4 Hours Alan Watts Lectures For Bedtime | BLACK SCREEN | NO MUSIC | NO C...

4 Hours Alan Watts Lectures For Bedtime | BLACK SCREEN | NO MUSIC | NO CAPTIONS | NO ADBREAKS - YouTube

Transcripts:

Now if everybody's comfortable we can get started. I have announced that this seminar is to be about the cosmic network and therefore we've got to spend the first evening understanding something about the nature of networks because in order to get the principle of a network across I have to convey to you an idea which is extremely simple but which is difficult to grasp.

only because we're not used to it. We are used to thinking as uh westerners as having a certain kind of language and therefore a certain kind of logic that goes with it. We're used to thinking of the world in terms of the game of billiards. In other words, we are still thinking about our psychology, our bodies, and their relationship to the outside world in terms of what would scientifically be called Newtonian mechanics.

 And Newtonian mechanics has a very long history because it goes back to some of the atomic theories of people like Democrus who were the among the great precratic philosophers of ancient Greece. And so we may as well begin with a little bit about the history of the idea of an atom because this has always fascinated people. What is the world fundamentally? What is all this? Well, one way of finding out is to take a knife and chop something in two so you can see what's inside it.

 What is an apple inside? What is a seed inside? What is a human body inside? And then you find that uh when you chop a thing in two, you've got two pieces. But the cutting reveals that that has a structure inside. And the structure is composed of what we call organs or parts. And then in turn, in order to inquire into them, we take them and we chop them apart.

 And in our curiosity to find out how it's made, in just the same way that a child will take a toy to pieces, we chop and chop and chop until we've got bits so small that they are the same width as the edge of the knife. And they can't be cut anymore unless we can find a finer knife. And so when we get down to that bit beyond which there is no bitter, it is called in Greek atomos which means the first letter a means nonmos cutable.

 And so the word atom means that smallest particle of the world which can't be cut into any smaller particle. That's the original idea of atomism. So then the the went further than that to the notion that the world was built in the same sort of way that a house could be built of bricks or stones. The world is seen therefore as a composite of fundamental particles.

 Then what remained to be discovered was the laws governing the relationship between these particles. And so naturally one thought of them as as as little balls. Why balls? Because balls are hard to cut. If you take a ball bearing and hit at it with a sword, it's allowable to jump right off to one side. A cube will submit to being cut, but a ball is very difficult to get at.

 Very strong form of nature. So people have always tended to consider atoms as balls, especially atoms of um liquid. There was a notion, you see, that the atoms of the element of earth were cubes because cubes all sit together rather firmly. Liquid, which when you put up good, that was balls.

 Fire was made of um if I remember rightly, pyramids. Air, I can't remember what air was made of, what their atoms were shaped like. maybe sausages or something like that because air is pretty difficult to get at too. But they had some ideas. But fundamentally what has influenced western thought and still influences western thought is the idea of an atom as some sort of fundamental little planetary system.

 And so these things come into relationship with each other and they bang each other around as in the game of billyards. And so if we are to understand the world profoundly, we have to find out what are the laws governing the relationship of the atoms. Now you must understand first of all a principle about what are called laws of nature.

 We inherit the idea of laws of nature from our theology. And our theology that we've grown up with is in certain ways peculiarly different from the theologies of oriental peoples. Jewish theology and Christian theology which have entered very profoundly into the common sense of the average person have an image of the world which is quite basically political and we'll go further than that and say it's monarchical.

It's based on the idea that the world is a construct evoked out of nothingness by the commandment of a celestial king. Now there may be Jews in this room who are practicing and devout Jews and there may be Christians in this room who are practicing and devout Christians and I don't want to offend you by any imagery that I choose or remarks that I may make about this imagery because I don't suppose that anybody has come to this room and to this particular place who is either a practicing or Christian Jew who has what I would call a naive idea of

God. But the funny thing is about our ideas of God is that our symbols, the images, the mythological forms which we use to describe God have an extremely powerful influence on our feelings and on the way we behave. After all, I was a member of the Church of England when I was a small boy, and that had a very powerful effect on me.

 And in the Church of England, it's quite obvious from an emotional point of view, as distinct from a very intellectual point of view, that God stands behind the King of England. and the king of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the whole hierarchy of lords and ladies and noblemen and officials who descend from this point are somehow involved at any rate this is perfectly clear to a small boy are somehow involved with the hierarchy of heaven because at morning prayer to which we went every Sunday the minister would pray a prayer which began oh almighty father high and mighty king King of

kings, Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who doust from thy throne, behold all the dwellers upon earth. Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to behold our most gracious sovereign lord, King George, etc. And so this was a very courtly procedure at which the clergyman dressed in his proper robes proceeded to the altar which is a kind of earthly symbol of the throne of heaven made due oasis and uh presented this petition with all proper humility.

 Now these are things that were that if you're brought up in that environment you take for granted. That seems to be the natural attitude to God. But imagine someone coming in from a culture where God is not conceived in the image of kingship. How strange he would find this behavior.

 This was all this bowing and scraping because you know very well that places where they bow and scrape and where there are thrones are places of terror because anybody who rules by force is and must be basically terrified. That's why he has to have all these protections, why he has to be addressed in the right form of language.

 Say you go into a court today, an ordinary US law court, there is a very strict etiquette and if you start laughing, the judge will bang the gavvel and threaten contempt of court and all sorts of dire punishments because here everybody has to be serious. It's like on the parade ground, all those Marines lined up, you know, and they salute the flag and they have to have a very grim expression on. It's serious.

 And so, uh, in the courts of kings, they have to be serious because kings are afraid of laughter. They're also afraid of being attacked suddenly. So everybody has to kneel down because if you kneel down or prostrate yourself, you're at a disadvantage and the king stands or sits at his throne with his bodyguards ranged on either side.

 See like that we've already got the form of a church, the bishop at his throne, his attendant cannons and clergy flanking him on either side. And so uh certain great Catholic cathedrals are called basilica and basilica from the Greek vasilus or basilus is the king. So the basilica is the court of the king.

 The very titles of god in the bible king of kings and lord of lords are of course borrowed from the persian emperors. the Cyrus which is the Greek word kios meaning lord. So the mass begins with the invocation kirier elaison. Lord have mercy upon us. The titles are borrowed from the Persian emperor. And so the rights that have become associated with Christian religion are reflections of those great autocratic monarchs of the ancient near east.

 the Cyruses of Persia, the pharaohs of Egypt and people like Hammurabi who were the great Calaldian monarchs. The universe was conceived then as being ruled on a political pattern like that. So that Hammurabi in particular and Moses after him, they were the wise ones who laid down the rules. They were the patriarchs who said now this is the way everybody's got to behave.

 And since you can't all agree among yourselves as to what the rules going to be, I'm going to tell you what to do. And since I'm the toughest guy around here, and I got these brothers of mine who are pretty tough, too, we're going to say this is the law. See, and you got to obey. So this is how we have got historically the idea of there being a law of nature that somebody told nature what to do.

 For example, a wonderful poem by Father Feny about bees. God to some sticky stuff not yet alive in a hive said, "Come, hum be my bee and buzz as I bid." And sure enough it was and it did. See, and in the beginning, let there be light, a commandment. So commandment is the fundamental idea. So the the the quest of the law of nature is the quest for the true understanding of the word of God. For by the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth.

 In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. What is that word? If we could find out the word of God. Here is the idea. You see we could perform incredible magic. That's why, for example, the name of God in the Bible is not to be uttered except once by the high priest in the Holy of Holies once a year.

 Otherwise, that name Yad Vo in Hebrew, we don't really know how it was pronounced. Jehovah mixes up those consonants with the vowels of Adonai. And uh then it's all mixed up in translation. But anyway, the Jehovah is a polite way of saying what can't be said because if you know the word, if you know the name of God, you have power, you have the power of God.

 And so all ancient ideas of magic were based on knowing the names of God. It is said that there are 100 names of God and 99 are revealed to us. And the camel knows the hundth name, which is why he looks so [Laughter] snoody. But so also a person uh in what we now call primitive orders of society are loathed to reveal their names because if I know your true name, I can utter it and have power over you.

 Now you say well that seems a very naive idea but it is exactly through the knowledge of names that we have western science and it that is magic. That is through trying to understand the laws of nature so that if you could understand the word underneath all the phenomena you could change the phenomena and create magic. only this that many scientists have got rather sophisticated and have realized that the word comes later than the event that in the beginning wasn't the word of course uh if you want to make new sense out of the phrase in the beginning was the word you have to go to Hinduism where they have the idea

that vak v a c in Sanskrit or speech is the basis of creation. But by this they fundamentally mean vibration. A sound you see is they say that is you see if you listen to sound and go right down into it fundamentally get what sound is all about you understand the whole mystery of things because the whole mystery of things is vibrating energy on and off.

Simple as that. It's life and death. Life is on, death is off. have to have off to have on. Have to have on to have off. It's quite a relief. But there they say that's the beginning now. But they also say in another sense on another level that the roots of Sanskrit say the the root form say the word Buddha comes from the root form Buddha which means to know or to be awake.

 Baba which means becoming comes from the root which means to grow. So on karma doing comes from the root to act. So they say though that the roots of Sanskrit are not simply the roots of a language they're the roots of life. Because in another sense altogether you see you create the world by the word and this is something that we're not very conscious of.

 It's the way you think that determines your basic reactions to what happens. In the words of Shakespeare, there is nothing either good or ill, but thinking makes it so. Thinking is talking to yourself inside your head. And we through this build up all sorts of weird notions. We say, for example, well, one day you'll have to die.

 Have to what's in the what's what's the s what's the emotional content of saying you'll have to die? It means it's going to be something imposed upon you against your will. So it's put in this passive mode have to. You'll be compelled to die. But I can't be compelled to die unless I'm fighting it.

 If I supposing I want to die, supposing I commit suicide or supposing we look at it all in another way and say when I get a disease and die as a result of it, getting a disease is something I do just as much as walk taking a walk. Only we've got our thoughts arranged so that we say you ought not to get a disease. Even if it's just plain old age, somehow you ought not to do that.

You ought to go on. You can't say when death comes about. I laid me down with a will because we've got this hangup about life being divided into two parts. Things that we do on the one hand and things that happen to us on the other. And Buddhists say uh what happens to you is your karma. And people don't readily understand that.

 They think my karma, yeah, I I something awful happened to me because of something bad I did in my last life. And therefore, I've got bad karma. Karma simply means your doing, your action. So that when something that happens to me is called my karma, it means that it's your own doing.

 And if you recognize that it's your own doing, it's never bad karma. It's only bad karma if you refuse to admit that it's your own doing and merely blame someone or something else that it's something that happened to you. Now, I've digressed a little because what I was getting at was the meaning of a law of nature. Laws of nature were taken over.

 The idea of the law of nature was taken over by western science from this ancient magical notion of the word of God, the commandment of God being the foundation for everything that happens in the world. But now today in western 20th century science there is a entirely new idea of the law of nature.

 The laws of nature are not things that exist in any real sense which phenomena like the motion of stars or um the behavior of animals and rocks. They're not phenomena which these things obey. The universe is doing its stuff. But uh because we have a certain kind of structure and brain, we want to make sense of it.

 And therefore we find various ways of understanding the world by the principle of regularity. Now what's that? Let's take a clock. A clock ticks regularly. But the world does not tick regularly. Inconveniently enough, the sun does not have the earth go around it in a neat 360 days. This has always irritated calendar makers. How to make a rational calendar? There is no solution because the rotations of the earth upon its own axis do not neatly synchronize with its rotation around the sun.

 There's always something a little odd about it. So what we do is we we we superimpose over this rather odd elliptical path the ideal figure of a circle with its 360°. Now that is also like putting a ruler along a piece of wood and saying this piece of wood can be cut to 12 in. Now there are no inches in the wood.

 Inches are a method a technique that human beings have invented for measuring things. And so we can cut out of a piece of cloth or a or or or a trunk of a tree so many feet. Well, originally it's simply comparing the trunk with us by putting our feet over it one after another and saying it's so many feet long or so many spans when you stretch out the hand. This is a fundamental idea of measurement.

 And the inch is of course one joint, not your kind of joint. And uh so the the uh this comparison of man's body and its regular shape you see 10 fingers on either side 10 I mean you know five fingers on either side makes 10 five toes on either side makes 10. And so by stretching ourselves out as it were against nature we measured it.

 And the idea of this of measurement is the same idea as the idea of the law of nature. A law of nature is exactly the same kind of thing as a ruler or a hammer or a saw. It is a way of thinking which enables us to control our environment by observing regularities and then by making a calculus which is a process really of betting. Will it be regular next time? And the odds are that it may be.

If it's done it once this way, it's likely to do it again that way. So in this way you predict eclipses of the sun. You predict the phases of the moon. You measured them. You counted how it went, how often it did it like this, how often it did it like that. And you say, "Well, it keeps on doing it." And you think, "Wow, this is fascinating.

 It seems to obey me because now I can tell you anytime it's going to come up." And if the other people around haven't figured it out, they think I'm magic because I'm going to say to them, "The moon is going to change at such and such a time. So many days from now, it's going to have a different shape." They'll say, "My god, he was right.

" And they'll think I'm making it happen because I can do that. And so I get a rather privileged position because I could predict. But that's the basic idea you see of the law of nature. The law of nature is a human network like the lines of celestial latitude and longitude. They don't exist in the heavens, but we project them on the sky in order to measure the positions of the stars because the stars are scattered in a very confusing way.

 and uh just try and remember that mess and figure it out. Though the clever ones, you see, just said look at it through a network, a spherical network. You can number all the squares in the spherical network in accordance with the principles of the circle, the 360°. You've thrown the network on the sky. It isn't really there.

 See? Then to help you a little further, pick out some of the big stars and see if they make a shape. You know, this is like doing a raw shock test. And you see, oh, look, there's one over there that looks like a dipper, or some people call it a plow. And there's one there that looks like a cross. There's one there that uh by some extreme wangling can be made to look like a virgin.

And all these lines that join the constellations together are our ways of projecting a pattern upon this great and glorious confusion so that we can remember it and chart it. But obviously you can very well see that if you looked at the same pattern of stars from some completely different position in space all those constellations and their arrangements would vanish and you would have to invent a new one because there is nowhere where the stars really are.

 It depends where you're looking from. So in this sense then man in nature with his extraordinary symmetrical brain and its amazing complications figures it out and it's man who introduces the law into the world. He invents it. But in a way invener to invent is to discover. But what we discover in a way is not something that's out there.

