the root and ground
of your own consciousness.

You don't need to do anything to be that. You are that, and saying
Nembutsu is simply a symbolical way of pointing out that you don't have
to become this, because you are it. And Nembutsu, therefore, in its
deeper side builds up a special kind of sage, which they called
myoko-nin. Myoko-nin in Japanese means "a marvelous fine man," but the
myoko-nin is a special type of personality who corresponds in the West
to the holy fool in Russian spirituality, or to something like the
Franciscan in Catholic spirituality. I will tell you some myoko-nin
stories because that is the best way to indicate their character. One
day a myoko-nin was traveling and he stopped in a Buddhist temple
overnight. He went up to the sanctuary where they have big cushions for
the priests to sit on, and he arranged the cushions in a pile on the
floor and went to sleep on them. In the morning the priest came in and
saw the tramp sleeping and said, "What are you doing here desecrating
the sanctuary by sleeping on the cushions and so on, right in front of
the altar?" And the myoko-nin looked at him in astonishment and said,
"Why, you must be a stranger here, you can't belong to the family." In
Japanese when you want to say that a thing is just the way it is, you
call it sonomama. There is a haiku poem that says, "Weeds in the rice
field, cut them down, sonomama, fertilizer." Cut the weeds, leave them
exactly where they are, and they become fertilizer, or sonomama. And
sonomama means "reality," "just the way it is," "just like that." Now,
there is a parallel expression, konomama. Konomama means

"I, just as I am." just little me, like that, with no frills, no
pretense, except that I naturally have some pretense. That is part of
konomama. The myoko-nin is the man who realizes that

"I, konomama-just as I am-am Buddha, delivered by Amitabha because
Amitabha is my real nature." If you really know that, that makes you a
myoko-nin, but be aware of the fact that you could entirely miss the
point and become a monkey instead by saying, "I'm all right just as I
am, and therefore I'm going to rub it in-I'm going to be going around
parading my unregenerate nature, because this is Buddha, too." The
fellow who does that doesn't really know that it's okay. He's doing too
much, and he is coming on too strong. The other people, who are always
beating themselves, are making the opposite error. The Middle Way, right
down the center, is where you don't have to do a thing to justify
yourself, and you don't have to justify not justifying yourself. So,
there is something quite fascinating and tricky in this doctrine of the
great bodhisattva Amitabha, who saves you just as you are, who delivers
you from bondage just as you are. You only have to say

"Namu Amida butsu." It is fascinating, but that is the principle of
Mahayana, and your acceptance of yourself as you are is the same thing
as coming to live now, as you are. Now is as you are, in the moment, but
you can't come to now, and you can't accept yourself on purpose, because
the moment you do that you're doing something unnecessary. You are doing
a little bit more. That is what they call in Zen putting legs on a snake
or a beard on a eunuch. You've overdone it.

How can you neither do something about it nor do nothing about it as if
that was something you had to do? This is the same problem as originally
posed in Buddhism: How do you cease from desiring? When I try to cease
from desiring, I am desiring not to desire. Do you see this? All of this
is what is called upaya, or skillful device, to slow you down so that
you can really be here. By seeing that there is nowhere else you can be,
you don't have to come to now. Where else can you be? It isn't a task or
a contest-what the Greeks called agone. There is nowhere else to be, so
they say, "Nirvana is no other than samsara." This shore is really the
same as the other shore. As the Lankavatarasutra says, "If you look to
try to get nirvana in order to escape suffering and being reborn, that's
not nirvana at all."

THE TAOIST WAY OF KARMA

CHAPTER SEVEN

The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principle components
of Chinese thought. There are, of course, quite a number of forms of
Chinese philosophy, but there are two great currents that have
thoroughly molded the culture of China-Taoism and Confucianismand they
play a curious game with each other. Let me start by saying something
about Confucianism originating with K'ung Fu-tzu or Confucius, who lived
a little after 630 Bc. He is often supposed to have been a contemporary
of Lao-tzu, who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way. It seems more
likely, however, that Laotzu lived later than 400 Bc., according to most
modern scholars. Confucianism is not a religion, it is a social ritual
and a way of ordering society-so much so that the first great Catholic
missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit, found it perfectly
consistent with his Catholicism to participate in Confucian rituals. He
saw them as something of a kind of national character, as one might pay
respect to the flag or something like that in our own times. He found
that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism and no
commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the
Catholic faith. So, Confucianism is an order of society and involves
ideas of human relations, including the government and the family. This
order is based on the principle of what is called in Chinese ren, which
is an extraordinarily interesting word. The word ren is often translated
as "benevolence," but that is not a good translation at all. This word
means "human-heartedness" (that's the nearest we can get to it in
English), and it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all
virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It is above
righteousness, justice, propriety, and other great Confucian virtues,
and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good
arrangement, including not only our virtuous side but also our
passionate side-our appetites and our waywardness. The Hebrews have a
term that they call the yetzer ha-ra, which means "the wayward
inclination," or what I like to call the element of irreducible
rascality that God put into all human beings because it was a good
thing. It was good for humans to have these two elements in them. So, a
truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of
rascality, just as one has to have salt in a stew. Confucius said the
goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to try to be
wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity and to be something that isn't
human. So, this gives the Confucian approach to life, justice, and all
those sorts of things a kind of queer humor, a sort of "boys will be
boys" attitude,which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human
problems. It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist
priests (especially Zen priests) who visited China to study Buddhism
introduced Confucianism into Japan. Despite certain limitations that
Confucianism has-and it always needs the Taoist philosophy as a
counterbalance-it has been one of the most successful philosophies in
all history for regulation of governmental and family relationships.

Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships-linguistic,
ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, and in all the spheres of moralsand
for this reason has always been twitted by the Taoists for being
unnatural. But you need these two components, and they play against each
other beautifully in Chinese society. Roughly speaking, the Confucian
way of life is for people involved in the world. The Taoist way of life
is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know in our own modern
times, there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular
lifestyle of the United States. If you want to go through the regular
lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and
then you go into a profession or a business. You own a standard house,
raise a family, have a car or two, and do all that jazz. But a lot of
people don't want to live that way, and there are lots of other ways of
living besides that. So, you could say that those of us who go along
with the pattern correspond to the Confucians. Those who are bohemians,
bums, beatniks, or whatever, and don't correspond with the pattern, are
more like the Taoists. Actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of
life for older people. Lao-tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism,
means "the old boy" and the legend is that when he was born he already
had a white beard. So, it is sort of like this: When you have
contributed to society, contributed children and brought them up, and
have assumed a certain role in social life, you then say, "Now it's time
for me to find out what it's all about. Who am I ultimately, behind my
outward personality? What is the secret source of things" The later half
of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out. It is
something to do when you have finished with the family business. I am
not saying that is a sort of unavoidable strict rule. Of course, one can
study the Tao when very young, because it contains all kinds of secrets
as to the performance of every kind of art, craft, business, or any
occupation whatsoever. In China, in a way, it plays the role of a kind
of safety valve for the more restrictive way of life that Confucianism
prescribes. There is a sort of type in China who is known as "the Old
Robe" He is a sort of intellectual bum, often found among scholars, who
is admired very much and is a type of character that had an enormous
influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist life. He is
one who goes with nature rather than against nature. First of all, I am
going to address ideas that come strictly out of Lao-tzu's book, the Tao
Te Ching. Of course, the basis of the whole philosophy is the conception
of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao-tzu starts out
by saying that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. You
cannot give all the meanings, because the word tao means both "the way
or course of nature or of everything" and "to speak" So, the actual
opening phrase of the book, following this word tao, is a character that
means "can be" or "can" or something like "able" So, according to its
second meaning it is "the way that can be spoken, described, or uttered"

