Alan Watts Law of Attraction overlaid in a relaxing binaural instrumental.

it's so curious that the emphasis of the Western tradition in religion is primarily upon right belief do you believe in the right dogmas and the right doctrines and only secondarily upon right action because what you believe is in Christianity at any rate far more important than what you do because one is saved through faith not by works and early in its history the Christian Church rejected the movement in the church which had been known as ganach decision from the Greek gnosis which means knowledge and in a way there were some sound reasons for doing so because the gonna sticks were what I would call anti materialists they divided human beings into three classes that were called respectively [Music] pneumatic psychic and hi lick last one being H y LIC from the Greek highly or they would call it now la e Li meaning would so the people were spiritual psychological and wooden and that is to say the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality and most closely identified with their bodies and Orthodox Christianity rejected this sort of distinction because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence is not inconsistent with spirituality this is something which most Christians have forgotten but they do believe as the central principle of Christianity in what's called the Incarnation that in the Jesus of Nazareth Almighty God did in fact become material become human and by this process initiated a transformation of the cosmos in the words of Saint Athanasius God became man that man might become God and you don't hear that from the pulpit they are the Christian church therefore emphasized mistis or faith as against enosis or knowledge because they said you can never know God God could never become an object of knowledge and in this funny roundabout way the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus only the Hindus do call this knowledge of God through faith they call it in Jana which is the same as the Greek word gnosis just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things he just says he doesn't know but the original word agnosia in greek meant a special kind of knowledge it was called the dark knowledge of God the knowledge of God in the Cloud of Unknowing to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk this monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of dionysius the areopagite Dionysus was a 5th or 6th century syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from porphyry who got it from plutinos who was a neoplatonist and who probably got a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of Alexandria and Alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous exchange place between east and west Buddhist monks visited Alexandria it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know all Rome's gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed they bought too much luxury from India India in exchange got Roman architecture and you will see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples but Alexandria was the great Center for the Gnostics and for Christian theology and some of the greatest theologians Clement Origen Athanasius st. Cyril all worked out of Alexandria are now going back to this strange mount Dionysus it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowledge as the knowledge of God by faith by agnosia really by unknowing and he in a book which he wrote very short book called the theologian Mystica he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads in certain parts of it the last section of it reads like the mandala Punisher because it's a series of negations it says what God is not and he goes very far because he says that God is not one this is our idea of unity falls far short of what God is so does our idea of Trinity so does our idea of spirit our idea of mind of justice of love all these things are not really God and he says in another place if anybody having seen God understood what he would see what he would have seen would not have been God but some creature of God less than God some sort of angel or something like that [Music] it's perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of dionysius the areopagite he became identified you see with st. Paul's first convert in Athens and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul now where he's known as some Denis but some Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of dionysius the areopagite as having the highest authority and you could if all the texts of Dionysus his work had been lost you could restore most of it from quotations in some Thomas he wrote really two very important books one was the one I said the theologian is dica the other was called the divine names these two books presented the two phases of his theology the book called the divine names was a discussion on the nature of God in terms of what God is like by analogy and this kind of knowledge of God he called catyph attic from the Greek Femi to speak or say Qatar meaning to say according to that is to say to speak by analogy where he used though entirely negative language about God this sort of discourse was called apophatic and the word appo meaning away from to talk away from just as a sculptor when he makes an image reveals the image by removing stone and so darn Isis explained that one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts which is exactly what the Hindus mean when they say of God one can only say neti neti not this not this not any conception thus in Hindu philosophy the highest state of consciousness in Samadhi is called nirvikalpa samadhi which means literally non conceptual the calpro means a concept near is a negation so the non conceptual knowledge now people have greatly misunderstood this they have imagined that unknowing the state of the highest contemplation was the acquisition of a blank mind from which you first discarded thought you went on to discard perception he went on to discard any kind of sensory content in awareness until you were so far as anyone could say aware of nothing and they supposed that this kind of catatonic state was mystical consciousness this is often believed in India if you go to the Vedanta Society and asked what do you mean by nearly Kalpa Samadhi they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever of the sensory world that he's completely absorbed as you sometimes see Hindu holy men sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf to everything going on around the founder of Chinese then known as way none described people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood said is a very serious mistake indeed to confuse sunyata the Sanskrit word for the great void which is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof it is a great mistake to confuse it with nothingness it is rather to be thought of as space or like space because space is not empty it contains the whole universe so in the same way the State of Mind of a person who is truly enlightened is not empty it contains everything but like space it is not stained by what it contains and it's often said in Zen imagery you can't hammer a nail into space you can't spit on the sky and silent if you try the spit will just return and hit your own face so they go on to say the consciousness in all of us your basic mind is like space it is completely pure but of course by purity they don't mean unsexual which is of course what purity generally means in the Western world blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God person who's pure in heart is generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts you know what naughty means means vain negative empty a naughty person therefore as one who doesn't amount of anything was just nothing that's the real meaning but our this misunderstanding of the nature of contemplation existed not only in India from which it was transmitted to China but also in the West you read many treatises on Western mysticism and the still the feeling that getting into a deep deep trance sometimes called rapture again the word rapture has undergone some transformations we talk about rapture as people being beside themselves with pleasure but to be wrapped means to be taken away from the body so also ecstasy we now interpret as meaning in a state of high pleasure but it means to be outside yourself to stand outside yourself your soul has left you it is with God as Arabs say of all crazy people be kind to them they're not here their soul is with God but actually if it can be true as Buddhists say that Nirvana and sansara are one and if it can be true as Christians say that the spirit can be made flesh the word can be made flesh then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting in a trance like a lump on a log with a perfectly blank mind because if that were the highest state of consciousness it would be an exclusive state of man a state of mind that shuts out life and in that sense it could not qualify for being what the Hindus call non-dualistic they always speak of the highest reality as being not one because one excludes many not nothing because nothing excludes something not being because being excludes non being and vice-versa so they use this word non dual to mean that which doesn't exclude anything which has it were has no outside as we say space has no outside you can only have outsides inside space you can't have any outsides outside space there is no outside space even though space may be curved finite so if you want to think incidentally of that curved space go and take a look at a photograph in the life a book on mathematics well there's a picture of a Klein bottle which is a three dimensional mobius strip it might be a strip you know is a piece of paper that is twisted once and then joined it has only one side and only one edge our Klein bottle is a three-dimensional mobius strip and it only has one inside it has no outside you can say it has an inside and no outside or it has an outside and no inside it's a fabulous little little trick but there's something like that would be the nature of space as that which does indeed trilliant transcend the opposite not quite we'd have to do one extra move on a serpent to make it into a Klein bottle you'd have to tuck its head through the ins through the side of its skin and make the aperture through the mouth continuous with the inside of the serpent what's the tail you see that's more or less my bottle so what I'm getting to I'm giving you something out of the general history of religions show that what has been meant by the mystical state the state of Samadhi or awakening in certain traditions is not this State of Trance but a state of consciousness in which you can perfectly well carry on your daily affairs and of course what is meant by a bodhisattva as the ideal type of Buddhist person is that he is not wrapped that he is actively engaged in the life of the world because he has gone beyond the illusion that Nirvana is to be found away from everyday life so what is then the point of meditation why meditate why do you have to crawl off into a hole or go to a Zen monastery or retire and be quiet when this is only a withdrawal is there anything to be said for it a meditation is in there in that sense as a practice as a discipline is a very curious problem because from one point of view it's a help and from another point of view a hindrance and I think we have to understand first of all that meditation exercises are medicinal rather than dietary the same could be said of LSD a medicine not a diet something that is described in Zen as when you want to open a door or summon someone to open the door for you you pick up a brick and you knock on the door but you don't carry the brick into the house when you need a raft for crossing a stream you cross the stream on the raft but you leave the Raph on the bank at the other side you don't go carrying it around but a lot of people when they get into meditation or they get into religion or into any kind of exploration of this sort turn the door into a revolving door and keep on going round and round and round and never get through they say what a gasp it is to be in this revolving door it's an ending a good definition of a parasite the person who goes through a revolving door on someone else's push so there are all sorts of people in the religious racket who are going through revolving doors and they're very bitter about people who walk right through and leave the door behind because they say well you haven't paid enough respect you must really understand religious one-upmanship it's a tremendously important thing and don't be caught out by this because