 When we invent the laws of nature, we are discovering something about ourselves and our own passion for prediction, for regularity, for keeping things under control. Therefore, there has to be a law. So then going back right now to the beginning of what I started to say, the question was then what is the law of relationship between the atoms between the fundamental billyard balls of which the world is composed? Well, you watch the game of Billyards and there's a Q and it hits that ball and then it moves over and it hits that

one and then that hits that one and then that hits that one. And so the final ball which moves into the pocket has its behavior explained through its contact with the other bill balls and the final contact with the Q. That's why it did it. And so this view of the world as something that happens by the mechanical processes of the law of cause and effect is one that is really basic to most people's common sense today to most educated people. They would say it's very difficult to figure it all out because the whole thing is so complicated. But

if uh you could know all the details involved in say the behavior or a single act of a human being, you would find that it was the ineluctible result of a series of uh bouncing balls against each other, fundamental atoms that predisposed the great final event to be just like that. So that theory of the relationship between the atoms is called in technical language catenary. C A T E N A R Y.

Kenary. A catary effect or a relationship between events is like for example to use another illustration where you stand a row of bricks up end end up you know and you knock over the first one and they all go kata ka ka and fall down that is a catenary sequence but it becomes increasingly obvious today to the physicist and to the biologist that that will not do as a sufficient description of how various events affect each other.

 And so there's another type of causal relationship altogether which is called instead of catenary reticulate. R E T I C U L A T E reticulate from the Latin ret meaning a net a net relationship wherein in other words any given event is not simply ascribed to one or more previous events but that the relationship between the past and the present and between the present and the future is all to be taken into consideration in understanding any one event.

 In other words, let's take one event. I drop a ball and it bounces. That's an event. I don't know how many events it really is, but we'll just say for the sake of argument that it's an event. Now, is it enough in uh describing this event to say I let the ball go, it obeyed the law of law of gravity and hit the floor, but because it was made of rubber and had some air inside it, it bounced and sort of slightly disobeyed gravity because it had an energy in it.

 But that's not enough because that the ball dropped, that I let it go, that it bounced depended not merely upon a historical sequence of events that you can lay out in a string along a along a line of time. It depends also upon a present context. There must be a certain density of air.

 All kinds of things have to coexist with this in order for me to be there to drop the ball at all, much less manufacture a ball. So that what happens must be considered not merely as a historical phenomenon, but it must be seen in context. Context is terribly important because it isn't just when a thing happens that is important. It's where it happens.

 In what setting? So that you could say that my blood in my veins is in a certain setting. In a test tube, it's in a completely different setting. And in a test tube, my blood is not behaving in the way it behaves in my veins. Therefore, it's not the same thing. So an individual person in one setting will behave in one way, in another setting in a completely different way. I remember when I was a child, I was one boy when I was at home with my parents.

When I went to visit my uncle and aunt, I was someone different. When I was with my peers, I was someone quite different because I changed according to the setting. And children are very well well aware of this. It's only as we go on that we keep having it drummed into our heads that we ought to have a consistent character because we're influenced by novels. Well, the characters are supposed to be consistent.

 And so, you ought to have a consistent character. You ought to behave the same in all circumstances and towards all people. That merely means you become inflexible. [Music] So what things are therefore depend on the context in which they are found upon their network relationship to everything else that's going on.

 And one of the reasons for this which is going to lead us to something more profound but much simpler is of course that the whole notion of a thing or of an event in nature and of causal relationships between different things and different events is a purely abstract idea that does not really fit the facts of nature at all.

 In nature, in what? This physical world that you feel when you hold your head or hold somebody's hand or just breathe. In that world, there aren't any separate events. None. Whatever. Sure, there are all sorts of wiggles around here. All sorts of lines, all sorts of colors, all sorts of surfaces, all sorts of uh forms. But they're not separate because you see, you can't separate an inside what you are inside your skin from the outside of the skin.

 Because you can see that at once, if there weren't anything outside your skin, there'd be no inside. It takes the outside and the inside working together to create this situation. And in the simplest way, the situation that I call my body wouldn't be operating unless there was air around here to breathe, this physical phenomenon goes with the situation of there being air. Now, true, it wiggles about inside the air in a rather complicated way.

 And other people watching say, "Huh, something going on over there." you know, because the air you can't see and it remains rather constant except when there's a gale and so you don't pay much attention to it because it's always around. What you pay attention to is what changes uh rather rapidly and you say, "Well, that's a that.

" Say, "Hey, you say to someone, you see this change going on, some wiggling over there, say, "What's that?" See, and and he knows what you mean by a that. A that means something on the end of a fingerpoint. It's different. It's peculiar. See, now that's a that. So from that comes the idea of an event or a thing, a that.

 But all these thats that are happening aren't disconnected. They go with each other just as I go with the surrounding air. And just as this whole situation in which we are at this moment is a complicated going withness. Now here then we get to the fundamental idea of this idea of going with and from this we shall be able to construct the whole notion of network and this is the idea I said at the beginning is extremely simple but very difficult for people brought up to use western languages to understand.

[Music] Now going with us we could call it relativity relationship means simply let me first of all put it in a very extreme form. Consider yourselves yourself sitting here at this moment being just exactly the sort of person you are. Maybe a little neurotic, maybe a little sick physically, maybe a little ashamed of yourself for some reason or other or whatever, you know. Uh just the way you are anyway.

 Just like that sitting here. That situation goes with as back goes with front the entire situation of the rest of the universe. In other words, you as you are exactly the way you are and you really don't know what that is. You may have some opinions about it, but you really don't know. That goes with the way the whole of the rest of boundless being is arranged.

 Now, it isn't that the way the rest of boundless being is arranged is determining you to be the way you are. Or if it is that, if that's true, if it determines you, then we must also allow the other side of the picture that you determine it. It's your karma. You did it. But you say, "No, but I didn't. I couldn't help it. It did me.

" And you can say t isn't test isn't test isn't like two children arguing until you realize that the argument was was stupid because you and it are one event and it isn't a question of it controlling you or you controlling it. It's all it's all one event. As Talhad Shardan said the whole universe is the only true atom, the only truly indivisible.

 The human being though finds this difficult to understand because we're always telling each other now you should be different. You ought to change. You don't be like that. Now listen, you're sick and I got a system. See, I I've got a system. I've got a real school here. A thing that is very important and you should come and study with that. It may not be mine.

 But it may be some uh big sage or pundit that I know and you should come around and study that and uh I've thought about this for a long time because I've heard every kind of opinion of all the sorts of things that I should do in order to get myself into shape. And I realized that if I followed this advice, I would spend my entire day doing exercises in preparation for life. I don't know when I'd ever get around to that.

 You know, I would have my half an hour's yoga practice, one hour of zazen, uh so much uh physical exercises and uh so much uh memory practice, so much uh special diet preparation to be sure that I got proper food. And if I think this all through, I think, oh my god, it isn't worth it. Then another school of thought will say, "No, that's the thing. You're getting confused. Just do one thing.

" See, just uh but then I say, "Now, how am I going to choose which one I'm going to do?" Well, he says, "Obviously, this one's the best." Then before you know where you are, you're swed up by some religious fanatic. Now, please, I don't want to do this to you.

 Please don't think that I have any such recipe that I'm going to give you anything to do for 5 minutes every morning. I just am not. I want to my whole notion would be to set you all free so that uh you'd only have to attend one seminar and never have to come back. That's the idea really because I know that so far as my own livelihood is concerned that there are always more people and if uh no I don't collect a following and just send them all away.

There are plenty more people to fill the [Laughter] vacuum. But this is the important this is the whole idea that we're going to work on of a net that you are like a dew drop on a multi-dimensional spider's web early in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see that in every due drop there's the reflections of all the other dew drops.

 So the way that dew drop looks goes with the way all the other ones look. See the particular glimmer in it and so on. It's peculiar position and everybody has to have a peculiar position in the cosmos. The reflections in every one of them are different according to the position they're in and the other due drops that they reflect at such and such angles.

 But nevertheless, the whole network, all the due drops depend on each individual due drop and each individual due drop mutually depends on all the others. And that's the sort of a scheme we're living in. And it it it little bit affronts our logic at first because we say I can understand that I depend on this universe because after all I need sunlight and air and water and the help of a society and all that kind of thing. I needed a father and mother.

 But uh looking at it from the other point of view I find it very difficult to see how the whole thing depends on me. That's because we've been brought up with a put down theory of the individual. Lou, no little children should be seen and not heard. You are the servant and subject of God and don't you ask impertinent questions.

 Or another way of putting us down is to say, well, you're just a piece of a fluke in a mindless mechanism. See, we always managed not to find out that the relationship of the network is mutual. It runs both ways. That it depends on you just as much as you depend on it. Cuz you see, it's you with your ingenious brain that, for example, turns vibrations of air into sound.

 You turn whatever the sun is doing into light. You turn whatever the air is doing into a sky called blue. There is only blue for a brain. It's just like if you hit a drum and it's got no skin, it won't make any noise. So it's the tight skin that evokes the noise out of a moving fist. No skin, no noise. So you as the reflector like the dew drop reflects you as the so-called reflector of all that goes on by the constitution of what kind of a reflector you are you evoke what we call sun moon and stars nebula vast spaces they're only vast in

relation to you they're not really vast only if you compare them with yourself they're vast They could be considered very tiny or equally the space between two sides of a hair could be considered vast if you want to think about it that way. I mean if you really want to go into a hair an awful lot between uh one diameter of a hair you know and if you think about it a long time you'll think it's a what we call a vast subject study of mic microscopy it is a vast subject depends on on the attitude you see but the the basic principle the thing I really want to try and get across is this idea of going

with the universe around you is your outside just as much as the organs inside your skin are your inside. You go with it in the same way that the stalk goes with the root or with the flower. And uh as front goes with back, as north pole of magnet goes with south pole, this principle of relationship governs everything. I wouldn't say governs.

 I'm only using these wretched terms that we have to use out of our language. It it it underlies everything. And it's important to realize and let me repeat this that the great universe does not control the small individual any more than the small individual actually controls the great universe.

 This is not a question of controlling. It is a question of more like dancing of what happens rather than what makes it happen. Things aren't made to happen. Only if you insist that a certain event is quite separate, then you can think of it being made to happen by the events that came before it. But if you realize they're all parts of one event or different aspects, different phases of one event, then you see it happening and you don't see anything making it happen. Forcing that whole idea of things being made to happen. In other words, goes back to the idea of a

universe that is based on a monarchical image where the boss says, "Damn it, you do that." And the thing can't help it. And so it's made to happen. But say in Chinese dowist philosophy, the universe is just not seen in that way. It's not seen as anything is not made to happen. It is what does happen. But it's all interrelated.

 And therefore there is a pattern to it. There is an order to it. The order of the net. I was talking in last night's session about the nature of networks and you remember that I explained the two different conceptions of causal relations between things and events and I may as well write these down unless you've forgotten them. There's the catenary and the

reticulate. In this kind, things and events are explained as being links in a causal chain. And so every particular happening that is identified as a thing or an event which is however quite an arbitrary kind of selection is explained by its past by the chain of events which lead to it in a causal sequence.

 On the other hand in thinking of the reticulate relationship a thing is explained not simply by its relationship to past events but by its context. That is to say its relationship to present and future events as well as past. So that every event becomes something in a network.

 Now you will very well understand that when you see the knots in a network or or better the squares of the net, they're all held together by each other. Imagine the kind of network where instead of there being uh well something like knitting uh in knitting the stitches are all held to together by each other and if something breaks at one point the thing starts raveling.

 So uh the reticulate view or the net view of the universe is one in which uh the Buddhists say everything mutually interpenetrates everything else. So as I was trying to make the central point the point of uh implication the point of relativity that things go together like two sticks standing on the ground in this way. See, they give each other mutual support or like the three rings in the Valentine beer trademark or the Christian symbol of the Holy Trinity.

 Those rings interlock but take one of them away and the interlocking is broken down for all of them. So in the same way the individual although seeming to be uh something that rattles around in the universe although a given planet or a given star seems to be something that uh is moving on its own motion the behavior of stars is a situation that arises only because of the mutual interdependence of all stars.

Because to take a very simple illustration, if there is only one star in the whole universe, no motion can be ascribed to it. It can't even be said to be still. Nobody knows what it's doing because there's nothing for it to relate to. But take two stars and they can get nearer to each other or further away from each other, but nobody knows which is moving.

get three stars and then uh you have say two close together and one of them seems to go away. Now who is moving away from who? Are the two stars saying, "Hey, we don't like you. We're going to get out of your way.

" Or are they saying to the other star, "Why don't you like us? Why do you keep going away?" Well, who's right? Well, you can say on the principle of democracy that the majority must be right. But then they say, well, let's have an umpire and we have a fourth star who can stand uh above us. You see, um, two stars can only move in a straight line with respect to each other.

 Three stars can move in a plane with respect to each other. But a fourth star can establish a third dimension where we can say I can look down on you and take an objective standpoint. But then the argument is which one of them is the fourth. But that's the basic principle on which the whole universe is constructed. It's um a relativity system in which motion uh depends on comparison with something relatively still.

 And there can't be any motion at all unless there is that comparison. So uh because of this relationship, every individual is so related to everything else that's going on that you imply it. In other words, anybody who was a great scientist from some other world altogether who studied a human body carefully and figured out the conditions under which such a thing would exist.

 He would come to the conclusion that that human body was something from a universe just such as we have. He would find that your structure and your behavior implied this whole thing. Just as with a laser beam system, you can photograph a small fragment of any photographic negative and from that tiny fragment you can reconstruct the whole picture from which it was taken because the crystalline tensions in that fragment imply the whole context of crystalline tensions that belong to that particular negative. So in exactly the same way you as an individual imply

this world and this world mutually implies you and you are a natural formation moving in and with this universe not determined by it because this is not a system of determinism. But you are moving with it in just the same harmonious way that you notice the waves moving and the trees growing and the clouds moving.

 And as you don't accuse the clouds of making aesthetic mistakes, so really is a certain light in which you can see human beings uh both good and bad as uh perfect forms of nature. You may have fashionable discriminations about who is beautiful and who is ugly. You may have metaphysical discriminations about who is sick and who is healthy.

 You may have moral discriminations about who is good and who is evil. Now these are all points of view, relative points of view. They are all legitimate because they are parts of the functioning of the whole. The fact that you take those points of view, that too is part of nature. But a skillful person lives on two levels at once.