But it also means the way that can be "wayed" although you would have to
invent that word. The way that can be traveled, perhaps, is not the
eternal way. In other words, there is no way of following the Tao; there
is no recipe for it. I cannot give you any do-it-yourself instructions
as to how it is done. It is like when Louis Armstrong was asked, "What
is jazz" He said, "If you have to ask, you don't know" Now that's
awkward, isn't it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing certain
atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it. We can
also gather what it is from the art, poetry, expressions, anecdotes, and
stories that illustrate the philosophy of the way. So, this word then,
tao, the "way or the course of things" is not, as some Christian
missionaries translated it, the Logos, taking as their point of
departure the opening passage of Saint john's Gospel, "In the beginning
was the word" If you look this up in a Chinese translation of the Bible,
it usually says, "In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with
God, and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All
things were made by it and without it was not anything made that was
made" So, they have substituted

"Tao" and that would have a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher,
because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd. The Tao is
not a manufacturer, and it is not a governor. It does not rule, as it
were, in the position of a king.

Although the book Tao Te Ching is written for many purposes, one of its
important purposes is as a manual of guidance for a ruler. What it tells
him is, essentially, "Rule by not ruling. Don't lord it over the people"

And so, Lao-tzu says, "The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left
and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord
it over them, and when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to
them" In other words, the Tao doesn't stand up and say, "I have made all
of you. I have filled this earth with its beauty and glory. Fall down
before me and worship" The Tao, having done everything, always escapes
and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgment, because it
loves obscurity. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao is like water. It always
seeks the lowest level, which human beings abhor" So, it is a very
mysterious idea. Tao, then, is not really equivalent with any Western or
Hindu idea of God, because God is always associated with being the Lord.

Even in India, the Brahman is often called the Supreme Lord, although
that is a term more strictly applicable to Ishvara, the manifestation of
Brahman in the form of a personal God. But the Lord Krishna's song is
the Bbagavad Gita, the

"Song of the Lord" and there is always the idea of the king and the
ruler attached. This is not so in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is
not something different from nature, ourselves, and our surrounding
trees, waters, and air. The Tao is the way all that behaves. So, the
basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it is an organism. As
we shall see when we get on to the Cbuang-tzu (which was written by
Chuang-tzu), who is the sort of elaborator of Lao-tzu, he sees
everything operating together so that you cannot find the controlling
center anywhere, because there isn't any. The world is a system of
interrelated components, none of which can survive without the other,
just as in the case of bees and flowers. You will never find bees in a
place where there are not flowers, and you will never find flowers in a
place where there are not bees or other insects that do the equivalent
job. What that tells us, secretly, is that although bees and flowers
look different from each other, they are inseparable. To use a very
important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. "To be" and "not to
be" mutually arise. This character is based on the picture of a plant,
something that grows out of the ground. So, you could say, positive and
negative, to be and not to be, yes and no, and light and dark arise
mutually and come into being. There is no cause and effect; that is not
the relationship at all. It is like the egg and the hen. The bees and
the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low, back and front,
long and short, loud and soft-all those experiences are experienceable
only in terms of their polar opposite. The Chinese idea of nature is
that all the various species arise mutually because they interdepend,
and this total system of interdependence is the Tao. It involves certain
other things that go along with Tao, but this Mutual arising is the key
idea to the whole thing. If you want to understand Chinese and Oriental
thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp, because we
think so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe
today in Aristotelian and Newtonian ways.

According to that philosophy the world is separated. It is like a huge
amalgamation of billiard balls, and they don't move until struck by
another or by a cue. So, everything is going tock, tock, tock, all over
the place; one thing starts off another in a mechanical way. Of course,
from the standpoint of twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well
now that this is not the way it works. We know enough about
relationships to see that the mechanical model that Newton devised was
all right for certain purposes, but it breaks down now, because we
understand relativity and we see how things go together in a kind of
connected net, rather than in a chain of billiard balls banging each
other around. So, then, we move to a second term that is extremely
important. The expression tzu-jan is the term that we translate as
"nature" in Chinese, but this term expresses a whole point of view. It
does not say nature, natura, which means, in a way, "a class of things"

It means, literally, "self so" or "what is so of itself" It is what
happens of itself, and thus, spontaneity. Early on in the Tao Te Ching,
Lao-tzu says, "The Tao's method is to be so of itself" Now, we might
translate that as 14 automatic" were it not that the word automatic has
a mechanical flavor. Tzu-jan, or sbizen in Japanese, means
"spontaneous": it happens as your heart beats. You don't do anything
about it, don't force your heart to beat, and you don't make it beat-it
does it by itself. Now, figure a world in which everything happens by
itself-it doesn't have to be controlled, it is allowed. Whereas you
might say the idea of God involves the control of everything going on,
the idea of the Tao is of the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the
people to conduct their own affairs, to let it all "happen" This doesn't
mean that there is not a unified organism and that everything is in
chaos. It means that the more liberty and the more love you give, and
the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take
place, the more order you will have. It is generally believed in India
that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem
is to become free from his past karma. The word karma literally means
"action" or "doing" in Sanskrit, so that when we say something that
happens to you is your karma, it is like saying in English, "it is your
own doing" In popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of builtin moral
law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things and all the
good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit. So long
as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what
the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is
called nishkama karma. Nishkama means "without passion" or "without
attachment" and karma means "action" So, whatever action he does, he
renounces the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does
not generate future karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of
becoming, samsara, the "round" and keeps you being reincarnated. Now,
when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that
you have start presenting themselves for Payment. In other words, a
person who begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick
or that his children will die, or that he will lose his money, or that
all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being
cleared up. There is no hurry to be "cleared up" if you're just living
along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life, a certain
hurry occurs. Therefore, since this is known, it is rather discouraging
to start these things. The Christian way of saying the same thing is
that if you plan to change your life (shall we say to turn over a new
leaf?) you mustn't let the devil know, because he will oppose you with
all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from
his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking
too much, and you make a New Year's resolution that during this coming
year you will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The
devil will immediately know about it, and he will confront you with the
prospect of 365 drinkless days. That will be awful, just overwhelming,
and you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon.

So, in that case, you compromise with the devil and say, "Just today I'm
not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe we'll go back" Then,
when tomorrow comes, you say, "Oh, just another day, let's try, that's
all" And the next day, you say, "Oh, one more day won't make much
difference" So, you only do it for the moment, and you don't let the
devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day
after day after day. Of course, there's something still better than
that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of
course, not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that
saying

"Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth" is just this.
That is why, in Zen discipline, a grea t deal of it centers around
acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen
Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release
the bowstring without first saying

"Now"

There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van
Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this
bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to
deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would
be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would
catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life,
or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act
simultaneously- this means you escape karma and the devil. So, you might
say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting
free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we
have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You
can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into
the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the
engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once.