what happens is there's a little game going on which I'm going to initiate you into and it's played in Zen which is it works like this if you go to a teacher and ask for rich spiritual instruction or even if you come to a seminar like this you are by doing that confusing yourself because you are looking for what you're asking for outside as if someone else could give it to you as if you didn't have it so the teacher knows that as long as you do that you haven't understood but he doesn't just tell you to go away we may sometimes just say go away I'm too busy and I'm any in any case I can't tell you anything well people won't take that for an answer they won't take no for an answer and furthermore if he just said go away they would just find some other teacher who would exploit them and maybe keep them as followers for years and acquire a great deal of money by so doing what he does is another thing he tries to give them the put down as if to say you have a great long distance to go yet your attainment is not at all perfect and where are they they're always talking about other sects and other schools and saying well they haven't really got the point see so that you keep losing faith in yourself and feeling my goodness I haven't yet attained this thing and that keeps you working but all the time you're being talked out it's like someone who's a pickpocket and he's stolen your own watch and is selling [Music] but just so long as you can be talked out of yourself you deserve to be now you become very aware of this if you ever do momentarily slip into some sort of a mystical experience you become aware of this tremendous gamesmanship going on and you see it is sort of continuous with with all sorts of cosmic games that are going on of creatures ET and other creatures up and the creatures that get eaten of course transform themselves into the creatures that eat them and then in turn eat other creatures and that you you see the whole for hide-and-seek game going on and then you realize very clearly that the state of development that you are in now is no better and no worse than anybody else's state because it's like space again which planet is an or which star is in the best position well it's all equal they're all in the middle anyone can be considered as the center one any point on a sphere is the center of the surface of the sphere so you know that in the same way everybody in all his behavior whatever he's doing whether we call him from a certain point of view sick or whether we call him healthy whether we call him good or bad neurotic normal psychotic sane all the manifestations are just like the leaves on the trees and in each being in a unique way is as Christians would say manifesting the will of God so they're really in from that point of views there is nothing to do to attain Buddha nothing at all but you see that's very difficult to understand because a lot of people when they hear that there's nothing to do try to do nothing and you can't because you are karma and karma means action you can't do nothing but the thing you're looking for or think you're looking for is what you're doing is what's called you only of course as we all know we've got ourselves into the idea that oneself is so difficult to see because it's like as I've often said trying to bite your own teeth or look into your own eyes and you can't find it it's always behind it's like your head is from the optical point of view a blank space neither la in light no dark it's right in the middle of everything and so one of the great tricks of gurus is to set people looking for their heads there's a famous story of a king in India and ancient times called yojna Dutta and one morning he woke up and reached out for his mirror brought it over no head he was looking in the wrong side of the mirror you know he was kind of bleary-eyed and had a hangover so he summoned servants and said he gods I've lost my head find it and they said but your majesty it's there on your shoulders he said it is not I can't see it in the mirror nobody can show me my head so they were rushing all over the place [Music] now the trick to that is of course that you are perfectly well aware of your head only not in a form in which you expect to be aware of it you expect to be aware of your own head in the same way as you're aware of other people's heads but that wouldn't be true of you because you've got an inside view on your head you have an outside view one of other people's heads because you're taking an inside point-of-view but the way in which you are aware of your head is in terms of what you are seeing and hearing because all sites and all sounds are what the nerves inside your head are doing that's how to be aware of one's head you are aware therefore of yourself the mysterious self that you have in terms of experience because there isn't really any difference but that always escapes people you see so perpetually so long as you don't understand that you can be talked into going on to all kinds of weird excursions and just so long as you believe it you're a sucker you're hooked and it takes a tremendous inner confidence and nerve finally to say it don't pull that stunt on me I see through your game and because gurus a very clever at putting you down but they're just trying to see how strong you are testing you out see if they can put with you so long as they can you see they're gonna go on doing it because they gonna get you to the point where they can't do it to you anymore then they'll graduate and so one of rennes eyes students after he saw through it said well it wasn't much in wrens eyes Buddhism after all course there wasn't he said boldly and straight out my teaching is just like using an empty fist to deceive a child when you play games with the child and pretend we've got something here the child goes into all kinds of tizzy to get you to open your hand and show what it is and then there's nothing fooled so you so you can be fooled as long as you put the food when you can't be fooled you don't ask the question anymore because it's all become clearer it's all become clear that there is no puzzle about this universe what makes you think the rapunzel's about this universe very simple reason you're trying to explain it and when you explain things what you would what do you mean by explanation there are several meanings of explanation there's