 You live basically on the level where you know there are no mistakes. can't be. Everything moves in accordance with what the Chinese call the Dao, the way of nature. And if you have that basic feeling, uh you will always be sane. But you are able to comprehend within that feeling a more restricted point of view whereby things are good and bad.

 Just as in the confines of this room and this area, it's perfectly clear that there's a difference between the up direction and the down direction. But we know that this area is situated in interstellar space and there there is no up and no down. Now the second situation doesn't contradict the first.

 But if you have only the discriminatory point of view, if you take your fundamental stand as a being on the difference between good and evil, you get in the Christian hang-up, you have then to say that there is eternal heaven and eternal hell, that the distinction between good and evil is radical.

 And if you do that, you begin to suffer from a disease called chronic guilt, which is one of the most destructive emotions that anybody can have. You feel an outcast from the universe, at odds with reality itself, at odds with God. And that sends people quite mad and is responsible for a good deal of the craziness of Western civilization. It's uh making too much of a good thing out of the distinction between good and evil.

 It is an important distinction, but it's not fundamentally important. And you have to learn to admit different degrees of importance. And uh just say that you you can't just say that because a certain distinction isn't absolute that it's not important. After all, your own physical formation is not absolute, but it's important. So the situation of man in this network is to repeat the proposition on the one hand that he as an organism psychophysical organism is something that the whole cosmos is doing.

That was the as much of truth I think as there is in modern astrology which I regard as a pseudocience but it is based on a very fundamental principle that when you draw a map of a person's soul you draw a small picture of the universe a very crude picture and that is the design of that person's individuality. The truth is therefore that your soul is something which contains your body.

 Your body does not have the soul inside it like a spook and the whole cosmos is your soul. So the cosmos is doing you at the point you call here and now. Reciprocally you're doing it and the one depends upon the other. You have difficulty in conceiving this as a westerner because we have all been brainwashed by several centuries of put down theories of man that you were a uh the wretched little subject and a disobedient one at that of an eternal king and b that you were just a fortuitous congress of atoms in a mindless mechanism of incredible

vastness. uh having entertained those two theories of man and of existence for so many centuries, we are very much brainwashed into being unable to see that we and the universe are mutually causitive or to use the Chinese expression mutually arising.

 Now then a second difficulty arises in this which requires that I bring in some ideas first of all from Buckminister Fuller. The principal notion of Buckminister Fuller's thought and if you don't know this name Buckminister Fuller is what I would call a philosophical engineer a man who is one of the most creative minds in the modern world. Uh he invented the geodessic dome which is his main claim to economic fame.

Uh but beyond that he's done a great deal of extremely fascinating thinking about the future of technology and the situation of man in the universe and he has devised this important term synergy coming from the Greek sin with eros work. But what he means by synergy is this, that every complex organism has as a whole an intelligence greater than any one of its parts.

 This is a difficult idea to swallow because he applies it to technology in this way. He is saying that the industrial natural complex in which we live is something that is going in a certain direction on its own whether you like it or not and that it is able to organize your behavior in a more intelligent way than you can organize it.

And he believes therefore that the increasing complexity of the industrial complex will of itself say outlaw such lunacy as war. It will make it impossible and that we shall find ourselves increasingly organized by an intelligent system that is not under our conscious direction but will make us feel I suppose rather as our individual selves feel inside our bodies.

 He gives an illustration. The transportation communications network aircraft, radio, television, telephone. These taken together are constituting a global net which might be said to be something like Talhad Desard's idea of the noosphere. I hope you all read Talhad Deshada, the famous Jesuit theologian who wrote the the best of his books is the phenomenon of man.

 The earth which is the geosphere from the Greek goss geese geese the earth then the earth as a geosphere is covered with a biosphere that is the sphere of living organisms. The biosphere in turn generates the noosphere which is the communication network that we call the mind. Through literature, through speech, through radio and television communication, the noosphere is slowly realized.

 So Buckminister Fuller is really talking about the same thing. The noosphere is the network of communication set up by technology. And so for example, let's just take air transportation. As a result of jet planes, all centers that are in communication with each other by jet aircraft are becoming increasingly the same place.

 When you wake up in Tokyo, having come from Los Angeles or San Francisco, you are slightly in doubt as to where you are because Tokyo is an immense model. It's a mixture of Paris with Los Angeles, of um San Francisco with Shanghai, of London vaguely thrown in, and uh sort of a touch of Japan. It's a phenomenal place.

 But if you live in San Francisco, you realize it's becoming more like Tokyo because we have a tremendous inrush of Japanese culture. We have superb Japanese restaurants. Uh you can go to sushi bars, that is to say, bars for rice balls and raw fish, which are beautifully served just like in a bar in Tokyo. And increasingly through we have supermarkets which sell oriental, African and Japanese goods. And uh I call them supermarkets for the unusual.

 And more and more people are laying down tatami mats and um cooking over hibachis and using chopsticks and every kind of thing like that. So the point is that how near a place is to you is simply a factor of transportation. There are places in the United States, I was just in one in a far out Indian area of South Dakota. It takes longer to reach than to get to Tokyo. So, it's further away. That's all there is to it.

For all practical purposes. So Fuller's idea is that by the year 1968, so soon we have a one town world and it's coming fast. And as you human beings have some problem adapting to this because as you know when you travel by jet just as when you're in an elevator that drops too fast you feel it left your stomach on the 14th floor and has taken the rest of you down to the first.

 So the jet aircraft leaves your psyche in London and brings your body to San Francisco. And it takes some time to catch up. All your time rhythms are thrown off but we'll get used to it. And eventually therefore we must add to this planes are very expensive. All governments have immense investments in aircraft and to work they must be kept flying otherwise they they get out of order. So they must be kept moving.

 That means there's also a huge tourist business constantly interested in shuffling people all around the earth. And as a result of that, it's going to be increasingly a vested interest and politicians will find it harder and harder to stop it in the interest of having a war. So what we are in effect reduced to at the moment so far as wars are concerned are experimental wars.

wars under small in small areas against people who allegedly don't matter very much in order to test out our military materials and techniques because uh nobody can afford to keep a large standing army in which there are no veterans. So they must have practice and so practice wars are carefully arranged.

 But increasingly you see they find that these practice wars uh rouse passions and disturb everybody in all directions because there is no such thing as an unimportant people and so they become increasingly difficult to carry on. So Fuller is extraordinarily hopeful about the future of mankind because he feels that the synergy, the quality of intelligence in the total system will overcome the folly of individuals or of parts who are unable to act with full understanding of what's going on.

 And you see this is a serious problem so far as the individual is concerned because today not only is there a population bomb, there's also an information bomb. The proliferation of information about everything is so great that no individual can possibly grasp it. Not only has he difficulty in grasping it, but there is difficulty even for big committees to organize this information to integrated in such a way that if I need to know a certain thing, I can very swiftly find it out. For an individual untrained in physics, it's very difficult to find out quickly about

physics because physics is expressed in a mathematical language which he probably has never learned to read. So the time lag in scanning you see all consciousness is a matter of scanning and it takes in the totality of events in the world by a sweeping motion like the glance of our eyes around a room.

 Well, it takes time to glance your eyes around the room and register what's there if you want to remember it consciously. So what we are saying is that the the intelligence of the system the synergy is more intelligent than any individual consciousness can be.

 But of course as a living organism you are much more than consciousness in this scanning sense because you certainly don't arrange the complexities of your own brain by conscious decision. That's something that you grow. Or we could put it this way that the intelligence of the universe grows as it grows you. But here again is another hurdle for the average westerner whose common sense is derived from the philosophy of science current in the 19th century of thinking that the organization of the universe is intelligent.

 That seems to us to echo of theism of God ideas where God is based on an anthropomorphic or man-like image. The old gentleman with whiskers in the sky. And of course that God is dead beyond recall. But that's not the only kind of God. To think of the universe itself, its vast and complex organization as being intelligent.

 What on earth does that mean? What do you mean by the word intelligent? Well, when you come to think of it, it's the most difficult word to define. Everybody knows what it is, but very few can say. It's like you know what love is, but just try and define it. You know what time is, but try and define that. Space.

 Everybody knows what space is, but it's the most difficult thing to pin down. And that's equally true of intelligence. We can see certain elements in intelligence. We can see complexity as an element of it. We can see uh complexity as what we call an orderly arrangement of different clusters of complexity.

 But again, we're using words all of which are imprecise. What do you mean orderly? That's practically to say it's all in order. Uh it was almost like saying it's intelligently arranged. We recognize these things, but we are not quite sure what we mean by them, but we recognize them at once. And for example, if we begin with the pure hypothesis that we ourselves are intelligent and let it go at that. If we are not, then nothing is.

 But let's for the sake of argument say that we human beings are intelligent. Now if that is so then the environment in which we live must also be intelligent because we are symptoms of that environment and I don't for the life of me see how you can have intelligent symptoms of an unintelligent organization. We belong in this world. We didn't arrive here from somewhere else.

 We're not tourists in the universe. We're expressions of it like branches express the tree or fruit express the tree. And so you will not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. That is to say, the environment in which you live will be a system of mutual cooperation between a vast complexity of different kinds of organism.

 And the total balance of that makes your life possible. In other words, human life goes with, as front goes with back, an extremely complex bacterialological world, which sometimes diseases us, but most of the time assists us by its colonies, its societies, its methods of reproduction. All these complex interreations are the which without which not the sin quuanon of there being blood and veins and bones and intestines and all that kind of thing. That's only the bacterological world.

 In addition to that there's a world of insects which is tremendously important to us. But the insects are extremely clever. And if you talk to a good entomologist, he will scare the wits out of you because he will show you the most conclusive reasons why insects should ultimately take the whole planet over.

 Fortunately, uh we are not absolutely abominated by flies because we have lots of spiders and uh we have birds. And so birds and insects are mutually necessary to each other. And especially flowers and insects have an arrangement with each other whereby one could say of flowers and bees that although they look very different, they are one in the same organism. Flowers perfume and color.

 Bees buzz and uh fly around, but you can't have the flowers without the bees, and you can't have the bees without the flowers. And so you can think through relationships between every conceivable kind of organism uh into which you must add things like atmosphere qualities, gas content of atmosphere uh on and on and on until you suddenly realize that what you call your mind and intelligence in your very brain and body is utterly involved with this network of other kinds of organisms existing at a special temperature in certain gases which could only be found in certain kinds of solar

system. Now then seeing that should give every technologist pause because you can't go running into that situation with penicellin and DDT unless you know very well when to stop. Unless you know, unless you can be very discriminating just what surplus of insects you want to get rid of without killing the other ones that are important, how to give penicellin without destroying all the stomach flora and having to build them up again with acidophilus and stuff.

So this is why in the Dowist Chinese view of nature and the relation of nature to human politics, they set as fundamental the principle called wooue. Uh woe which means uh non-inference not quite what we mean by let's say fair but rather close to it that is to say when you act upon nature and you must you can't help but interfere there is no way of isolating yourself from the world every time you breathe you interfere with something about the art of wooue is that when you interfere, endeavor to do so by going

with the grain of things. In other words, if you want to split wood, split it with the grain. Don't try to split it across the grain. And likewise, when you want to pick a fight, don't use violence, but use the other person's violence to bring about his downfall. That's judo. And that judo is applied wooi.

Sailing is wow uh as distinct from rowing which isn't. So then the Dowists you see recognized that there is this universal organism and they thought of the cosmos as a great organism uh without a boss. There is no one in Chinese philosophy making the world happening or ordering it.

 There is no as it were central principle in the middle which sends out commands to all the subordinate parts but rather that the thing organizes itself. Their word for nature being meaning what is so of itself. So they saw the whole cosmos as a self-regulating organism and they further saw that the individual is not merely a part of that organism.

 He is a an expression of the whole thing and the whole depends upon this expression just as much as the expression depends upon it. And that was the principle of mutual interpenetration which is called in uh well it's more familiarly known by its Japanese name gig mug the principle of the network between thing event and thing event there is no obstruction but you see it remains to us a bit of a puzzle to say that all this is an intelligence because we can think of all kinds of objections to it.

 We can think if by some conscious science we were able to construct the universe. We would do it a little differently. We would have improvements to suggest upon mosquitoes. we would uh perhaps a great a great surgeon might uh suggest that the human body be organized a little differently. Uh we can think of dozens of things but you find the curious thing is this when you try to think out carefully how to improve the world and then you realize is what the consequences of your suggestion would be you wouldn't like all of the consequences.

 Hence the saying, be careful of what you desire. You may get it. And then one invites the individual and this is one of the great great things to do to suggest another kind of universe. What kind of universe would you design if you were God? And uh I recommend I'm not going to go into this because it's a long story, but I thoroughly recommend it as an exercise in thought.

 Model your own universe and see what comes out of it. Because I can only tell you that you will eventually discover that you will model this one. And uh you you you'll find out you see that they that it's based on certain absolutely fundamental principles which of course includes the game of hideand seek.

 Now you see it now you don't which is vibration which is the same thing as energy. And you got to begin with that. But that if once you start with that it implies the rest because uh all all that we see around us is just a fantastic combination of black and white elements of what the Chinese call the yin and the yang the negative and positive forces and it all leads to this but in an incredible dance.

 And so then uh you have difficulty though of course in seeing the world as an organism because when you look out at the stars, you are in roughly the same situation or relationship to what you are seeing as when a physicist studies the constitution of the atom. He will make a map of the behavior of the nucleus in which there will be uh various rotating particles or wavicles and you will see something which looks like a mathematical design and doesn't look like an organism because we expect an organism uh to be a kind of gooey thing with um blood and flesh and wriggles and so on. Uh so if you looked only through the

microscope uh you wouldn't see the organism. Well, when we look out at the rest of the universe, we are as it were sitting down on one of those electrons uh looking through a microscope at the rest of it and therefore we don't see the sort of total design it makes up. That's much too far away from our conscious inspection.

 And this is one of the reasons then why uh it's difficult for us to formulate the idea that there is an intelligence operating here because all we see is a firework display. This tremendous display of radioactive mud and gas and one would say well that's a it's just a it's just a kind of a contraption uh that happened to arrive there. And uh that's all there is to it.

But the funny thing about man is that he can put himself down and say that he is an accident, a kind of colloidal chemical accident that occurred on this very unimportant rock rotating around a lesser star on the fringe of one of the minor galaxies. and that this is um where we are and that the universe does not give a damn about us.