It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without
challenging it, and so it has the reputation ofbeing the easy way. There
are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One
of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as
difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his
students. If some teacher or some guru says, "Really, this isn't
difficult at all-it's perfectly easy" some people will say, "Oh, he's
not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult" When
we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that's very
weird and rigid, people think, "Now there is the thing. That man means
business" So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a
guy they are serious students, whereas the other people are only
dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's
the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who
shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence
rather than effort, because that's what it is. Taoism is, in that sense,
what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using
cleverness instead of muscle. So, the question naturally arises, "Isn't
it cheating" When, in any game, somebody really starts using his
intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating; and to draw
the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. The
inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of
cheating; that is its way of saving face. "You beat me by means that
weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had
the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like
this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you
introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that,
and you're not playing fair" So, in the whole domain of ways of
liberation, there are routes for the stupid people and routes for the
intelligent people, and the latter are faster. This was perfectly
clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in
his Platform Sutra, where he said, "The difference between the gradual
school and the sudden school is that although they both arrive at the
same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for
fast-witred people" In other words, can you find a way that sees into
your own nature-that sees into the Tao immediately. Earlier, I pointed
out to you the immediate way, the way through now. When you know that
this moment is the Tao, and this moment is considered by itself without
past and without future-eternal, neither coming into being nor going out
of being-there is nirvana. And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of
time based on this. It has not, to my knowledge, been very much
discussed by Taoist writers; it's been more discussed by Buddhist
writers. But it's all based on the same thing. Zenji Dogen, the great
thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied in China and wrote a
book called Sbobogenzo. A rosbi recently said to me in Japan, "That's a
terrible book, because it tells you everything. It gives the whole
secret away" But in the course of this book, he says, "There is no such
thing as a progression in time. The spring does not become the summer.

There is first spring, and then there is summer" So, in the same way,
"you" now do not become "you" later. In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he
says that the person who is settled down on the train to read the
newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the
platform. Therefore, you who sit here are not the same people who came
in at the door: these states are separate, each in its own place. There
was the "coming in at the door person" but there is actually only the
"here-and-now sitting person" The person sitting here and now is not the
person who will die, because we are all a constant flux. The continuity
of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its
own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber
pole. You know it goes round and round, and the whole thing seems to be
going up or going down, whichever the case may be, but actually nothing
is going up or down. When you throw a pebble into the pond and you make
concentric rings of waves, there is an illusion that the water is
flowing outward, but no water is flowing outward at all. The water is
only going up and down. What appears to move outward is the wave, not
the water. So this kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming
to go along in a course of time does not really happen. The Buddhists
say that suffering exists, but no one who suffers. Deeds exist, but no
doers are found. A path there is, but no one follows it. And nirvana is,
but no one attains it. In this way, they look upon the continuity of
life as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a
cigarette and whirl it in the dark and create the illusion of the
circle, whereas there is only the one point of fire. The argument, then,
is that so long as you are in the present there aren't any problems. The
problems exist only when you allow presents to amalgamate. There is a
way of putting this in Chinese that is rather interesting. They have a
very interesting sign-it's pronounced nin (nen in Japanese). The top
part of the character means "now" and the bottom part means "the mind
heart" the shin. And so, this is, as it were, an instant of thought. In
Chinese they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word
inana. Then, if you double this character and put it twice or three
times, nin, nin, nin-it means "thought after thought after thought" The
Zen master joshu was once asked, "What is the mind of the child" He
said, "A ball in a mountain stream" He was asked, "What do you mean by a
ball in a mountain stream" Joshua said, "Thought after thought after
thought with no block" He was using, of course, the mind of the child as
the innocent mind, the mind of a person who is enlightened. One thought
follows another without hesitation. The thought arises; it does not wait
to arise. When you clap your hands, the sound issues without hesitation.

When you strike flint, the spark comes out; it does not wait to come
out. That means that there's no block. So, "thought, thought,
thought"-nin, nin, nindescribes what we call in our world the stream of
consciousness. Blocking consists in letting the stream become connected,
or chained together in such a way that when the present thought arises,
it seems to be dragging its past, or resisting its future by saying, "I
don't want to go" When the connection, or the dragging of these
thoughts, stops, you have broken the chain of karma. If you think of
this in comparison with certain problems in music it is very
interesting, because when we listen to music, we hear melody only
because we remember the sequence. We hear the intervals between the
tones, but more than that, we remember the tones that led up to the one
we are now hearing. We are trained musically to anticipate certain
consequences, and to the extent that we get the consequences, we
anticipate it, we feel that we understand the music. But to the extent
that the composer does not adhere to the rules-and gives us unexpected
consequences-we feel that we don't understand the music. If he gives us
harmonic relationships that we are trained not to accept, or expect, we
say, "Well this man is just writing garbage" Of course, it becomes
apparent that the perception of music and the ability to hear melody
will depend upon a relationship between past, present, and future
sounds. You might Say, "Well, you're talking about a way of living that
would be equivalent to listening to music with a tonedeaf mind so that
you would eliminate the melody and have only noise. In your Taoist way
of life, you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless present
Moments" Up to a point that is true; that is, in a way, what Buddhists
also mean by seeing things in their suchness. What is so bad about
dying, for example? It's really no problem. When you die, you just drop
dead, and that's all there is to it. But what makes it a problem is that
you are dragging a past. And all those things you have done, all those
achievements you've made and all these relationships and people that
you've accumulated as your friends have to go. It isn't here now. A few
friends might be around you, but all the past that identifies you as who
you are (which is simply memory) has to go, and we feel just terrible
about that. If we didn't, if we were just dying and that's all, death
would not be a problem. Likewise, the chores of everyday life become
intolerable when everything-all the past and futureties together and you
feel it dragging at you every way. Supposing you wake up in the morning
and it's a lovely morning. Let's take today, right here and now-here we
are in this paradise of a place and some of us have to go to work on
Monday. Is that a problem? For many people it is because it spoils the
taste of what is going on now. When we wake up in bed on Monday morning
and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately
we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas, actually, we're just lying in
bed. So, the Taoist trick is simply, "Live now and there will be no
problems" That is the meaning of the Zen saying, "When you are hungry,
eat. When you are tired, sleep. When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit"

Rinzai, the great Tung dynasty master, said, "In the practice of
Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Sleep when you're tired,
move your bowels, eat when you're hungry-that's all. The ignorant will
laugh at me, but the wise will understand" The meaning of the wonderful
Zen saying

"Every day is a good day" is that they come one after another, and yet
there is only this one. You don't link them. This, as I intimated just a
moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they
do. The flower goes puff, and people go this way and that way, and so
on, and that is what is happening. It has no meaning, no destination, no
value. It is just like that. When you see that, you see it's a great
relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are firmly established in
suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again to play with
the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don't haunt
you, because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on
from moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die
sometime in the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have
enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing
all kinds of continuities. This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying
about mountains: "To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are
waters. To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains,
waters are no longer waters" In other words, they have dissolved into
the point instant, the tsbana. "But for the fully perfected student,
mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters"

THE BOOK ON THE TABOO AGAINST KNOWING WHO YOU ARE

by

Alan Watts

Preface

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo--our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy religions of the East--in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. 

       We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe. For this purpose I have drawn on the insights of Vedanta, stating them, however, in a completely modern and Western style--so that this volume makes no attempt to be a textbook on or introduction to Vedanta in the ordinary sense. It is rather a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition. 

       Particular thanks are due to my wife, Mary Jane, for her careful editorial work and her comments on the manuscript. Gratitude is also due to the Bollingen Foundation for its support of a project which included the writing of this book. 