really one basic meaning but first of all to be able to translate what is happening into terms of words or numbers in other words to describe but a real explanation is not just the description it's the description which enables us to control what we are describing but didn't we see in the last session that to control the world is not really what we want to do so that if all explanations have as their function enabling us to control things then maybe an explanation isn't what we wanted and furthermore you can very simply see that what makes things complicated is explaining them when somebody explains to you how a flower works and he's a great botanist and analyzes all the innards of a flower and shows the channels the fibers the processes of reproduction and so on that go on in it everybody stands fascinated see how complicated that is how clever God must have been to create that flower to have all that complexity good it isn't complicated at all it's only complicated when you start thinking about because the vehicle of words is a very clumsy one and when you try to talk about the processes of nature what is complicated is not the processes of nature but trying to put them into words that's as complicated as trying to drink up the ocean with a fork takes forever so this intense complexity that we see in Italy he is created by our attempt to analyze it all and so what we do is you see when we analyze we use our eyes and ears as scalpels and we deceptively and we have to put a label on every piece we chop up so we scalpel eyes and we get it right down to atoms getting finer and finer and we suddenly thought well we've got to the end of it because the word atom means what is not cuttable Hamas but any family could cut the atom and lo and behold big fleas had to put liens upon their backs to buy them and it goes on forever there is no end to the minutest which you can unveil through physical investigation for the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into pieces and the sharper you can sharpen your knife the finer you can cut it and the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed and the sophisticated instruments that we can now make that was probably the limit but in a way all that is vain knowledge in a way because you see it what it does is it gives you the illusion that you've solved your problems when you have control certain things and you have solved certain problems practical problems you say fine more of that please let's go on solving problems and then you do you create a world of people as we are today far more comfortable than people who lived in the 19th century just remember the troubles of going to a dentist when you were children some of you children of medicine of badly heated homes of all sorts of things that we don't put up with anymore but the problem is we keep running into this thing that all constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious and when we take it as a matter of course to have certain comforts then we switch the level on which we worry when you solve a whole set of problems people find new ones to worry about and after a while you begin to get that haven't we been here before feelings aren't we just going round on a cycle and doing the same old thing over and over and over again because we don't realize that we are tied chasing our own tails by an eternally recurrent process of not knowing who you are that is the hidin see that is the nature of what the Hindus call the manvantara and the pralaya the period of the man mantra in which the worlds are manifested and the period of the pralaya in which the worlds are withdrawn from manifestation in and out in and out evermore came out by the same door as in I went the thing is to get to the point where you can see that you are doing that in every moment of your existence with every tiny little atom of your body you now at this minute you see are the whole the whole system are leaning and outing in other words you often think perhaps maybe a long long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world illusion and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification my friends there is no diversification in other words what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces did you forget that you cut it so when you see the world is complicated and that there are life problems and that you might one day succeed the hundreds and hundreds of people are running like mad after something that they caught the little success and they have no idea what it is so in exactly the same way the galoot is keeping you running and running after spiritual attainment you don't know what you want see where Krishnamurti is so clever because he says if you ask me for enlightenment how can you ask me to enlighten if you don't know what it is how do you know you wanted is it any concept you have of it will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the situation you're already in if you think you know what you're going out for all you're doing is you're seeking the past what you already know what you've already experienced therefore that's not it is it because you say you're looking for something quite new but what do you mean new what's your conception of something new well I'm figuring I can only think about it in terms of something old something I once had so he doesn't say anything he doesn't indicate anything positively everybody says why are you so negative why don't you give us something to hang on to well if these simple answer is it would be spurious you don't need anything to hang on to your it you don't need a religion but then you say well [Music] well what is all this religious stuff about them why don't we just forget it I can try by all means go away don't go to gurus don't go to church don't enter philosophical discussions forget it but then you'll realize that by having consented to forget it you're still seeking what a trap what can you do you see if you stay here and listen to me or to anyone else who comes around here you're fooling yourself but if you go away you're fooling yourself too because you still think that's going to improve your situation it won't and therefore when you discover that it doesn't you think well maybe it was a mistake to go away and you come back to the guru he looks at you and says oh you are very undisciplined very very inferior