 Yet the odd thing is that this wretched little chemical thing can reflect an image of the whole cosmos in its vastness inside his head. and can know he's there. And that means though that this thing, however small in dimensions, is vast in comprehension. And what scale are you going to attach the word importance to? Mere size or degree of comprehension? By degree of comprehension, man is huge.

 by that scale. So then if uh the principle is simply that if we can see from a perfectly physical point of view, what we would call a strictly scientific point of view, that the individual organism goes with its environment in just the same way as bees go with flowers.

 And flowers in their turn go with grubs and grubs in their turn go with birds and so on all the way through. Then when you want to define yourself, you cannot say that I am just what is inside this skin because what is inside this skin goes with everything outside it and constitutes a single complex field. of diversified behaviors, diversified processes.

 You look at that then from a strictly physical point of view and there it is this network. But then the trouble comes up is you say when you've studied that and you've read all the books on ecology and boty and zohology, astronomy and so on, you say yes, I see that that's uh quite true theoretically. But I would like to be able to feel that this is so as mystics report that they have felt it.

 to have that kind of experience in which the network is absolutely clear. Because you see, if we don't take it that far, if we know about it theoretically only, the theoretical knowledge is not going to have much effect on what we do. But knowledge of a more emotionally compelling nature will indeed affect the way we act.

 with respect to our environment and uh may in fact prevent us from destroying our environment as we are now very busily doing. It's interesting that the Congress of the United States recently passed an act making it a very serious offense to burn the American flag. And they passed this act with many patriotic speeches and rhetoric and much reciting of poems.

 This is the most fantastic example of uh American confusion between symbol and reality between menuu and meal. Because this same Congress is directly or indirectly responsible for burning up what the flag stands for, namely the geographical United States and its people by not really doing much about the devastation of our forests, the pollution of our water and atmosphere, the reckless waste of our natural resources, and resorting to a form of economy.

which under any sane circumstances would be termed sheer lunacy. But you see they cannot distinguish between the symbol and the reality because we are all hypnotized with words and symbols. And so when the flag is more precious than the country, we are insane. When you say I love my country and what you mean by that is you feel certain emotions when you salute a flag.

 You don't love your country at all. Uh because to love the country means to participate in its life in a loving way in a considerate way. And uh after all our our animals are in a certain sense members of the United States, birds, bears, all these lovely creatures. And what we are doing is we are getting rid of birds at a fast rate.

 We've reduced certain populations of birds by as much as 75% in the last few years because they eat our poisonous insecticides and so on and eventually they get into us. That's love of country. So as as a result of this confusion you see and failure to see that the outside world is not a kind of chunk of mineral resources and cows to be exploited and to be just eaten up. If we do that we turn ourselves into a swarm of locusts on the planet.

The price for eating beef is that you must farm beef. You must conduct husbandry. You must help cattle to multiply and you must care for them properly. The same with fishing. We have not husbanded whales and therefore they're on their way to extinction.

 This is the price that you've got to cherish the animals that you live off. And then furthermore after that to put in my particular prejudice, you've got to cook them properly. You don't just chew it up because it's supposed to give you energy and be good for you. That's an irreverent use of dead animals and dead plants. They give their lives for you.

 And the proper response to that is uh take it with reverence. And that means cook it well. So that your act of cooking is like the rituals of a priest at an altar. It is the sacrificial altar, the chopping board and the range uh which we use and uh it's not a kind of a kitchens are not to be looked on as sort of lavatories where you throw things together to put in at the upper end.

So, but this can only come about, you see, in a situation where human beings are vividly aware of the external world as as much themselves as their own bodies. And you must allow yourself therefore to feel that what you see is not merely something out there. It's in your head and your head's in it.

 And these things mutually interpenetrate each other like this. Now it's in your head. Now your head's in it. Now it's in your head. Now your head's in it. Like this. You see? And this rhythm sets up what we call vision.

 So if you see that the external world is as much you as anything inside your skin or anything inside your head, then you have a certain respect for it and no longer consider matter. For example, take a piece of wood. Piece of wood is not just a chunk of stuff, but people think about wood that way. You can't be a good carpenter if that's the way you think about wood. We think we're dealing, you see, with these inert, unfeilling blocks of stuff.

 Rocks have no feelings, of course. Bang it around. Mountains have no feelings. Blow them up with dynamite. But they do have feelings. And if you hurt them, this is the Indians say. I've just been with a whole bunch of Indians. They say the continent of the United States is getting ready to shake us off as a dog would shake off fleas.

 They say the storms are going to get worse, the earthquakes worse, the floods worse, and the insect pests will multiply in all sorts of strange ways and finally get rid of us and leave the land to the Indians who originally owned it. [Music] Let's have a brief intermission. the question arose this morning about the problem of

whether the extension of the network especially by electronics might not abolish individual privacy. And I said I was planning to devote this afternoon session to that problem and some of its ramifications. This of course is the area of the problem with which Marshall McLuhan is very largely concerned. For he has pointed out that just as the wheel is an extension of the feet and as uh beyond the wheel naturally comes the horse and carriage uh the automobile and the airplane. All these technological creations are extensions of the human

organism. And finally, the electronic network of telephone, telegraph, radio and television is an extension of the nervous system. And into that we must throw as an additional extension of the nervous system the computer. The computer into which data can be fed from the files of the insurance companies, the Internal Revenue Service, the police, the credit agencies, everything.

 So that in a matter of seconds when an individual is identified, an enormous amount of information about him can be instantly known. In a rather similar way, the time is not too far ahead when you will be able to have a box about so big on your desk which has a little screen on it and a dial.

 And after dialing a key code, you will dial the catalog number of any book in the Library of Congress that you want to read. And at any rate that you wish, the spread pages of that book will appear on your television screen. And you can get it right like that. When we get to television worked with the agency of laser beams, you will of course be able to see solid three-dimensional images in color projected in a certain area and you can walk around it.

 I haven't discovered yet whether you can kiss it. [Laughter] But uh when you get a phenomenon like that, it begins raising the question of where somebody actually is. When the reproduction becomes technically perfect, you see, you won't know the difference between the reproduction and the original. That's going to be a new kind of confusion.

 And uh we will perhaps even be able to think about the word reproduction in a new sense. We say now one of the meanings we give to the word reproduction is sexual reproduction of the species or the biological method. Then we have reproduction through photocopy and all that kind of thing. Let's suppose too that we begin increasingly to be able to manufacture the parts of the human body in very perfect kinds of plastic so that when your heart goes wrong or your kidneys go wrong, the surgeon will simply replace them with a plastic reproduction which will work equally well. And perhaps they'll never be able

to reproduce in plastic the brain, but they can at least put in there a radio device which will connect with a computer uh system of some kind which will do the same job. So that then uh after the years go by and your parts have been replaced, the serious question arises as to are you the same individual? And uh we would say well no you've been entirely replaced but that happens normally.

 Of course it does. You're being replaced all the time though by a different method. And just as say an institution like the University of California which is a very rapidly changing university for some mysterious reason it remains the University of California recognizable as such even though the students the faculty the office and administrative staffs and the very buildings themselves are in a state of flux so that they hardly remain a constant for 5 years in succession.

 What then is the university? The university is a pattern of behavior and the organisms involved in that pattern keep changing but the pattern retains an identifiable continuity. So does your body. So does the whirlpool in the stream. So do the hot springs down below. Although the water is running through them all the time and is never the same.

So you can envisage the reproduction of the human being in this electronic way and at first you say oh horrors. Are we going to be converted into nothing but plastic replicas of ourselves? Will we be there in any sense anymore? Will the soul survive it? But you see uh in the case of the University of California, it is what we call the University of California that is the soul and its bodily expression keeps changing.

So when we find out that we are electronic echoes of ourselves being perpetuated through the ages, we shall come to the astonishing conclusion that that's what we already are. Only we have to do it again ourselves in order to realize it. We are already the most remarkable electronic patterns from the standpoint of physics. So let's a bit lay that bug bear to rest.

 Although I must say there is something about plastic in its present stage of evolution that is somewhat repulsive. There is a uh state of consciousness which those who are psychedelically hip or hep call the plastic doll in which uh everything looks as if it's made of plastic as if patent leather or enamel tin that it only reflects light and has no light inside it.

 There is another side to the vision whereby everything becomes living jewelry with light inside. A kind of botific vision is distinct from a diabolic vision. And at the present stage of its development, plastic always suggests the diabolic vision. But it is through the diabolic vision that you gather the deepest insights.

 It's really profounder than the botific vision in a certain way because if you can go down into any experience, I hope you understand the meaning of this phrase go down into, it's very important. It means exploring a certain sensation or a certain feeling to find out all its implications to find out what it is at root that you like about it or dislike about it.

 And you will find if you explore the plastic doll vision sufficiently carefully that it will bring about in the end a far greater depth of bliss and realization than merely exploring the things that are lovely at first sight obviously. So, so one should think about this funny thing uh of technology uh considered as artificiality in the light of the realization that there really is nothing artificial.

 You might say the distinction of the artificial from the natural is a very artificial distinction that the constructs of human beings are really no more unnatural than bees nests and birds nests and uh constructs of animal and insect beings. They're extensions of ourselves. So then what about the situation when it arises that we are all computerized that no one is hidden? I want you to notice something already about the Bell Telephone Company.

 They have a regulation whereby you cannot switch your telephone off. You may have an extension in the house and you may switch that off, but you may not switch off your main phone. And if you leave it off the hook, it starts screaming after a while. They project that not many years hence the ordinary telephone will disappear and every individual will carry around with him a thing about the size of the old pocket watches. One side of it will be a TV screen and a speaker.

The other side of it will be a set of buttons over which you just place your finger to activate them. uh you will be able to dial information who will give you the number of any given individual. If he doesn't answer, he's [Laughter] dead. So under such circumstances, absolutely no one can get lost. And then you see as a as this moves on let me develop some of its further possibilities.

 Uh people like tobby and mluhan have noted that as technology progresses there enters into it a quality of what they call etherealization. And this is connected with Talha Desardan's doctrine of pedunkles. Um, ped uncles aren't exactly relatives. Uh, and we have to understand first the doctrine of pedunkles. Now here it is. Here is a globule. It might be an amoeba or it might be oil in water suspended.

 And this globule is going to separate. First it does this. Then it does this. Then it does this. And then it does this. See? Now these things here are pedunkles from the Latin root pays. Pedis meaning a foot. uh some sort of um protrusion out of a globular body. So notice then that the production of a pedunk here in the form of a connecting neck and here in the form of little tails when the neck is broken that in the course of the development when we reach this stage the podunks have disappeared. According to Dasharda, this is why we do not find missing links

around in the evolutionary process. They vanished in accordance with the law of pedunkles. Now, in exactly the same way, uh the human technology sets up certain kinds of pedunkles. A road for example or a railroad is a peduncle because with the development of automotive traffic, truck traffic, the railroads become increasingly obsolete and there are rusty old tracks lying all over the country that are not used anymore.

 And then with the development of aircraft, the road tends to become obsolete. With the development of radio, the wire as a connection, as a pedunkcle becomes obsolete. So that more and more the the connecting links that we saw in a visible way disappear with the development of more expert types of communication.

 We can easily take this a step further when we develop a form of electronic communication such that you don't even need to take a plane. You want to see uh supposing I want to see my father in England. We both have these laser beam TV jobs and just like that I can recreate in front of him myself and my exact environment everything around just as if he was sitting in the room and he I can do that with his set on the other end so that eventually we don't need to take the plane.

 Uh, you can conceive, as some science fiction writers have, what seems to us a rather appalling situation, where you never never need need to leave the place where you're sitting. All food supplies and everything are automatically delivered. You just dial what you want and some kind of mechanical process transmits it to you. Then they go further than that.

 They don't uh they they really abolish food altogether because they've got it down to some special essences which you take. Then they go beyond that and you give yourself a certain kind of electronic stimulation and it does all for you that food could ever do. And then you think oh dear what's the next step beyond that? Of course, the next step beyond that is, of course, there's one thing yet, one podunk we had have to get rid of, and that is the black box, the electronic gadget.

 Because by the time we have become as etherealized as that, we move into a telepathy and uh psychic communication. And as soon as you make that step, of course, it would seem that all privacy whatsoever has gone because what you are inside is an open book to everybody else. Your thoughts are easily read and therefore uh you may say at first, ooh, that is the conversion of humanity into an anthill of the worst type.

 And this is in a way naturally what all properly educated Americans and I will add properly educated Britishers and some other peoples dread. It is said the Englishman's home is his castle and everybody needs a castle place where you can get away from it all and just be yourself. But even then when you're away from it all and you're just being in yourself, you've unfortunately got a lot of thoughts inside your head that aren't yours.

 because you think in the English language and that was given to you by other people and contains their prejudices that you can't avoid them in thinking. Japanese people will say that when they think in Japanese, they can have certain feelings that are characteristically Japanese, but when they start thinking in English, they can't have those feelings.

 And so, uh, you are very very much really in the sphere of public influence when you start to think. And if you listen carefully to your thoughts in so far as they are uttered in words and they very often are uh try and discover the tone of voice in which certain of your thoughts are being said and you will listen and hear your mother or you will hear an aunt or you will hear a school teacher or will hear certain friends expressing their opinions and telling you who you are and how you ought to behave and you think those are your thoughts and they're nothing of the kind. An inner pandemonium under the

dome of the skull is going on all the time. Myriads of voices, myriads of influences from outside working upon you even when you are physically quite alone. So this means that you are not nearly as much of a private individual as you think. You are also of course exercising these influences upon other people. You're telling them who they are, what you think about them, what you think of their behavior.

 And even if they don't believe you, they nevertheless pay very serious attention to it. They can't help it. You can take the experiment, for example, that BF Skinner used to try, which is very terrifying. He would send two members of the class selected arbitrarily outside of the room. Then he would arrange two chairs, chair A and chair B.

 He would say to the class, "Now look, when these people come back, we're going to engage them in a conversation. Whatever A says, agree with him. Whatever B says, disagree with him." So they come back into the room and they take their seats and a conversation begins. Now B may be a very strong-headed, articulate person and A really rather feeble.

 But what happens is this that by group agreement with anything A says he is encouraged. He is built up. He becomes more articulate. He finds himself uh sprouting. But B by being disagreed with on every point begins to get baffled and confused and uh feel very uncomfortable indeed. Unless he is onto the game and he challenges the whole group. I see now what you're playing.