ALAN WATTS Sausalito, California January, 1966 

Chapter 1

I  Inside Information

Just what should a young man or woman know in order to be "in the know"? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell? 

       In Japan it was once customary to give young people about to be married a "pillow book." This was a small volume of wood-block prints, often colored, showing all the details of sexual intercourse. It wasn't just that, as the Chinese say, "one picture is worth ten thousand words." It was also that it spared parents the embarrassment of explaining these intimate matters face-to-face. But today in the West you can get such information at any newsstand Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults. 

       But if sex is no longer the big taboo, what is? For there is always something taboo, something repressed unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling Taboos lie within taboos, like the skins of an onion. What, then, would be The Book which fathers might slip to their sons and mothers to their daughters without ever admitting it openly? 

       In some circles there is a strong taboo on religion, even in circles where people go to church or read the Bible. Here, religion is one's own private business. It is bad form or uncool to talk or argue about it, and very bad indeed to make a big show of piety. Yet when you get in on the inside of almost any standard- brand religion, you wonder what on earth the hush was about. Surely The Book I have in mind wouldn't be the Bible, "the Good Book"--that fascinating anthology of ancient wisdom, history, and fable which has for so long been treated as a Sacred Cow that it might well be locked up for a century or two 80 that men could hear it again with clean ears. There are indeed secrets in the Bible, and some very subversive ones, but they are all so muffled up in complications, in archaic symbols and ways of thinking, that Chris tianity has become incredibly difficult to explain to a modern person. That is, unless you are content to water it down to being good and trying to imitate Jesus, but no one ever explains just how to do that. To do it you must have a particular power from God known as "grace," but all that we really know about grace is that some get it and some don't. 

       The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are--as now practiced--like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don't seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day. 

       The Book I'm thinking about would not be religious in the usual sense, but it would have to discuss many things with which religions have been concerned--the universe and man's place in it, the mysterious center of experience which we call "I myself," the problems of life and love, pain and death, and the whole question of whether existence has meaning in any sense of the word. For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd. 

       It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd--uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of "doing it" from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock? 

       Ludwig Wittgenstein and other modern "logical" philosophers have tried to suppress this question by saying that it has no meaning and ought not to be asked. Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as "Why this universe?" are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking "Where is this universe?" when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense, Wittgenstein, as we shall see, had a point there. Nevertheless wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals and intelligent and sensitive people from morons. 

       Is there, then, some kind of a lowdown on this astounding scheme of things, something that never really gets out through the usual channels for the Answer--the historic religions and philosophies? There is. It has been said again and again, but in such a fashion that we, today, in this particular civilization do not hear it. We do not realize that it is utterly subversive, not so much in the political and moral sense, as in that it turns our ordinary view of things, our common sense, inside out and upside down. It may of course have political and moral consequences, but as yet we have no clear idea of what they may be. Hitherto this inner revolution of the mind has been confined to rather isolated individuals; it has never, to my knowledge, been widely characteristic of communities or societies. It has often been thought too dangerous for that. Hence the taboo. 

       But the world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure--like the Pasteur serum for rabies. It is not that we may simply blow up the planet with nuclear bombs, strangle ourselves with overpopulation, destroy our natural resources through poor conservation, or ruin the soil and its products with improperly understood chemicals and pesticides. Beyond all these is the possibility that civilization may be a huge technological success, but through methods that most people will find baffling, frightening, and disorienting--because, for one reason alone, the methods will keep changing. It may be like playing a game in which the rules are constantly changed without ever being made clear--a game from which one cannot withdraw without suicide, and in which one can never return to an older form of the game. 

       But the problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the prob lem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms- Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body--a center which "confronts an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflectt this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." 

       This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin. 

       The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile. We are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. In America the great symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and the rocket--the instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know how to fit houses into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers who know that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first need for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments which, like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own brains.)1 [Click the BACK button on your browser to return from notes to where you were reading.] The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends. 

       The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology. 

       It might seem, then, that our need is for some genius to invent a new religion, a philosophy of life and a view of the world, that is plausible and generally acceptable for the late twentieth century, and through which every individual can feel that the world as a whole and his own life in particular have meaning. This, as history has shown repeatedly, is not enough. Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the "saved" from the "damned," the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. Even religious liberals play the game of "we-re-more-tolerant-than-you." Furthermore. as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended and kept "pure,--and-because all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty-religions must make converts. The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our position. In the end one is committed to being a Christian or a Buddhist come what may in the form of new knowledge. New and indigestible ideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition. however inconsistent with its original doctrines, so that the believer can still take his stand and assert, "I am first and foremost a follower of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever." Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness --an act of trust in the unknown. 

       An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency 

       Therefore The Book that I would like to slip to my children would itself be slippery. It would slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary medicine. not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference. They would read it and be done with it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to go back to it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines. 

       We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience--a new feeling of what it is to be "I." The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing-- with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego. I am not thinking of Freud's barbarous Id or Unconscious as the actual reality behind the facade of personality. Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called "reductionism," a curios need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces. They worked very hard, then, to prove that grapes can grow on thornbushes. 

       As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one canhardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergendanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time--a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy. 

       The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth-- that is, through special metaphors, analogies. and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road. 

       Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this: 

       "There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black. 

       "In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place. 

       "God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. 

       "Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it--just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self--the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. 

       "Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't. we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Mobius strip--a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. 

       "God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. 

       "You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world." 

       This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating. By contrast, so many other mythical explanations of the world are crude, tortuous, and unintelligible. But many people think that believing in the unintelligible propositions and symbols of their religions is the test of true faith. "I believe," said Tertullian of Christianity, "because it is absurd." 

       People who think for themselves do not accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it: 

The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way "up there." We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom. We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. 

But, he continues-- 

Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts . . . "the Ultimate Ground of Being," he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction." 2 

       "The Ultimate Ground of Being" is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for God" and would also do for "the Self of the world" as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or "pretending" to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos you re IT! 

       Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalo- mania--an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity. For though we cultivate the ego with one hand, we knock it down with the other. From generation to generation we kick the stuffing out of our children to teach them to "know their place" and to behave, think, and feel with proper modesty as befits one little ego among many. As my mother used to say, "You're not the only pebble on the beach." Anyone in his right mind who believes that he is God should be crucified or burned at the stake, though now we take the more charitable view that no one in his right mind could believe such nonsense. Only a poor idiot could conceive himself as the omnipotent ruler of the world, and expect everyone else to fall down and worship. 

       But this is because we think of God as the King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personally and consciously controls every detail of his cosmos-- and that is not the kind of God in my story. In fact, it isn't my story at all, for any student of the history of religions will know that it comes from ancient India, and is the mythical way of explaining the Vedanta philosophy. Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, most of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate superperson who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is ''underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself. 

       But Vedanta is much more than the idea or the belief that this is so. It is centrally and above all the experience, the immediate knowledge of its being so, and for this reason such a complete subversion of our ordinary way of seeing things. It turns the world inside out and outside in. Likewise, a saying attributed to Jesus runs: 

When you make the two one, and

when you make the inner as the outer

and the outer as the inner and the above

as the below . . .

then shall you enter [the Kingdom] . . . .

I am the Light that is above

them all, I am the All,

the All came forth from Me and the All

attained to Me. Cleave [a piece of] wood, I

am there; lift up the stone and you will

find Me there. 3 

       Today the Vedanta discipline comes down to us after centuries of involvement with all the forms, attitudes, and symbols of Hindu culture in its flowering and slow demise over nearly 2,800 years, sorely wounded by Islamic fanaticism and corrupted by British puritanism. As often set forth, Vedanta rings no bell in the West, and attracts mostly the fastidiously spiritual and diaphanous kind of people for whom incarnation in a physical body is just too disgusting to be borne.4 But it is possible to state its essentials in a present day idiom, and when this is done without exotic trappings, Sanskrit terminology, and excessive postures of spirituality, the message is not only clear to people with no special interest in "Oriental religions"; it is also the very jolt that we need to kick ourselves out of our isolated sensation of self. 

       But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of "unselfishness," which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such "unselfishness" is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of "we're-more-tolerant-than-you." The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivations or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them. 

       For this reason The Book I would pass to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds and oughts. Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt. How would you like to be an invalid mother with a daughter who can't marry because she feels she ought to look after you, and therefore hates you? My wish would be to tell, not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we ignore them as they are. You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality. It may well be as the squares said of Jesus, "Look at him! A glutton and a drinker, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners." 

       Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg's way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self. There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you ought to break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, the Self) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, and so bring the drama of life on earth to its close in a vast explosion. Another Hindu myth says that as time goes on, life in the world gets worse and worse, until at last the destructive aspect of the Self, the god Shiva, dances a terrible dance which consumes everything in fire. There follow, says the myth, 4,320,000 years of total peace during which the Self is just itself and does not play hide. And then the game begins again, starting off as a universe of perfect splendor which begins to deteriorate only after 1,728,000 years, and every round of the game is so designed that the forces of darkness present themselves for only one third of the time, enjoying at the end a brief but quite illusory triumph. Today we calculate the life of this planet alone in much vaster periods, but of all ancient civilizations the Hindus had the most imaginative vision of cosmic time. Yet remember, this story of the cycles of the world s appearance and disappearance is myth, not science, parable rather than prophecy. It is a way of illustrating the idea that the universe is like the game of hide-and-seek. 

       If, then, I am not saying that you ought to awaken from the ego-illusion and help save the world from disaster, why The Book? Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply that it is part of "things taking their course" that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. I realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard. 

(1) "I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon . . . Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported." Fred Hoyle, Galaxies, Nuclei, And Quasars. Harper & Row, New York, 1965.

(2) A discussion of the views of theologian Paul Tillich in "The Battle of the Bible," Look, Vol. XIX, No. 15. July 27, 1965, P. 19.

(3) A. Guillaumont and others (trs.), The Gospel According to Thomas. Harper & Row, New York, 1959. pp. 17-18, 43. A recently discovered Coptic manuscript, possibly translated from a Greek version as old as A.D. 140. The "I" and the "Me" are obvious references to the disguised Self. 

(4) I said "mostly'' because I am aware of some very special exceptions both here and in India. 

Chapter 2

II The Game of Black-And-White

When we were taught 1, 2, 3 and A, B, C, few of us were ever told about the Game of Black-and-White. It is quite as simple. but belongs to the hushed-up side of things. Consider, first, that all your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense--something like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas. But the complex patterns and chains of neurons which constitute these senses are composed of neuron units which are capable of changing between just two states: on or off. To the central brain the individual neuron signals either yes or no--that's all. But, as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are 0 and 1, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvelous patterns. 

       In this respect our nervous system and 0/l computers are much like everything else, for thc physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In others words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down. 

       Although sounds of high vibration seem to be continuous, to be pure sound, they are not. Every sound is actually sound/silence, only the ears don't register this consciously when the alternation is too rapid. It appears only in, say, the lowest audible notes of an organ. Light, too, is not pure light, but light/darkness. Light pulsates in waves, with their essential up/ down motion, and in some conditions the speed of light vibrations can be synchronized with other moving objects so that the latter appear to be still. This is why arc lights are not used in sawmills, for they emit light at a pulse which easily synchronizes with the speed of a buzz saw in such a way that its teeth seem to be still. 

       While eyes and ears actually register and respond to both the up-beat and the down-beat of these vibrations, the mind, that is to say our conscious attention, notices only the up-beat. The dark, silent, or "off" interval is ignored. It is almost a general principle that consciousness ignores intervals, and yet cannot notice any pulse of energy without them. If you put your hand on an attractive girl's knee and just leave it there, she may cease to notice it. But if you keep patting her knee, she will know you are very much there and interested. But she notices and, you hope, values the on more than the off. Nevertheless, the very things that we believe to exist are always on/offs. Ons alone and offs alone do not exist. 

       Many people imagine that in listening to music they hear simply a succession of tones, singly, or in 23 clusters called chords. If that were true, as it is in the exceptional cases of tone-deaf people, they would hear no music, no melody whatsoever--only a succession of noises. Hearing melody is hearing the intervals between the tones, even though you may not realize it, and even though these particular intervals arc not periods of silence but "steps" of varying length between points on the musical scale. These steps or intervals are auditory spaces, as distinct from distance-spaces between bodies or time-spaces between events. 

       Yet the general habit of conscious attention is, in various ways, to ignore intervals. Most people think, for example, that space is "just nothing" unless it happens to be filled with air. They are therefore puzzled when artists or architects speak of types and properties of space, and more so when astronomers and physicists speak of curved space, expanding space, finite space, or of the influence of space on light or on stars. Because of this habit of ignoring space-intervals, we do not realize that just as sound is a vibration of sound/silence, the whole universe (that is, existence) is a vibration of solid/space. For solids and spaces go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion. 

       If there were a body, just one single ball, with no surrounding space, there would be no way of conceiving or feeling it as a ball or any other shape. If there were nothing outside it, it would have no outside. It might be God, but certainly not a body! So too, if there were just space alone with nothing in it, it wouldn't be space a all. For there is no space except space between things, inside things, or outside things. This is why space is the relationship between bodies. 

       Can we imagine one lonely body, the only ball in the universe in the midst of empty space? Perhaps. But this ball would have no energy, no motion. In relation to what could it be said to be moving? Things are said to move only when compared with others, that are relatively still, for motion is motion/stillness. So let's have two balls, and notice that they come closer to each other, or get further apart. Sure, there is motion now, but which one is moving? Ball one, ball two, or both? There is no way of deciding. All answers are equally right and wrong. Now bring in a third ball. Balls one and two stay the same distance apart, but ball three approaches or retreats from them. Or does it? Balls one and two may be moving together, towards or away from three, or balls one and two may be approaching three as three approaches them, so that all are in motion. How are we to decide? One answer is that because balls one and two stay together, they are a group and also constitute a majority. Their vote will therefore decide who is moving and who is not. But if three joins them it can lick 'em, for if all three stay the same distance apart, the group as a whole cannot move. It will even be impossible for any one to say to the other two, or any two to the other one, "Why do you keep following me (us) around?" For the group as a whole will have no point of reference to know whether it is moving or not. 