 You have made up your minds to disagree with everything I say. Therefore, of course, you don't [Laughter] count. I shall pay no attention to you. So, in this way, you see, we're already uh colossally influenced by each other. And this is why I think that Harry Stack Sullivan's basic ideas about psychopathology are in some respects more profound than Freud's.

 Freud is always looking into the individual history into the uh physiology into the depth psychology of the individual in an interior sort of way. But Sullivan was always looking to the individual as the expression of a social network. And the same in the psychology of George Herbert me where he called the conceptions that we have of ourselves the interiorized other.

 In other words, the sum total of all the things that people have told us we are. Because you do not know yourself as a self except in a society. Just as you do not exist biologically without a father and a mother, you do not carry on an existence without a society.

 And the reactions of other people to you provide you with the mirror in which you attain a realization of yourself. You know who you are in terms of your relationships with others. So then now uh when we contemplate this disappearance of privacy and a completely integrated human society, we can look at this from two different points of view. Pro and con. Let us first look at the pro point of view. How great to have nothing to hide.

How great to give up all worries about ownership because you can say if somebody says uh they would like something you have and you say please have it because you know very well you can go to someone else and say could I have that and they'll give it to you and uh so all the way around uh there there is no propriety in the sense not of um prudish propriety but propriety in the sense of possession.

 also of course in the sense of prudish propriety uh nobody has any dirty little secrets because if I have any dirty secrets uh I know very well that you have too and so let's drop the whole pretense and uh let go uh so in this sense there might be a very very close fellowship between all people in which uh there are no barriers, no defenses and we all uh cooperate together beautifully and love each other.

 Now uh let's look at the con point of view. con point of view would say yes but uh surely the more we communicate with each other in that way and have no property and there are no boundaries and there are no fences or defenses then just in the same way that jet aircraft makes all cities the same city.

 So this would make all people the same individual. Would that be what the Hindus mean by saying you are all one? You are all the godhead in disguise. Would it mean that uh now part of our difficulty in approaching this is that we begin from the standpoint of a certain conception of the individual person and this is of course the Christian ego uh which is the soul as a center of action and uh something alive with consciousness and intellig ence that lies hidden in the bag of skin.

 As for example, King John says in Shakespeare's play to Hubert, "Within this wall of flesh there is a soul counts thee her creditor, and with advantage means to pay thy love." See the image? Within this wall of flesh, there is a soul. Within the castle, there is the king. And every man's home is his castle. And so those of us who are brought up in that way to feel a that we are basically the soul in the body and b that every soul that exists is of infinite value in the eyes of God.

 We therefore have instituted since the industrial revolution a tremendous technological campaign to preserve the individual. We have all kinds of social services, hospitals, ambulances, medicine, uh welfare agencies, every kind of thing with the one aim of preserving life, getting you to live longer and giving what is called full opportunity for the development of your personality to the myriads of Asia.

 This is uh almost unbelievable. And then of course we are teaching the peoples of Asia medicine and uh sanitation industrialization so that every single child can be regarded not as so much waste. human material which because it's sick has to be thrown away. But as some individual to be loved and cherished and properly treated and uh because individuality the human the the particular each particular human organism is infinitely precious.

 That is the moving ideal of the sort of people who first created uh the great hospitals, who abolished slavery, who abolished the death penalty for trivial offenses, who made that great humanitarian movement of the 19th century associated with such people as Wesley and Charles Dickens and Wilberforce and so on u to rescue the precious indiv individual from the ravages of impersonal disease or impersonal political exploitation.

 Then when uh a kind of American capitalist liberalism achieved to some extent this sort of ideal, we look then at political forms which are socialistic or communistic and are leerary of them because they seem to go back on all that. So of course did national socialism in Germany because the position there is it is not the individual who is the supremely important being but it is the community the state which is supremely important.

 The individual realizes himself as a servant of the state. But our theory in the liberal capitalism of the United States is that the state is the servant of the individual. that we employ policemen and soldiers and sanitary inspectors and uh Department of Commerce officials all to serve us.

 And we call them public servants and when a policeman gets upish, he has to be reminded that we pay his salary and that his job is to serve us and not to be a kind of uh admirable kiton sort of butler who takes the upper hand. But of course the very idea of a servant still calls it has in it doesn't it something aristocratic and as we all know in this country it is increasingly difficult to get services of any kind more and more it is felt beneath the individual's dignity to be say a waiter a barber after all they give you a certain kind of service certainly it's beneath anyone's dignity to shine shoes because that's the feat And that's very

low down. It's like kissing people's feet. Uh to give massage, to uh do all these things for other people that that are rather material skills, increasingly you have to get them in another way, either by a do-it-yourself system or by some sort of machinery. And so in the same way, people who used to give service want to translate themselves professionally.

People who were formerly called undertakers now call themselves morticians. Uh janitors call themselves maintenance services. Uh I suppose barbers will soon call themselves tonsorial experts. Uh all sorts of things like that are going are happening right now in order to give the sense of equality all round.

 And so, uh, the guy who gives you gas at the garage will notice your first name on your credit card and will address you by it. I get very irritated to be called Al. I just don't respond to that form of address at all, but I suppose that's my British [Applause] snobbishness. But here it is, you know, everybody slaps everybody's back. Now, I was very puzzled by this when I first came to live in California.

Because here the use of first names and this kind of familiarity is extraordinarily common. And when I found myself on firstname terms with a man who was in a certain sense my boss who was the president of the University of the Pacific. I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

 And the reason I felt uncomfortable was that I felt the whole thing was insincere. that there was not the kind of relationship between us which would normally be represented by being on firstname terms. But there was what was much worse an sort of effort to prove that there really ought to be that kind of relationship when neither side had any intention of forming it.

 And that's very baffling if you come from outside and you don't know I suppose what all good born and bred Californians know what are the cues the subliminal cues which distinguish one form of first name address from another course what eventually happens is that people have two first names the the the published one and the nickname known only to an intimate circle used only by an intimate circle but you see what we see in this then is the creeping socialism, the creeping uh abolition of what is precious and what is private and what is property and feel that as that disappears and as all fences disappear,

the collection of human beings will simply dissolve into an amorphous mass. And indeed uh there is a danger in that. We have seen people disappear into amorphous masses. We have seen Hitler's legions. We have seen uh the things that Chinese can do with what they the military tactic called the human sea when swarms and swarms of troops all identically uniformed are absolutely thrown at the enemy in wave after wave after wave.

 But let us not forget that the generals of the western powers did exactly the same thing in the first world war on both sides. They used the tactics of the human sea uh in which uh the lives of individuals meant nothing whatsoever. Now there are two different ways of responding to what we will call the invasion of privacy.

 Very often you will encounter someone who attacks your privacy in a psychological way. It may be a drunk sitting next to you at a bar or it may be someone who fancies himself as an expert psychological guru and uh when you express an opinion or say you know you walk up to such an individual and say good morning how are you feeling? He says, "Why do you ask me?" And he immediately, you see, he breaks the social rules whereby you communicate with another person without actually saying anything.

 Phrases like, "How are you? Nice day, isn't it?" are like on a radio buzzing to be sure that the other side is in communication. And so you make various noises testing is that so and so give a call letter etc etc etc and you know you're in touch. So in the same way uh we in our general daily converse we feel each other out by saying these little social platitudes and then we test the person as to whether they by the sound of the voice by the smell which we don't think about but which we absorb unconsciously. Uh unless they smell very strong

then complete with bombs and uh then then we we we get the feeling uh do I want to explore this relationship further? We test. But then those people you see who invade your privacy instantly. Uh e it's either the drunk or the child who's quite innocent or the probing psychologist who is playing his special game maybe of oneupmanship of some kind and sees how uncomfortable he can make you.

 Now what are what are the tactics of response to be in these various situations? Uh when you get the probing psychologist, you can shrug your shoulders and say, "Didn't your mother ever teach you manners?" Or uh you can simply not defend yourself. Uh some people just don't need to defend themselves at all. And so that probing them in that way is like tossing a rock into a well and you wait and there's no splash and that really sets people back.

 Krishna Morty does that. If you make a comment about somebody in his presence that is in any way adverse or critical, he gives just no response at all. So, do you suddenly feel like the Buddha said, you spat at the sky and the spit falls back into your own [Laughter] face. And uh I was once present where a certain person of that nature was using as his ploy silence.

And the silence implied the conversation of everyone else around this table is trivial. Now it was one of those tangible silences. And suddenly someone at the table turned to him and said, "You know, I can't stand people who use silence as a weapon. [Laughter] Did he remain silent? No.

 A conversation then started but uh and it was a very uh rather a dis disagreeable conversation if I may say so. [Laughter] So there there is, you see, always the the response to psychological attack, an invasion of privacy, uh, as Alan Ginsburg does it. If anybody presses on him too hard, he'll strip naked.

 And if anybody challenges him to fight, he said, "All right, you challenge me, I choose the weapons. Who's going to undress first? uh and he has this kind of um marvelous feeling that there there really isn't anything that he's hiding. I know that maybe but but he certainly doesn't impress me as anyone who really hides anything. So that you see to enter into a human relationship where uh there is nothing to hide and you don't depend on any sort of property gimmick for your personal worth. And that's a thing we get very easily hooked on.

 Uh it may be your car, it may be your clothes, it may be uh your cameras, your style of watches, your fountain pens, your heaven only knows what uh your home that you possess and that is inseparable from your personality and you can't be you if you're stark naked. So the confrontation of people in an atmosphere of physical or spiritual nakedness is one where uh many individuals seem they have completely lost because they can't play their accustomed role. Of course I have a certain advantage that even if I'm stark naked I can still [Laughter]

talk. But now supposing uh they say now you shut [Laughter] up don't defend yourself with language. See uh that's like taking off an extra set of clothes. But as I say, there's a certain kind of individual whom this doesn't phase at all because he knew from the beginning that he was nothing and nobody.

 And of course, that's a very important thing to know because you have nothing to lose. He who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed. And he who has nothing to lose has really no fear either of the loss of his property, his propriety or his privacy. But uh there are other people who in this situation of the loss of privacy are completely degraded.

 The way for example we systematically deprive privacy of the from the intimate inmates of prisons and mental hospitals. You go into a mental hospital, all the Johns are completely exposed. Uh everything is smooth walls. There are no corners. There are no secrets. Uh everybody sort of herded around and they all look the same, put the same uniform, have the same haircut.

 Uh and and also in the army in the say in the marine boot camps the same. The first thing is to degrade the individual ritually so that he has no privacy and to see what happens to him if you do that. Now you may uh the result of this is that you may brainwash him completely and make him nothing more than an obedient tool of the system.

 And in this case you see what you've got. you're back again to monarchical politics. And so in a system where the design of uh the the politics is that the community of human beings is ruled whether by an individual monarch or by a totalitarian state makes no difference. But the dynamics of that situation is that this community is not a group.

 It is a crowd. Now we therefore have to understand the difference between a group and a crowd because this is the key to the whole thing. And if you understand this uh you can get round the things that seem threatening in a society where there is no privacy. A crowd is structured in this way.

 There is a number of identical individuals suitably brainwashed and there is a leader. Whether this is an individual again or a bureaucratic entity of some kind, the relationship between them is this. In other words, the line of communication is from the individual to the leader and uh they don't really they're not really in communication with each other at all except in so far they may communicate with each other but this controls the nature of their communication.

 So in other words, when a politician speaks to an enormous audience, what he sets up is a crowd because the audience are individuals who don't know each other. They're just people. They're just heads or hands. And so the leader really communicates with them and they can't answer back unless they do so as a group see you know then they answer back but all as a collective because along the lines of this kind of communication supposing I talk to to a thousand people over the radio and they all send me back letters. Well I can't read them much less answer them. There isn't

time. So this is a strictly one-way communication. Now then let's look in contrast to that to the design of a group. We'll make it a circle again for convenience. Now a group has no leader because it is itself an organism. And so the lines of communication run first of all like this. demo.

 This isn't very well drawn because I got an odd number in it, but that's all right. But they're much more complicated than that. They are also this. Now you see we're going on. Let's go this one around. Who isn't he talking to yet? He isn't talking to that one. isn't talking to this one. He isn't talking to this one. Do you see how I'm not going to draw this all in? Take forever.

 But uh the thing is that these this sort of pattern is group communication. This sort of pattern is crowd communication. So a a group an effective group a true uh group of human beings is one in which there are enough people or not too many people so that they can all know each other. and are in communication with each other.

 Now then you say how do you relate that sort of a cell to the larger human group? Why very simply every group appoints one cell to represent it and that cell goes and joins a group of representative cells and they have to be of adequate size for them all to be in touch with each other. And then if it's necessary to go higher than that and include a still number greater number of collectivity of small cells the representative group representative sub one will elect representative sub 2 to go to a representative group of sub twos.

 And in this method, which is the actual original design of the Republic of the United States, which of course has been completely overlooked, you get a hierarchy of cell structures where I am in communication with you here and I'm fully occupied in this system of communication. the chances are that I don't know a great deal about what other cell groups are doing because it's too complicated for me to scan.

 But therefore, we will delegate one particular individual and say you make a specialty of scanning these other groups around here so that you have a wider knowledge and so it goes. So that you have a hierarchical system of communication. You you can call it government if you want to because what we are simply talking about is an information system.

 So that for example one of these will not ever individually elect the president of the United States but his representative at a certain level will because his representative a certain level knows far more about who to select than he does because he's made it his business to do so. Every individual can't do that.

 And so you will find that this is the system of direct representation used by all dictators. All dictators vote themselves into office by referendum. They take it to the people. They say, "You are the people. You elect me." Well, it's the easiest thing in the world to bamboozle an enormous number of people by mass persuasion to do practically anything you want. But you can't bamboozle that kind of structure.

 It's too strong here with the mass communication. You see everybody getting the same thing. Now, oddly enough, you see, Mclhan in his thought about the future of communications says that with the development of the electronic circuits, we tend towards tribalism. And this precisely is tribalism. This is the monolithic state.

This is the tribal community. This is utterly paternalistic. But this is different. This is gives everybody a chance to have his say so. and have his say so not only in terms of a yes or no vote but the thing the unit the tribe is small enough for there to be a discussion and that's why we can't understand about Indians Amarindians why they don't like the idea of voting they have a powow they're like Quakers the Quakers don't vote they get what they call a sense of the meeting because they all know each other and they consider putting a thing to a vote as a kind of unreason reasonable

procedure. We should all get together and feel it out and establish through discussion a consensus. So this as I say is a very strong human cluster very difficult to be pushed around by this. Now as we have developed electronic communications thus far we have things like uh great national hookups.