       Note that whereas two balls alone can move only in a straight line, three balls can move within a surface, but not in three dimensions. The moment we add a fourth ball we get the third dimension of depth, an now it would seem that our fourth ball can stand apart from the other three, take an objective view of their behavior, and act as the referee. Yet, when we have added the fourth, which one is it? Any one of them can be in the third dimension with respect to the other three. This might be called a "first lesson in relativity," for the principle remains the same no matter how many balls are added and therefore applies to all celestial bodies in this universe and to all observers of their motion, wheresoever located. Any galaxy, any star, any planet, or any observer can be taken as the central point of reference, so that everything is central in relation to everything else! 

       Now in all this discussion, one possibility has been overlooked. Suppose that the balls don't move at all, but that the space between them moves. After all, we speak of a distance (i.e., space) increasing or decreasing as if it were a thing that could do something. This is the problem of the expanding universe. Are the other galaxies moving away from ours, or ours from them, or all from each other? Astronomers are trying to settle the problem by saying that space itself is expanding. But, again, who is to decide? What moves, the galaxies or the space? The fact that no decision can be reached is itself the clue to the answer: not just that both the galaxies and space are expanding (as if they were two different agents), but something which we must clumsily call galaxies/space, or solid/space, is expanding. 

       The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough. 

       A similar solution applies to the ancient problem of cause and effect. We believe that everything and every event must have a cause, that is, some other thing(s) or event(s), and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects. So how does a cause lead to an effect? To make it much worse, if all that I think or do is a set of effects, there must be causes for all of them going back into an indefinite past. If so, I can't help what I do. I am simply a puppet pulled by strings that go back into times far beyond my vision. 

       Again, this is a problem which comes from asking the wrong question. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat. 

       The cat wasn't born as a head which, some time later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once. 

       The narrow slit in the fence is much like the way in which we look at life by conscious attention, for when we attend to something we ignore everything else. Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together--as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam. Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of thc wold after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television, and Norbert Wiener and his colleagues found some evidence that there is a similar process in the brain. 

       But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events. We often say that you can only think one thing at a time. The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bigs, things, events, causes, and effects. We do not see that the world is all of a piece like the head-tailed cat. 

       We also speak of attention as noticing. To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore-for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignore-ance (i.e., ignorance) despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice. Physically, we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch innumerable features that we never notice. You can drive thirty miles, talking all the time to a friend. What you noticed, and remembered, was the conversation, but somehow you responded to thc road, the other cars, the traffic lights, and heaven knows what else, without really noticing, or focussing your mental spotlight upon them. So too, you can talk to someone at a party without remembering, for immediate recall, what clothes he or she was wearing, because they were not noteworthy or significant to you. Yet certainly your eyes and nerves responded to those clothes. You saw, but did not really look. 

       It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of symbols--words, numbers, signs, simple images (like squares and triangles), musical notes, letters, ideographs (as in Chinese), and scales for dividing and distinguishing variations of color or of tones. Such symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are the labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label. Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail. 

       What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages. There is no English word for a type of feeling which the Japanese call yugen, and we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which Japanese people use the word. 1 

       There must then be numberless features and dimensions of the world to which our senses respond without our conscious attention, let alone vibrations (such as cosmic rays) having wave-lengths to which our senses are not tuned at all. To perceive all vibrations at once would be pandemonium, as when someone slams down all the keys of the piano at the same time. But there are two ignored factors which can very well come into our awareness, and our ignorance of them is the mainstay of the ego-illusion and of the failure to know that we are each the one Self in disguise. The first is not realizing that so-called opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and off, inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect, are poles or aspects of the same thing. But we have no word for that thing, save such vague concepts as Existence, Being, God, or the Ultimate Ground of Being. For the most part these remain nebulous ideas without becoming vivid feelings or experiences. 

       The second, closely related, is that we are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of perception is not only the real way of seeing the world, but also the very basic sensation of oneself as a conscious being, that we are fully hypnotized by its disjointed vision of the universe. We really feel that this world is indeed an assemblage of separate things that have somehow come together or, perhaps, fallen apart, and that we are each only one of them. We see them all alone--born alone, dying alone--maybe as bits and fragments of a universal whole, or expendable parts of a big machine. Rarely do we see all so-called things and events "going together." like the head and tail of the cat, or as the tones and inflections--rising and falling, coming and going--of a single singing voice. 

       In other words, we do not play the Game of Black-and-White--the universal game of up/down, on/off. solid/space, and each/all. Instead, we play the game of Black-versus-White or, more usually, White-versus Black. For, especially when rates of vibration are slow as with day and night or life and death, we are forced to be aware of the black or negative aspect of the world. Then, not realizing the inseparability of the positive and negative poles of the rhythm, we are afraid that Black may win the game. But the game "White must win" is no longer a game. lt is a fight--a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys. 

       The principal form of this fight is Life-versus-Death, the so-called battle for survival, which is supposed to be the real, serious task of all living creatures. This illusion is maintained (a) because the fight is temporarily successful (we go on living until we don't), and (b) because living requires effort and ingenuity, though this is also true of games as distinct from fights. So far as we know, animals do not live in constant anxiety about sickness and death, as we do, because they live in the present. Nevertheless, they will fight when in hunger or when attacked. We must, however, be careful of taking animals as models of "perfectly natural" behavior. If "natural" means "good" or "wise," human beings can improve on animals, though they do not always do so. 

       But human beings, especially in Western civilization, make death the great bogey. This has something to do with the popular Christian belief that death will be followed by the dread Last Judgment, when sinners will be consigned to the temporary horrors of Purgatory or the everlasting agony of Hell. More usual, today, is the fear that death will take us into everlasting nothingness--as if that could be some sort of experience, like being buried alive forever. No more friends, no more sunlight and birdsong, no more love or laughter, no more ocean and stars--only darkness without end. 

Do not go gentle into that good night . . . 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

       Imagination cannot grasp simple nothingness and must therefore fill the void with fantasies, as in experiments with sensory deprivation where subjects are suspended weightlessly in sound- and light-proof rooms. When death is considered the final victory of Black over White in the deadly serious battle of "White must win, the fantasies which fill the void are largely ghoulish- Even our popular fantasies of Heaven are on the grim side, because the usual image of God is of a very serious and awesome Grandfather, enthroned in a colossal church-and, of course, in church one may decorously "rejoice- but not have real, rip-roaring fun. 

O what their joy and their glory must be,

Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see. .

       Who wants to be stuck in church, wearing a surplice, and singing "Alleluia" forever? Of course, the images are strictly symbolic, but we all know how children feel about the old-time Protestant Sabbath, and God's Good Book bound in black with its terrible typography. Intelligent Christians outgrow this bad imagery, but in childhood it has seeped into the unconscious and it continues to contaminate our feelings about death. 

       Individual feelings about death are conditioned by social altitudes, and it is doubtful that there is any one natural and inborn emotion connected with dying. For example, it used to be thought that childbirth should be painful, as a punishment for Original Sin or for having had so much fun conceiving the baby. For God had said to Eve and all her daughter "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." Thus when everyone believed that in having a baby it was a woman's duty to suffer, women did their duty, and many still do. We were much surprised, therefore, to find women in "primitive" societies who could just squat down and give birth while working in the field, bite the umbilical cord, wrap up the baby, and go their way. It wasn't that their women were tougher than ours, but just that they had a different attitude. For our own gynecologists have recently discovered that many women can be conditioned psychologically for natural and painless childbirth. The pains of labor are renamed "tensions," and the mother-to-be is given preparatory exercises in relaxing to tension and cooperating with it. Birth, they are told, is not a sickness. One goes to a hospital just in case anything should go wrong, though many avant-garde gynecologists will let their patients give birth at home. 