 So everybody in the United States is watching whatever it is that comes over ABC or NBC uh at the major hours and uh but that is uh I think a fairly temporary phenomenon with the development of UHF ultra highfrequency television broadcasting and the more we develop um micro electric machinery, the greater the capacity for discrimination on the dial.

 See, as it is, you get a lot of interference and therefore it cuts out the possibility of an innumerable cluster of stations. But as the technology becomes more perfect, you can receive an enormous number of different stations. And these stations will increasingly have machinery that makes them fairly simple to run.

 For example, with a um videotape machine now made by Ampex costing $6,000 and a Sony television camera costing $250. You can produce a television show with only one technician. The average TV show produced in a studio requires 14 technicians to handle it. So as this happens you see it means that there can be an increasing variety of the kind of material that is presented through the electronic channels.

 The Mcluhan adds to this a kind of strange point of view which is that it really doesn't matter what kind of material is going over because the message is not the content of the television show but your exposure to and involvement in that kind of a medium. Well, there's something to this that uh when you touch a person physically, which is a sort of a direct communication, you don't necessarily say anything.

 It is just the act of touching that may uh give the message or the massage of affection or love. And so people love to wander into the streets and mingle with a crowd of shoppers, especially a colorful crowd going back and forth and the feeling of all the interesting people around and everything. They're not saying to anything to each other in words, but this this the exciting feeling of being involved in this uh colorful goings on.

And so in the same way when we are plugged in if not turned on uh to a huge um in an outing of human communication, we feel very like an old Italian peasant lady leaning on the window sill and gazing at the busy street, watching life flow by and in a way you see there's something when you see it in terms of the old Italian mama uh watching the world go by there's something very uh fundamentally good about that something we associate with um colorful villages exciting streets and uh the romance of an archaic

peasant type person but you see that That sort of thing of watching an ever varying panorama of life is not completely excluded by electronic technology. Especially if people in their uh net structure are organized here as true nets. This is not a true net. This is just a trap. Well, let's take an intermission.

I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of illusion. the question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not. That is to say, whether the plot is comic or tragic. And if it's tragic, you see, is it must we say that it's ultimately tragic? And the question of who are you? And uh are we to say that I myself right down at root amerk of some kind that really has nothing to do with this cosmos but just arises in it and is here on sufference for a short period and then absolutely nothing follows. You see or the

alternative to that is what I really am the same as the whole thing that is the works the it or whatever you want to call it. Brahman, God, the Dao, the great void, the Buddha nature, I don't care, the self, anything, any name you want. And uh whereas that attitude, you can look at it from various points of view in judging it. You can say it's wishful thinking.

 You can say that it's uh insufferable pride. But the point of the matter is, as I tried to show, any other way of looking at things is kind of skitsoid. It looks as at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a barren tree. They just got settled there. You know, they don't belong.

 the sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Well, where is this other domain? And how does it relate to this one? Are they separate? I showed you that even when we say that two domains are the poles apart, the very fact that they're poles shows that they have a hidden connection. And the hidden connection is the big thing in life.

 All you junkies know that. [Laughter] And uh so in other words, we get a pattern of organization that is radial rather than an assemblage as if the universe were really a multiverse. A lot of things that got collected together that are out of the infinite wastes of space and sort of began to mand around each other.

 Whereas the other pattern which is so much more sensible is central uh and radial and I showed you how the crystals and the stars and the octopuses and even the human beings are all radial structures. Of course, we don't see our radial relationship to the totality of the universe because it isn't obvious. It's obvious that a tree is an arm of the earth reaching up and waving at the sky and a mountain is another kind of radiation from the earth.

 And so is a leg from a body and hair and things like that. But what what makes human beings as the highest of the mammals so uh conscious of being independent is that they are topologically an enclosed surface you see which wanders around independently of the ground. What we don't notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all. that wandering around uh is something that is entirely related to there being some ground.

 In other words, when you run up a hill uh the hill also runs you up it. The hill rises and lifts you as you run. You see? And uh if you understand that, you don't take a hostile attitude to mountains and hills. You're grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air because that's presumably why you went up that their thing was high. It was lifted up. You wanted to be lifted up. It lifted you up.

 You had to cooperate. Of course. I always like the illustration that I've used before. Perhaps you haven't heard it of the thistle down. The thistle down too comes moving through the sky. I once was playing with a with a thing, you know, and just came out of the blue sky and it caught it like that. Pulled it under my nose and I it it started to to pull to get away.

See, looks as if it were a butterfly or something. It pulls away when you catch it by the leg. And I thought, "Oh, no. Of course, that's not the thistle down. It's the wind." Well, which was it? You know, in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen, there were two uh monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind whether it was the wind or the flag that was moving. And he said, "It's neither.

 It's the mind. And so in a way the same thing was true about the thistle down. The mind is the moving thing because which point of view will you take? Which attitude of mind will you take towards this? Is it the wind moving the thistle down? Or is it the thistle down that is moving itself with the wind? After all, when you see a sailing boat and there's a man in the sailing boat, who is moving the boat? Is it the wind moving the boat or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a sail? Much smarter way of getting around than rowing. You don't have to work.

It's intelligence. You see, the mind that moves the boat. And uh so in the same way, I thought, you know, this fist down has some kind of intelligence. It's radial. It's organized. It's beautiful. And uh it's used that to sail itself with the wind to enable itself to pull like a little organism playing with the wind.

 And so in just the same way each one of us uh uses the universe to get around and the universe uses us to play with and to make games and patterns and to do its stuff. So uh because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin that is a very deceptive thing because the skin is not really the boundary of man.

 You'll notice that in various periods of art, human beings have been shaped in different ways and uh have been more or less transparent at some times, at other times opaque and uh at sometimes the emphasis has been on the state of mind which this human being is in. At other times the emphasis is on the bodily confirmations and so on.

 In uh the work of painters today, one sees images that at first sight one doesn't recognize as being human. There was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years ago called the new image of man. And uh these things didn't look like human beings at all. Some of them did.

 But but that's because what does a human being look like? That depends on your point of view. You see, if you are prejudiced that a human being is only what is inside his skin, then you think that when anybody paints the human being beyond those boundaries that he's lost the image of man. He hasn't necessarily lost it at all.

 You see, there's an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man. I don't know if you've ever heard that said, that man is the microcosm and that the universe as a whole is the macrocosm. Now, as you plum out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange, you begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote.

 How could they have anything to do with us? They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body, you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. If you feel your own pulse, or if you're able to look at an X-ray in some way of your inner organs working, see, they're all strangers to us. We don't know about them.

 and they give us the creeps as if they were, you know, coming across some weird insects in the dark. Uh that sort of feeling. But what we will always find out in the end, you see, when we meet the very strange thing and we look into the distant reaches of space, there will one day be the dawning recognition, that's me. Why? That's me.

 And the the whole game of the universe, you see, is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can. That's how one keeps variety going. That's how one keeps wonder going and all kinds of uh exciting developments. How different can you get? In the beginning, the Lord said, "Get lost to himself." You see, so uh we we shall find for example that space that you see all around you and containing you and you can in feel space in many ways. Space is not only something that comes through the eyes.

 The movement of your arms if with closed eyes for a blind person is his way of knowing space and you can hear space audibly. Lots of uh sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces and silence that goes with sound corresponds to space. And even St. Thomas Aquinus, that old Catholic theologian said that good derives its virtue from evil just as it is the silent pause that gives sweetness to the chant.

 So space you see that seems to contain space is one's mind. This was common sense to people living uh in the early renaissance for example at the time of Dante. There are many references in Dante's poetry to the identity of mind and space and in likewise in a 8th century text in China the sutra of the sixth patriarch he likens the nature of mind to the nature of space.

 He says just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the people and the mountains and the forests. So the nature of mind, the nature of consciousness, the nature of oneself contains all these things. So you see that if you think that way, you have an image of man that is global, that is very different from the image in which man is defined as bounded by his skin. That's a prejudice.

We think now for example I have my own private thoughts. Well, nobody has private thoughts because one thinks in images and words and these words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in which you live. We think thoughts the the domain of mind is very similar to the grid structure of an electric power supply system.

 You know what happens is there's a network of power stations and transformers so arranged that if one of them gives out and fails to supply a certain area immediately the grid connects them with other sources of power. Well, in rather a similar way our minds are connected. Let's take one very obvious example of it. what um Northrup Fry calls the order of words. The order of words is all existing literature.

 Both rhetoric, what is spoken of course and what is written down. Now, it's his theory that as a scholar of literature and the history of literature, he can take any piece of writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was written because everything that is written and said is inescapably related to the whole order of words.

 And it's amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away because he can say well obviously he has read this thinking say of a particular novelist or poet so it must come after the date when that novel was published but he couldn't possibly use an expression like that to say for example that it was a capital day.

 He would never he would never use that expression living say in contemporary 20th century America. That's a Victorianism or it's an Eduwardian way of talking. And so in by all sorts of little clues like that the scholar can pin down a piece of writing to when it was written. You see that is because every individual piece of writing is a function of all writing that's being done.

 Well, now that's a very specific and uh almost crude illustration of something that's going on in a far more complicated way than that. It isn't only all writing, all thinking is being done in relation to the total order of thought. And uh in a still more subtle way, all living is being done in relation to the total order of life to what the Shardan calls the biosphere.

 And it goes way beyond that because of the vast interplay of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields which embrace everything that there is. That is why the ancients when a person was born cast his horoscope. That was a map of the universe at the time of that person's birth. And therefore it was a drawing of his soul because the soul is not inside the body. The body is inside the soul.

 The soul, your soul is the whole universe as it is focused upon your organism. Now of course astrology is a very primitive science and it interpreted the influence of the universe upon the individual in very crude ways and it works mostly by good guesswork on the part of the astrologer. Uh if you know how to tell fortunes at a fair, uh you will find out a great deal about how all these predictive uh psychic sciences work because the the client invariably gives himself away. Either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his anxiety to conceal

it, they work equally well. Now, but but there is, you see, underneath the astrological notion a sound idea that the true map of the soul is the picture of the universe surrounding the individual. It isn't necessarily the your soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born.

 You see, it goes along all the time you live because the whole thing expresses itself through you. And therefore in that sense the the the map of the stars, the horoscope etc. was an image of man in just the same way as we regard a picture of the human body as an image of man and it's an image from a different point of view. It's a bigger image.

 It shows in other words that your mind is very largely outside your body. After all, it's inside too. It's simultaneous. You see, I cannot think. I can't have a mind without seeing, feeling, and relating to other people. Without all the social institutions, not only language but the laws, the customs, the gestures, the rituals by which we relate to each other. All those things compose the mind.

 For the mind is a huge network of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity. Mind and matter are of course polar. They go together. They're two ways of thinking about the same thing or shall we say two dimensions of the same thing just like uh length and breadth or just shall we say like shape and color.

 You see nobody ever saw a shape that wasn't colored. Nobody ever saw a color that wasn't shaped. And yet we can see there's a very clear difference between color and shape. But they always go together. They're always found together. Well, it's the same sort of relationship between mind and matter.

 And the difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other and saying well the world is only material or saying on the other hand that it's only mental is the same difference you would have in trying to reduce all shapes to colors or all colors to shapes so perfectly and yet stay so marvelously different. That's why the Buddhists say difference is identity. Identity is difference.

 It sounds goofy, but it makes a great deal of sense because what it's saying is is a relational thing that you don't know what identity is unless you know what difference is. And you don't know what difference is unless you know what identity is. That relationship between so-called opposites is called in the Chinese technical dowist vocabulary mutual arising.

 So they say to be and not to be arise mutually. High and low are mutually posited. Long and short are mutually delineated and so on. Now what we see then is the totality of the cosmos focused at each point. you see uh gives rise to the illusion of the independence of the point from the whole just as the human being by virtue of having an enclosed epidermis and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground presents the illusion of being separate.

 And so that's why I asked uh V to do these demonstrations last night because he showed visually the interdependence of the figure and the background and how the two play together. How you can switch from paying attention to one to paying attention to the other. And in each case it's significant. That is an art that we have lost in our day-to-day perception of life and it leads practically speaking to the serious problem of ecological blindness.

 That is to say to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer from especially in our culture that they are inseparably related to their physical environment. It looks as if we aren't. It looks as if we can go out with bulldozers and insecticides and uh every kind of a gadget and make over our physical environment as it suits our whims.

 But then we discover to our constonation that we've upset all sorts of balances that the house we made such a nice flat lot for on the hillside suddenly slides down the hill when there's a rainstorm because we took away all the shrubbery that was binding the hill together. And you know this happens in Hollywood every day. and uh and nobody ever seems to learn.

 And that's you see this immense importance of overcoming uh the illusion of separateness. But people are afraid of that because they think it's communistic. They think that uh the west the the grand style the great thing about western civilization is its stress on individual personality and its value and that we have created the ideal of personal integrity. That is to say that the most important thing in the world is the individual.

All collectivities, corporations, states and so on exist as servants of the individual. And if they get in his way and they interfere with his private enterprise, whatever that may be, uh it's a bad thing. Man, the individual is the crown of creation from this point of view.

 And therefore when anybody suggests that individual man is not what you thought was an individual but is in some way um united with grounded in the totality then if you're this kind of rugged individualist you mix up your vocabulary and you call the totality the collective. Now the collective and the totality are two completely different things. The idea of collectivism is based on individualism.

 It's the idea that the society of mankind and the physical environment beyond beyond it is a collection with nothing of a kind. That's that's the that's the idea of cosmic flatsom and jetsum that all floated together into a collection. And that's the obverse of individualism. You know, American individualism is the same philosophy as Marxist collectivism seen from the other side because they're both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality.

 And what people don't understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter of being isolated. It's a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one's relationship to the whole surrounding cosmos. Let's suppose that I'm uh preparing to make a date with some lady and she's such an individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself. She never thinks about anything that isn't herself. Well, she's an awful boore. She has nothing to say.

 She's not interested in any books, in any landscapes, in any works of art, in any literature, in any other people. She's a total boore. But the more on the other hand, she would uh be interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself, the more of a colorful personality she becomes. So the the the rule is to get away you see from these ideas of the individual uh as finding his individuality and uniqueness through independence but rather finding his individuality and uniqueness through being related because you see that's what makes look at look at the word relation from another point of view when we talk

about our friends and relations supposing I come across some individual who I can't make out what kind of a thing he is. I can't make out where he came from. His accent isn't American. It isn't British. It isn't particularly Middle Western. It certainly doesn't have the overtones of New York or New England. He just talks flat.

 And as to his style of clothing, it's utterly nondescript. Well, I think this is pretty much of a bore. What I like to see in an individuality uh in in a physical individual is ways that I can relate him to his ancestry that he has this little subtle accent or this mannerism or this eccentricity or whatever it is that connects him with a great background.

 You see, but it's his connection with his background that makes him so significant. If I can't see that connection, he becomes uninteresting. So there is no thought in this approach to devalue the individual. What really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or political philosophy that overstresses his isolation.

And this is something that uh Californians in particular need to take note of. And uh because many many people feel, you see, that the development of technology and of centralized government is a direct threat to the value of personality. Well, in some ways it is, but that is only because technology is being developed by personalities who don't understand what personality is.

 They're working on the old individualist dash collectivist point of view. They're the same. So then you see this is then the illusion created that the individual is operating all by himself that actions and thoughts and uh deeds proceed solely from inside his skin so that we can say there's where it started. You see? Well that's the game of praising and blaming.

 The game of who started it, who can we give candy to? Who can we bang on the head? Uh, in other words, somebody has to be it. As in the farmer in the Dell, you know, and finally you get the end, the cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone. I over there, the cheese stands [Laughter] alone. Well, why? Who started it? The group. Well, uh, another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility if they see through the illusion of separateness that no philosophy of history has really succeeded in making anybody more or less responsible. In other words, let's say that you are a

Christian, a Catholic of the old-fashioned medieval type who believes that you've got an individual soul with free will and that you're under responsibility to God to obey his law and that if you don't, the most disastrous consequences imaginable will befall you. You'll fry in hell forever.

 There's no evidence whatsoever that believing in that made people any more virtuous than they are today. None at all. Indeed, clergy who believed in all this owned whouses and uh all kinds of things um uh they were just as contemptuous of law and order as anybody could be now. And part of the reason was, of course, that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty like the Hbomb.

 Uh, it's just too big to think about and really brings justice into disrespect because it uses such crude and clumsy methods. You know, it's like uh using a hit a steam hammer to drive in tax. Responsibility is a thing like a nice face which you either have or haven't. Uh certain backgrounds, certain interests, certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings.

 And they they live that way not because they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible. It's because they're intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all around. That's all there is to it. And uh of course that's all is a big all but you you won't in other what I'm saying is the people who are frightened that people will other people will abandon responsibility never did have any way of thinking that would guarantee that people would be responsible. There is no such

guarantee. If there were we should be automter. Now I want to switch to another aspect of illusion. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye. And that is of course the great illusion of what we call matter, density, impenetrability, opacity.

 I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter because I'm a materialist. That is to say, I like material. And though I may seem to you to be quite self-contradictory, for example, a wine should have body, pure alcohol doesn't. And it's terribly important in human character for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism, between sensuality and spirituality.

 You see people who are purely sensuous and materialistic get very boring. You can fill your lives with all good things with uh Alfa Romeos and high-fives and wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and crisss and uh dry martinis and Chanel number five, you know. And after a while, if that's all you've got, it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the martinis taste like medicine and and somehow you get a distaste for life and even for mountains and trees and waters. And then on the other hand, the purely spiritual approach to things

is uh too rarified, too earnest, too abstract, too uh purely uklidian and uh the people who are intensely spiritual and don't have any sensuality are always desperately serious, colorless, lacking in humor and never are able to meet one as man to man with a kind of a friendly lear in the eye.

 That's terribly [Music] important. They live at a level of the frantic intensity. I see the these two extremes need each other. Say spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp. And sensuality needs a a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars, you know, to wonder about. The sensualist as such, the materialist as such has no wonder.

 And the mystic, the pure mystic has no body. He's pure alcohol spirit. So if then one should say that material is an illusion, this seems to be selling out to the spirit people and to the mystics. And so Christian scientists are generally speaking as personalities totally lacking in in materialism. and they're prissy and uh lacking in color and their churches are very very disagreeable.

 They're all reading desks and they're too bookish and they they have no ritual, no ceremonies, no no verve. You see, it's all cereable. And uh likewise um when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism, they go into this same ultra mysticism, they start disbelieving in all material pleasures as crutches. And it's very bad to have crutches.

 You see, uh you shouldn't take aspirin when you've got a headache. Uh you shouldn't wear glasses. Uh you shouldn't um show dependence on anything. You mustn't like your food too much because that's becoming uh gluttonous. So you eat very plain food which is not spiced and you eat it out of a sense of duty that is to keep the body functioning.

 Uh you drink only water because other drinks might cause certain dependences and give you too much pleasure and because the idea is you see you've got to control your mind and keep it absolutely calm and still so that you are not dependent on matter. And that's altogether the wrong approach because uh well I mean it is a game you can play. It is one of these possible things. I mean you can play the Jehovah's Witness game. You can play the three speed in three seed in the spirit baptist game.

 All these are various things which you can play just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or uh fishing or something like that. But what happens is you see that the the the notion that the material world is an illusion is turned into a judgment of value. If it's an illusion, therefore it's bad. I ought not to be under this illusion.

 Well, the reality of the matter is that if you see that the material world is an illusion, you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn't. A true materialist, therefore, is one who knows that material is an illusion. Then he's not afraid of it, then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest. Because you see, if you're a false and a fake materialist, what's happened? You borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac, an impressive house, a ranch style with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool, and you've bought uh a lot of stock and you somehow wangled the money and borrowed it, and you keep lying awake at nights wondering

if you're going to make the payments. Well, there's no point in that at all. What? How can you possibly enjoy all this jazz if that's the kind of jazz you want to enjoy if you got to worry about whether you pay for it or not? And you get hopelessly involved.

 You get commitments here, commitments there, and finally you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself. The only way to enjoy material and is to disbelieve in it just as one can disbelieve in money. Uh then you you can have zest for it. You see, otherwise it's much better to be poor. I mean, if you if you have no taste for the this kind of life and uh no real interest in it, but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons, much better to stay poor, not have any of that stuff at all.

 So then this is the important thing I'm trying to say. Material is an illusion but a great illusion. And the point is to swing it and not to run away from it on the one hand or to get stuck on it in the other. Then you can play with it. Just like a wheel going round. The wheel is too loose on the axle. It wobbles all over the place.

 If it's too tight, it won't revolve. But you kind of sit loose, you see, to this thing. Not too loose, though. Now, in what way then is the material world an illusion? Well, we know a lot about this now from our physics. And we know that what we call solidity is force, contained force. the agitation of particles or wavicles or whatever they are at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations so that when I put my foot on the floor the reason it doesn't go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so

rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can penetrate like an airplane propeller. You can't put your head through it without getting it chopped off. Only that if it were going faster still, it wouldn't even cut your head off. It would just be like banging your head against a brick wall. And it has to be going fast too within an extraordinarily small and restricted space.

 The airplane propeller is whizzing around through a considerable space in relation to the size of a head. But if it were going much faster but through much smaller spaces, you see, then it would be like banging your head against a brick wall. So what we've got in our so-called physical objective world is um the a behavior of energy where the where matter arises from it through its behavior in restricted spaces.

Density is a quality of space rather than a quality of matter. Do you see what I mean? I gave the illustration of the airplane propeller to try and show that. So that uh all this is an electronic diaphous world very similar to uh other creations of electronic patterns. the dance of forms on the TV screen, the uh rainbow, [Music] uh the Aurora Borealis, uh it's all fundamentally like that only we are of the same kind of jazz. You see, our bodies are this dance, too.

 And therefore, the the the physical world feels real to us. In other words, it feels solid because we are something of the same kind. If we were on a different wavelength, we'd walk right through it in the same way as radio waves come right through the house. They are of such a nature that they can penetrate the in the spaces the interstases or uh in some way uh jazz signals through and uh but we are on the same wavelength you see as the wall and so don't go through it.

 But nevertheless uh the the whole cosmos is therefore a function of energy or you could say of light something like light and therefore we and it are all diaphanous. Now, it's easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren't so dense. There's only one other creature as intelligent as man, and this lives in a medium that is less dense, and this is the dolphin.

The dolphin is a mammal. And many millions of years ago, it seems that dolphins were living on the land. But they are very clever. And they decided that the land was no place to live because getting food was difficult and you had to lug yourself around. And uh there were many many bad shows about the land.

 It had very curious changes of temperature. It became unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot. And you had in fact to work. Well, no sensible person ever works. I never work. I get paid for playing. And everybody should do that. That's the the mark of an educated man is that eventually he gets a job where he's paid for playing.

 And a worker or a proletarian isn't necessarily a poor man. Lots of poor I mean a poor man like say uh Sale Morganth or Eric Barker around here. They're not proletarians. A proletarian is a person who is fettered to the process of work. That is to say to doing chores every day that he really doesn't like and that aren't in the least interesting in order to go on living.

 So the poor the the the dolphins decided this is ridiculous this land existence and they went back to the water and it's pretty easy to fish. You see there are plenty of fish in the water and things to eat as we know the ocean is the greatest food supply in the world.

 And when they'd eaten a few fish or whatever they need, they decided just to have a bowl. So the dolphin can get a breast of a ship, get one of the with the wakes coming out on the side, can set its tail at an angle of 26°, you know, and be pushed along by the ship. And it's not going anywhere. There's no reason to go along there. As you know, as if it had to get to another part of the sea, the sea is pretty much the same all through.

But they're just going and boom and they chatter and dance and they they're they're really highly civilized beings. And so uh please don't anybody ever kill dolphins or be unkind to dolphins because they're exemplary high-minded creatures. And we shall soon discover this soon as we can set up communication with them.

 They will tell us all about it and we will uh then invent new style of civilization based on frolic [Laughter] frolic. But you see they they they dance in the in the mode of water. Now human beings as toinb has pointed out as their civilization progresses they begin to lose their roots and they are less and less tied to the land. they go into the air.

 And what's going to happen uh as if man develops without blowing himself to bits, if he can get over the hurdle, you see that dangerous point, is that gradually all roads are going to disappear and the earth will have centers of human habitation, you see, but no roads. They'll be as obsolete as railroad tracks because everybody will fly.

 And once you the the medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of water. And as we fly, you see on the land your values are all values of permanence, solidity, firmness. They're architectonic in the sense of our great stone structures, pyramids, and things like that. But in the air and on the water, all values are fluid. And what you have to know to be a good airman is of course stars.

 Like white throats and other migrating birds migrate by the stars. Imagine. But once you start relating yourself to the stars, you realize that you're living in a universe where directions are all relative and you become a being capable of existing in non-solidity. And that's why Buckminister Fuller, you know, believed that all techniques and really all culture came from the sea.

The men who first learned to sail were the wise men. He has a fantastic idea that there were initiates, great priests who were ships captains and that although some of their humble seaman didn't know all the secrets, these priests were the first people who knew that the world was round and that uh that gives one an entirely different theology.

 You see, and if you believe that the world is flat and uh so from the the the priests of the ocean, the landsmen learned how to use cranes, blocks, and tackles, how to build, how what a good house an overturned ship made. And so to this day, a cathedral has a nave as its central auditorium nave from Latin narvis ship showing the connections between ships and the first temples.

 And so Fuller goes on to say, "Now, if you're a good architect, as the ancient architects learned from the ocean, first thing you should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane factory and understand the the the beautiful thing that man has made in a fine fine airplane, you see, which is as great as a bird in its own way because that's the architecture of insecurity.

And that really lives with insecurity. Well, let's have an intermission. So then I was talking to you this morning about the dynamics of energy, about the way in which we select vibrations and about the basic principles. of meditation as it is understood in yoga and in Buddhism and in Zen as a process for bringing about mental

quiet which is not pure passivity. Mental limpness, just as physical relaxation, is not physical limpness as if you were a wet rag over a clothesline. In the process of meditation, one is completely aware of all sensory inputs. You don't try to shut off your senses. And although it may be helpful say to begin in meditation by closing the eyes in uh the Zen philosophy of meditation you don't close your eyes. If you do you are called a denison of the dark cavern.

You look at the floor in front of you about 4 feet and you allow the light to play with your eyes without putting any names on these patterns of light and shade and color. Just as you allow the sound waves in the air to play with your ears, but you don't put any name upon it. You allow yourself to be in a non-conceptual way.

 Now the importance of this the practical uh effect although when you are in meditation you are not concerned with practical effects practical effects acrew as a byproduct just as happiness which cannot be pursued is only a byproduct of being interested in something else. But the disease of civilization is that we confuse the world of symbols with the world of reality.

 As I said this morning, you all know what reality is. And it doesn't have to be explained to you. And if you try to define it, you become a professional philosopher and you will eventually shrivel up and die. But you know what it is? It's this. So we are in a very serious condition in the world today. We are trying to make as the goals of life the attainment of pleasures that really exist on paper only. And the chief example of this is lots of money.

There are no limits to the amount of money you can make if you're sufficiently clever and sufficiently ruthless. You can go on and on and on and on. But there are very strict limits to the amount of beef you can eat at one meal, to the amount of girls you can give to whom you can give adequate satisfaction, to the number of houses you can live in, to uh the amount of clothes you can wear.

 You can have supposing you wore three suits a day and you wanted to be different all the time. All right, there are 365 days of the year. Multiply that by three and that's enough for anyone who dresses also. Then that there is a real limit and uh you would consider if you were wearing a completely different suit for onethird of the day and you never wore it again.

 After a while, that would become a bit absurd. You might find a favorite suit, one that you felt s suited you. What is a suit except something that suits you? And you would go back to it and you would want that one again. Same with a woman. You find you've got a favorite one and you want to go back to her and uh keep her around. See, then you have a house.

 You can have hundreds of houses if you're very rich, but you find you have a favorite one and you want to go back. So there are limits to what we can enjoy in a material, physical, real sense. Although I must say when I say real and I also join with that the word physical and material uh the real world is not necessarily physical or material.

 The ideas that come out of the history of western culture that we say physical or material. These are purely conceptual. You see when somebody says I'm a materialist and I think there is nothing but but material. See and all the spiritual stuff is just fantasy. The idea of material is itself fantasy. These flowers are not material.