       Premature death may come as a result of sickness, but--like birth--death as such is not a sickness at all. It is the natural and necessary end of human life--as natural as leaves falling in the autumn. (Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.) Physicians should therefore explore the possibility of treating death and its pangs as they have treated labor and its "pains." 

       Death is, after all, a great event. So long as it is not imminent, we cling to ourselves and our lives in chronic anxiety, however pushed into the back of the mind. But when the time comes where clinging is no longer of the least avail, the circumstances are ideal for letting go of oneself completely. When this happens, the individual is released from his ego-prison. In the normal course of events this is the golden opportunity for awakening into the knowledge that one's actual self is the Self which plays the universe--an occasion for great rejoicing. But as customs now prevail, doctors, nurses, and relatives come around with smiling masks, assuring the patient that he will soon get over it, and that next week or next month he will be back home or taking a vacation by the sea. Worse still, physicians have neither the role nor the training for handling death. The Catholic priest is in a much better position: he usually knows just how to go about it, with no fumbling or humming and hawing. But the physician is supposed to put off death at all costs--including the life savings of the patient and his family. 

       Ananda Coomaraswamy once said that he would rather die ten years too early than ten minutes too late--too late, and too decrepit or drugged, to seize the opportunity to let oneself go, to "lay me dlown with a will." "I pray," he used to say, "that death will not come and catch me unannihilate"--that is, before I have let go of myself. This is why G. I. Gurdjieff, that marvelous rascal-sage, wrote in his All and Everything: 

The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ . . . of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. 

       Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them. 

As we now regard death this reads like a prescription for a nightmare. But the constant awareness of death shows the world to be as flowing and diaphanous as the filmy patterns of blue smoke in the air--that there really is nothing to clutch and no one to clutch it. This is depressing only so long as there remains a notion that there might be some way of fixing it, of putting it off just once more, or hoping that one has, or is, some kind of ego-soul that will survive bodily dissolution. (I am not saying that there is no personal continuity beyond death--only that believing in it keeps us in bondage.) 

       This is no more saying that we ought not to fear death than I was saying that we ought to be unselfish. Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them--to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over--fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise: you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are. 

       All this comes much more easily with the collaboration of friends. When we are children, our other selves, our families, friends, and teachers, do everything possible to confirm us in the illusion of separateness--to help us to be genuine fakes, which is precisely what is meant by "being a real person." For the person, from the Latin persona, was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through (per) which the sound (sonus) came. In death we doff the persona, as actors lake off their masks and costumes in the green room behind the scenes. And just as their friends come behind the stage to congratulate them on the performance, so one's own friends should gather at the deathbed to help one out of one's mortal role, to applaud the show, and, even more, to celebrate with champagne or sacraments (according to taste) the great awakening of death. 

       There are many other ways in which the Game of Black-and-White is switched into the game of "White must win," and, like the battle for survival, they depend upon ignoring, or screening out of consciousness, the interdependence of the two sides. In a curious way this is, of course, part of the Game of Black-and-White itself, because forgetting or ignoring their independence is "hide" in the game of hide-and-seek. Hide-and-seek is, in turn, the Game of Black-and-white.! 

       By way of illustration, we can take an excursion into an aspect of science-fiction which is very rapidly becoming science-fact. Applied science may be considered as the game of order-versus-chance (or, order-versus-randomness), especially in the domain of cybernetics--the science of automatic control. By means of scientific prediction and its technical applications, we are trying to gain maximum control over our surroundings and ourselves. In medicine, communications, industrial production, transportation, finance, commerce, housing, education, psychiatry, criminology, and law we are trying to make foolproof systems, to get rid of the possibility of mistakes. The more powerful technology becomes, the more urgent the need for such controls, as in the safety precautions taken for jet aircraft, and, most interesting of all, the consultations between technicians of the Atomic Powers to be sure that no one can press the Button by mistake. The use of powerful instruments, with their vast potentialities for changing man and his environment, requires more and more legislation, licensing, and policing, and thus more and more complex procedures for inspection and keeping records. Great universities, for example, have vice-presidents in charge of relations with the government and large staffs of secretaries to keep up with the mountains of paperwork involved. At times, the paper-work, recording what has been done, seems to become more important than what it records. Students' records in the registrar's office are often kept in safes and vaults, but not so the books in the library--unless extremely rare or dangerous. So, too, the administration building becomes the largest and most impressive structure on the campus, and faculty members find that more and more of their time for teaching and research must be devoted to committee meetings and form-filling to take care of the mere mechanics of running the institution. 

       For the same reasons, it is ever more difficult to operate a small business which cannot afford to take care of the financial and legal red-tape which the simplest enterprises must now respect. The ease of communication through such mass media as television, radio, books, and periodicals enables a single, articulate individual to reach millions. Yet the telephone and the post office enable a formidable fraction of those millions to talk back, which can be flattering and pleasing, except that there is no way of giving individual replies--especially when correspondents seek advice for personal or specialized problems. Only the President or the Prime Minister or the heads of huge corporations can afford the staff and machinery to cope with so much feedback. 

       The speed and efficiency of transportation by superhighway and air in many ways restricts freedom of travel. It is increasingly difficult to take a walk, except in such "reservations for wanderers" as state parks. But the nearest state park to my home has, at its entrance, a fence plastered with a long line of placards saying: NO FIRES. NO DOGS. NO HUNTING. NO CAMPING. SMOKING PROHIBITED. NO HORSE-RIDING. NO SWIMMING. NO WASHING. (I never did get that one.) PICNICS RESTRICTED TO DESIGNATED AREAS. Miles of what used to be free-and-easy beaches are now state parks which close at 6 P.M., so that one can no longer camp there for a moonlight feast. Nor can one swim outside a hundred-yard span watched by a guard, nor venture more than a few hundred feet into the water. All in the cause of "safety first" and foolproof living. 

       Just try taking a stroll after dark in a nice American residential area. If you can penetrate the wire fences along the highways, and then wander along a pleasant lane, you may well be challenged from a police car: "Where are you going?" Aimless strolling is suspicious and irrational. You are probably a vagrant or burglar. You are not even walking the dog! "How much money are you carrying?" Surely, you could have afforded to take the bus and if you have little or no cash, you are dearly a bum and a nuisance. Any competent housebreaker would approach his quarry in a Cadillac. 

       Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home. As already suggested, fast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point. Waikiki Beach is just a mongrelized version of Atlantic City, Brighton, and Miami. 

       Despite the fact that more accidents happen in the home than elsewhere, increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools. All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body--even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual--an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bioelectronic body. 

       Consider the astonishing means now being made for snooping, the devices already used in offices, factories, stores, and on various lines of communication such as the mail and the telephone. Through the transistor and miniaturization techniques, these devices become ever more invisible and ever more sensitive to faint electrical impulses. The trend of all this is towards the end of individual privacy, to an extent where it may even be impossible to conceal one's thoughts. At the end of the line, no one is left with a mind of his own: there is just a vast and complex community-mind, endowed, perhaps, with such fantastic powers of control and prediction that it will already know its own future for years and years to come. 

       Yet the more surely and vividly you know the future, the more it makes sense to say that you've already had it. When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another. This is why many people object to having their fortunes told: not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions would be horrible, but simply that the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it. 