 Material is an idea, is a concept. These flowers you can only understand by looking at them and feeling them. We don't know what they are. We see the patterns of energy and uh the delight of them. But a person who says, "Well, this is just material doesn't realize that he's some kind of a fantast." He's trying to say he's trying to put his personality up against the spiritual people who say the real thing in life is beyond all these things that we see and hear.

 There is a happy land far far away. uh you know there is some kind of a thing beyond all this and that's a kind of oneupmanship. People in religion are the worst game players in the world. They're always trying to outface each other and say, "Well, you don't have quite the right conception.

" Even among the most Orthodox confraternities, say Orthodox Catholic theologians, they're always trying to one up each other. say yes you you believe that your explanation of the doctrine of the trinity is very correct but there are certain subtle respects in which you haven't quite got the point and they go round and round and round on this forever because it's not really religion at all.

 It's a form of personal contest because everybody in the world almost is challenging someone else to say you're not real, are you? You're not really sincere. You don't actually mean what you say. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Prove it. I don't think you can. Everybody's going. So, everybody's frightened.

 Everybody's guilty and everybody else knows how to exploit everybody else's fear and guilt and emotions say like guilt are absolutely useless because uh they always uh frustrate their own objective. Guilt is supposed to make you good. But it's like alcoholism. The more terrible an alcoholic feels about his dependence on alcohol, the more he drinks. Same the same with jealousy.

 If I uh am jealous of the girl I love, terribly jealous, and won't allow her to have any other men, she hates me all the more for being jealous of her. I can't keep a girl by being jealous of her. And she can't keep me by the inverse process. So all those emotions deny themselves. So we have to see that all these games of spiritual oneupmanship. We have to see through them.

 Every guru, spiritual teacher comes on like he's got something that you don't have. more insight, more relaxation, more happiness, more oneness with God, whatever it may be. And this is the bait which catches you. Now, there are two kinds of gurus. One kind of guru really believes he's got more than you have.

 And he can do nothing for you except lead you into a bag. That's the ordinary minister who believes that he is a representative that the true and authentic religion and that uh he is going to get you into the church and he's going to get you hooked on the religion so that you become a religious addict. And so, of course, so long as you're a religious addict, just like an addict on heroin, will have to fork out 50 bucks a day to get his connection.

 So, you're going to have to tithe your income or whatever it is to pay off the mortgage on the church buildings and to keep the clergy alive. That's why they want to get you hooked on it. There's another kind of guru. He makes his living in an entirely different way. He uh wants to get rid of you. He's got some way of liberating you so that you can function on your own without having any guru at all and without belonging to any religion because he treats his doctrine, his practice as medicine, not as diet.

 And eventually you take the medicine, you understand, and you can function on your own and you go away. But when you go away, you say, "Hey," to everybody else, I got this guru, you know, he was just fabulous and he set me free. So what happens is the the this kind of guru instead of having a permanent group of followers has a big turnover and he gets on.

 All right. I'm just explaining the economics of spirituality. And uh there's another side to this. Incidentally, wherever a guru happens to liberate people instead of enslaving them, uh other people will want to uh do the same thing. And that's all right. Uh if you're a close type guru with a, you know, want people to stick around to pay the mortgage, uh you don't want any other gurus in competition with you. because that's taking away the business.

I had a very funny adventure in Thailand. I was wandering around a temple and uh I was sort of looking my gaze was cast downwards and I suddenly came across a bookstore and there was a book on uh the kind of meditation they do in southern Buddhism. And I said, "Oh, I was just sort of talking out loud to myself that must be Satipan.

" And a voice said, "You practice satiipatana." And I looked up and there was a yellow robed monk who spoke English standing in charge of the bookstore. He's kind of redeyed. And I looked at him and said, "Well, not exactly. Um, uh, I practice Zen." Oh, Zen, not sadana. Well, I said, "It's all kind of the same thing. It's like yoga." No, no. Satipana, not yoke.

Now listen, I said you Buddhists are supposed to be open-minded and believe that there are many many ways of realization. No satipana only correct way. Well, I said, uh, you talk like a Roman Catholic. They say they have the only true way. I said, you know what you like? You've got a ferryboat concession.

a ferryboat concession to take a ferry across the river and a few miles down the river somebody else opens up a ferry boat and you complain to the police and the government say he shouldn't open up because he's in competition with me now the truth of the matter is this I'm talking still about the economics of spirituality in London there's a street called Harley street where every eminent physician and surgeon wants to have an office.

 This was years ago and so Harley Street became completely full with physicians and surgeons. Well, you would say naturally they were all in competition with each other but nothing of the kind happened. They all became equally prosperous. So that they had to open up Wimpol Street which was the next street to Harley Street.

 And when they had filled that up they opened up Wellbeck Street which ran along next to it. And when they filled that up they got Queen Anne Street which run parallel. And the whole area is nothing but physicians, surgeons and dentists and they are all fantastically prosperous because they've got the right address.

 See once you've got into Harley Street you're there. So it's like uh you you're a guru and you set up in Saucelito or Big Su or Hollywood uh whatever you know uh you're you're in the right place and we can take any number and they'll all the more we have the more prosperous everybody will be.

 This is the economics of of plenty and it's all based you see if if you really work it right it's based on a big turnover. You don't try to capture people. You don't try to make them faithful to you. You don't want to tie them up. But you see, if you do that and you set them all free, you really get them going. That's what you're supposed to do. That's your job to liberate.

 And then they're grateful and they send their friends to you. [Laughter] So the the craft of mysticism. You see I I just want to be very frank with you because after all you pay to come to these seminars and in India it's considered very very immoral to ask for money for spiritual teaching. But that's a different culture from ours.

 In the United States, it would be immoral not to ask money because in the United States, people disrespect anything they get free and they have to give money as a token of their sincerity. Just as say in India or in China, you have to give something else. Uh you have to wait a long time. You have to be persistent in token of your sincerity. But in this country the hang-up is money.

 So naturally uh one asks uh for money. Uh person like myself only needs a relatively small amount of money. And so uh if you make an awful lot of it by being a successful guru, you give the rest away or do something creative and imaginative. Alan Ginsburg uh has a foundation.

 He he makes a great deal of money by being a crazy poet and he gives all that he doesn't need to help other poets. So then the point I'm making is this meditation you are not trying to gain anything to alter your state of mind from what it is now into some other state which you think it ought to be In you are centering in where you are. But you see the difficulty for us with this is that we do everything.

We even eat, we play, we dance under the fundamental assumption that all this is good for us. We go to concerts to improve our culture, to the theater, to the movie, in order to be able to say we have become more educated, we have improved.

 And as a result of this kind of motivation, we don't really do those things at all. If you go to the concert to become more cultured, you are not really listening. So meditation above all things because it's got a slightly disciplinary flavor to it, a slightly religious flavor to it is something that people use uh somehow to uh get ahead in the game of spiritual oneupmanship.

 And I get sick and tired of people who go uh and study Zen and come back and brag about the long hours of meditation they put in and how much their legs hurt and what an great ordeal it was and how good it was for them and how you who haven't gone through this discipline are a kind of underling. See, I've had this put on me for years because uh I didn't go to Japan and didn't sit around in Zenos and uh worked it my own way. And they say, "Well, you're just a dilitant.

 You see, you haven't suffered as much as we have." And uh uh you you really ought to suffer. You ought to put up with those long long endurance tests. Now the reason why in meditation one sits in a certain way whether you sit like I'm sitting now or whether you sit in the lotus posture your legs become a little uncomfortable and the reason for that is not self-punitive.

It's merely that it's it helps you to stay awake. That's all. And if you don't if you got, you know, if you were floated in a hot tub with supporters in a completely dark room in one of the sensory deprivation chamber, you would very likely go to sleep. But the point in meditation is to be wide awake.

 without however the intellectual chatter going on in the head. And so a posture which involves a very certain subordinate degree of discomfort keeps you awake. Actually, when you get used to sitting this way, I can sit this way without extreme discomfort for at least 40 minutes, even longer. And uh it becomes natural.

 But as I explained, the point is to be wide wide awake and aware of your total sensory input without confusing it with the symbolic world of words and concepts so that you experience life naked and directly. experience you naked and directly without uh having in your head the concept of who you are as a role player, as a personality, as an ego. And this becomes in due course a very pleasant thing to do.

 So that meditation becomes not um something uh that you put in so much time at like you might put in time in a jail but becomes a pleasure. Of course from the point of view of our religion in the United States that's almost sinful. Religion isn't supposed to be a pleasure because it's supposed to be joining with Christ in suffering on the cross.

 Look, there's enough inevitable suffering going on anyhow. You're going to die one of these days. Uh, everybody encounters difficulties in their lives. You don't need to go out of your way to seek them. So now there are two fundamental approaches to meditation. one you see this morning Charlotte was getting us to bounce on our heels and to stretch as tightly as we could to overcome gravity and then after that she said see what happens when you don't do it.

 So one of the methods of meditation is to stretch as tightly as possible to concentrate with your whole energy on a point and to use the maximum amount of effort. You say in yoga there's an exercise called kumba which is a way of breathing which is It's a kind of force holding the breath as long and as tightly as you can. That was like the stretching we did.

 That's like those people who say in the uh Tendai temple up on Mount K over Kyoto who practice bowing. Thousands and thousands of bowings. They stand up, they kneel down and prostrate themselves on the floor, get up again, stand up, kneel down, prostrate them on the floor. And there are those Tibetan monks who do the lunga uh do running through the the mountain trails with enormous leaps.

 And they do like Najinski could do those leaps where you know you pause a little bit in the air and seem to overcome gravity and then drop again. And they go on and on and on bouncing along a road. Or there are other pilgrims who prostrate themselves at every step traveling a long journey. There are people who uh run the streets of Kyoto, a 100 miles through the streets of Kyoto every day at a jog trot.

 There are all kinds of things like that where you work yourself to a limit in struggle because in doing that you get a thing which runners call second wind. And second wind in running is where you are no longer running but it runs you. where in other words the ego energy in the running is displaced and the energy of the whole organism takes over and that is all the energy of the whole universe when you get second wind.

 So you get second wind in uh this fierce kind of meditation. Alternatively, there's another way in and in this way is a kind of so-called easy way. And one uses it for a different type of personality. There are certain people who uh must have the difficult way because they don't know they exist unless they're sitting on a spike.

 And those those kind of people who don't believe they're real unless they hurt have to follow the difficult way. But there is a subtle way which is the dowistic approach wherein instead of trying to master and dominate your body mind, you let go of it and you let it do whatever it wants to do. Let's suppose for the sake of example for a moment you just close your eyes and allow your eard [Music] drums to respond to any sound going on. There are no proper sounds or improper sounds.

 You may feel free to shift, shuffle, cough, sneeze as you will. Don't try to identify, locate, or name the sounds that you hear. Just let the rippling air play with your eardrum. And as you hear the sound of my voice coming across to you, listen to what I have to say simply as tones. Your brain will take care of understanding.

 You don't try to understand. In other words, allow your ears to hear anything they want to hear. And to assist you in this, keep your tongues relaxed in the lower jaw. Listening to every sound in the whole field of air vibrations as he would listen to music as he would listen to Bach or Ravi Shanka without trying to see any painting.

There is no hurry. This is what there is. Well, now of course one can do that through all the senses, not just the ears, but the body feeling. skin contact, the breath, sense of smell, taste, and also of course the eyes. It's more difficult to do it with the eyes because our culture as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out is excessively

visual and because of uh the Gutenberg galaxy because of making sense out of print and the enormous valuation placed on literacy we've overbalanced one sense which is the visual sense. When we say to somebody, you smell, that's uncomplentary. We should say, of course, correctly, you stink.

 If we mean, you have a bad smell. But everything connected with smell is repressed. And therefore, because we still continue to smell, it is an unconscious sense through which we relate to each other in ways that we don't know. You take an instinctive liking to someone because you like the smell, but you don't know that. You take an instinctive dislike to someone because you don't like the smell, but you don't know that.

 All sorts of things, all sorts of messages are passed through the nose, but we are not aware of them. We don't have an adequate vocabulary of smell. Only three adjectives in English are associated with smell uniquely, accurate, pungent, fragrant. All the others are associated with borrowed from other senses.

 Think how many adjectives we have for vision, for sound, for taste. Although taste of course is inseparable from smell. So the second way of meditation which I was demonstrating to you allowing your ears to hear whatever they want to hear. In the same way you allow your uh breath to breathe any way it wants to breathe.

 You allow your muscle skin tone feeling. You know the sense of touch to feel any way it wants to feel. You allow your eyes to see anything they want to see. And finally, you allow your mind to think anything it wants to think. Let it go. This is the relaxed way. The other way is the tense way. They come to the same conclusion. You go around this way. Take the right hand path and go there.

 Take the left hand path and go there. I'm not going to evaluate between one and the other. It's up to the individual. But the way Charlotte and I have been interested in for a long time is the way which is natural, which doesn't force things and which lets the organism with its own inner sense of what is correct do it by itself. So if you will let your mind you see alone you don't try to concentrate it you don't try to discipline it you merely let it do whatever it wants to do whatever thoughts want to flow through your head let them flow.

Don't try either to uh get with them and uh make something of it and don't try to stop them. Just let them go. Besides, who are you as distinct from your thoughts, as distinct from your visual, auditory, tactile, alactory uh sensations? who might intervene and say you do otherwise.

 Because when we get that terrific split between our experience, our feelings, our sensations on the one hand and on the other something called the experiencer, the uh control agent who has and who directs all these things. There's the root of our trouble because we are confusing ourselves with an image of ourselves.

 And under those circumstances, we define the living organism as a material object, the body which corrupts and which is somehow antithetical to spirit. Not realizing that the idea of the body as something antithetical to spirit is purely a conception. This is not a conception. And as we see it now from the standpoint of 20th century quantum physics shimmering phenomenon of electrical energy. It's a light show.

This isn't what we used to think of as physical at all. You know, block chunky stuff. It's a zizzing dance. It's like fire. That's the meaning of the Buddhist figure fudo. This guy with a sword in one hand and a rope in the other with a fierce face and flames all around. Fudo means immovable. He's showing you everything is fire.

 Just like I said this morning, a flame seems to be a flame, a flame, a thing that sticks in one position. So fudo, this flaming god with a sword which cuts off all entanglements and the rope. I don't know what the rope's for. Maybe just for wiggling. He cuts loose our conceptions so that we can see this all too solid flesh dissolve.