       Let us indulge in one more fantasy along the same lines. Technology must attempt to keep a balance between human population and consumable resources. This will require, on the one hand, judicious birth-control, and on the other, the development of many new types of food from earth, ocean, and air, doubtless including the reconversion of excrement into nutritious substances. Yet in any system of this kind there is a gradual loss of energy. As resources dwindle, population must dwindle in proportion. If, by this time, the race feels itself to be a single mind-body, this superindividual will see itself getting smaller and smaller until the last mouth eats the last morsel. Yet it may also be that, long before that, people will be highly durable plastic replicas of people with no further need to eat. But won't this be the same thing as the death of the race, with nothing but empty plastic echoes of ourselves reverberating on through time? 

       To most of us living today, all these fantasies of the future seem most objectionable: the loss of privacy and freedom, the restriction of travel, and the progressive conversion of flesh and blood, wood and stone, fruit and fish, sight and sound, into plastic, synthetic. and electronic reproductions. Increasingly, the artist and musician puts himself out of business through making ever more faithful and inexpensive reproductions of his original works. Is reproduction in this sense to replace biological reproduction, through cellular fission or sexual union? In short, is the next step in evolution to be the transformation of man into nothing more than electronic patterns? 

       All these eventualities may seem so remote as to be unworthy of concern. Yet in so many ways they are already with us, and, as we have seen, the speed of technical and social change accelerates more than we like to admit. The popularity of science-fiction attests to a very widespread fascination with such questions, and so much science-fiction is in fact a commentary on the present, since one of the best ways of understanding what goes on today is to extend it into tomorrow. What is the difference between what is happening, on the one hand, and the direction of its motion, on the other? If I am flying from London to New York, I am moving westwards even before leaving the British coast. 

       The science-fiction in which we have just been indulging has, then, two important morals. The first is that if the game of order-versus-chance is to continue as a game, order must not win. As prediction and control increase, so, in proportion, the game ceases to be worth the candle. We look for a new game with an uncertain result. In other words, we have to hide again, perhaps in a new way, and then seek in new ways, since the two together make up the dance and the wonder of existence. Contrariwise, chance must not win, and probably cannot, because the order/chance polarity appears to be of the same kind as the on/off and up/down. Some astronomers believe that our universe began with an explosion that hurled all the galaxies into space, where, through negative entropy, it will dissolve forever into featureless radiation. I cannot think this way. It is, I suppose, my basic metaphysical axiom, my "leap of faith," that what happened once can always happen again. Not so much that there must be time before the first explosion and time after the final dissolution, but that time (like space) curves back on itself. 

       This assumption is strengthened by the second moral of these fantasies, which is the more startling. Here applies the French proverb plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose--the more it changes, the more it's the same thing. Change is in some sense an illusion, for we are always at the point where any future can take us! If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. 

       Furthermore, our bodily cells, and their smallest components, appear and disappear much as light waves vibrate and as people go from birth to death. A human body is like a whirlpool; there seems to be a constant form, called the whirlpool, but it functions for the very reason that no water stays in it. The very molecules and atoms of the water are also "whirlpools"--patterns of motion containing no constant and irreducible "stuff." Every person is the form taken by a stream--a marvelous torrent of milk, water, bread, beefsteak, fruit, vegetables, air, light, radiation--all of which are streams in their own turn. So with our institutions. There is a "constant" called the University of California in which nothing stays put: students, faculty, administrators, and even buildings come and go, leaving the university itself only as a continuing process, a pattern of behavior. 

       As to powers of prediction and control, the individual organism has already accomplished these in a measure which must have astounded the neurons when they first learned the trick. And if we reproduce ourselves in terms of mechanical, plastic, and electronic patterns, this is not really new. Any evolving species must look with misgivings on those of its members who first show signs of change, and will surely regard them as dangerous or crazy. Moreover, this new and unexpected type of reproduction is surely no more weird than many of the great variety of methods already found in the biological world--the startling transformation of caterpillar into butterfly, or the arrangement between bees and flowers, or the unpleasant but marvelously complex system of the anopheles mosquito. 

       If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now! Flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics-it all seems to come down to this fabulous electronic dance, which, at the macroscopic level, presents itself to itself as the whole gamut of forms and "substances." 

       But the underlying problem of cybernetics, which makes it an endless success/failure, is to control the process of control itself. Power is not necessarily wisdom. I may have virtual omnipotence in the government of my body and my physical environment, but how am I to control myself so as to avoid folly and error in its use? Geneticists and neurologists may come to the point of being able to produce any type of human character to order, but how will they be able to know what types of character will be needed? The situation of a pioneer culture calls for tough and aggressive individualists, whereas urban-industrial culture requires sociable and cooperative team-workers As social change increases in speed, how are geneticists to foresee the adaptations of taste, temperament, and motivation that will be necessary twenty or thirty years ahead? Furthermore, every act of interference with the course of nature changes it in unpredictable ways. A human organism which has absorbed antibiotics is not quite the same kind of organism that it was before, because the behavior of its micro-organisms has been significantly altered. The more one interferes, the more one must analyze an evergrowing volume of detailed information about the results of interference on a world whose infinite details are inextricably interwoven. Already this information, even in the most highly specialized sciences, is so vast that no individual has time to read it--let alone absorb it. 

       In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are. The question is then whether technical progress actually "gets anywhere" in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life. There is certainly a sense of exhilaration of relief at the moment of change--at the first few uses of telephone, radio, television, jet aircraft, miracle drug, or calculating machine. But all too soon these new contrivances are taken for granted, and we find ourselves oppressed with the new predicaments which they bring with them. A successful college president once complained to me, "I'm so busy that I'm going to have to get a helicopter!" "Well," I answered, "You'll be ahead so long as you're the only president who has one. But don't get it. Everyone will expect more out of you." 

       Technical progress is certainly impressive from the short-run standpoint of the individual. Speaking as an old man in the 1960's, Sir Cedric Hardwicke said that his only regret was that he could not have lived in the Victorian Age--with penicillin. I am still grateful that I do not have to submit to the doctoring and dentistry of my childhood, yet I realize that advances in one field are interlocked with advances in all others. I could not have penicillin or modern anesthesia without aviation, electronics, mass communication, superhighways, and industrial agriculture--not to mention the atomic bomb and biological warfare. 

       Taking, therefore, a longer and wider view of things, the entire project of "conquering nature" appears more and more of a mirage--an increase in the pace of living without fundamental change of position, just as the Red Queen suggested. But technical progress becomes a way of stalling faster and faster because of the basic illusion that man and nature, the organism and the environment, the controller and the controlled are quite different things. We might "conquer" nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and "outside" nature are all of a piece. In the same way, we do not see that "I" as the knower and controller am the same fellow as "myself" as something to be known and controlled. The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body--a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it. 

       Thus for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white. Nothing, perhaps, ever got nowhere with so much fascinating ado. As when Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle, the essential trick of the Game of Black-and-White is a most tacit conspiracy for the partners to conceal their unity, and to look as different as possible. It is like a stage fight so well acted that the audience is ready to believe it a real fight. Hidden behind their explicit differences is the implicit unity of what Vedanta calls the Self, the One-without-a-second, the what there is and the all that there is which conceals itself in the form of you. 

       If, then there is this basic unity between self and other, individual and universe, how have our minds become so narrow that we don't know it? 

(1) "To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds." (Seami) All these are yugen, but what have they in common?