student and you you need to apply yourself well as I explained I explain what he's doing but it comes down in a way to a sort of contest with a very will you call his bluff you're afraid to because you might discover that if you do call his bluff he's no better than that's what you're supposed to find out but without being cynical about it these are divine as you are but you've got to call the bluff there's going to be a showdown and it's it's a double bind the whole situation is a double bond because it doesn't do any good to stay here and it doesn't do you any good to go away [Music] either to do something about it or to do nothing about it now then there's something else when you understand that and when you realize that there's nothing to realize well it's all here then what are you gonna do well of course this is the sense of a Zen poem supernatural activity and marvelous power drawing water carrying fuel do whatever one does as a human being but there's a little element of philistinism in that it's like when a child is pestering father or mother with all sorts of questions they finally get down to the deepest metaphysical problems they say oh shut up and eat your doughnut and I wouldn't say that you see because life as one looks at it you see is in fact a celebration of itself when you look out at night at the stars and you really want a good god what is all that about well it's a firework and it's celebrating high holiday as whoopee now the whole world is willing it's a kind of exuberance and therefore the proper function of religion is digging this it's not seeking it's not seeking anything but is in a way Thanksgiving that's why of course the Christians who are right and following the mastery of the Eucharist the Thanksgiving only they had such a complicated way of thinking about it that nobody can understand it so they're in in religion or religious exercises whether they are meditative or whether they are ritualistic ah Whoopie they are not something you do in order to attain anything they are like art forms like dancing they are expressive of attainment of the attained less attainment so here's another hang-up for you when you go through mr. Suzuki runs the Zen Center he's a good disciple of Doge M who brought then a certain school of Zen to Japan in the 13th century Dogen said you can't sit and meditate unless you're already a Buddha in which case why meditate well meditation is just the way a Buddhist sits and he called this sitting justice it not to attain enlightenment the minute you do that you see you're not meditating so you only become a good meditator if you're not looking for anything and therefore you realize what a great thing it is to be able to sit and what a great thing it is not to dissect the world with your analytical intellect to be able to look out at the water or the trees or the floor and the light on it in front of you without calling it light or floor or trees or thinking that it has parts or thinking that it's complicated it isn't so when you can sit without thinking not with an empty mind mind you I'm going back to that point not with an empty mind but just a non analytic mind a non probing mind where you are not creating problems all the time by trying to control it by trying to control your mind by trying to control your experience what you see in here you then just simply discover that there is no way of controlling what you're experiencing because what you're experiencing is you and to try and really fundamentally control that this is going around the circle so if I would say to you now what you have to learn is to let it happen that's wrong - there's no one to let it happen if I say to you accept your experience be calm and open to things that again perpetuates the illusion that you're something different from so we go round and round but if there are some people who want to get together and like we would get together to play poker or to have a walk go fishing say the boat if there are some people who want to get together to meditate and have rituals to charmed great it's an art form and you can only use it and make it a good art form if you're not using it to get some and this is what really is the bane of temples all over the world go into Buddhist temples where they theoretically don't believe in any God there are the people praying and they're all doing it in order that we get a male child next time around or that the horse recovered from a disease or that mama gets cured of the dropsy and all these petitions are going on and on and on people always coming to the temple to ask for something lowbrow people for lowbrow things eyebrow people for highbrow things they're all the vendors sit outside and sell souvenirs and magic and charms and all the people go in and do this and all these serious priests sitting there really having to keep up face and say yes we can't provide these services on the other hand if you go in to one of these temples along with all the faithful followers and have a ball by a by a bead by a candle via this father by seven cents go in and dig this great thing going on salute the Buddha's or the crystal the waters or the crucifixes or what you will but don't take it seriously and this is one of the great important transformations of today in our consciousness is that a great many people are finding out that religion is not supposed to be taken seriously this is a shocking thing to many people or those used to be an old saying that a religion is dead when the priest laughs across the altars that's true in one sense when the priests know that they've got a racket going they don't believe one word of it and they're laughing across the altar because of all these suckers around doing it then it's true the religion is dead but when the priests laugh at the audience because they're having such fun because this whole scene is so beautiful well it's the difference between some stuffy old Buddhist priest humming a Sutra and Allen Ginsberg chanting a Sufi that's a thing to hear no they gone for interminable ball they are sick of it but they get paid for it this is magical but when i'm ginsburg johnson suit everybody gets in a circle he gets these little bells and they get going it's just like a it's like a a jam session where everybody is absolutely delighted well that's the way to do it and if you can't do it that way forget it it's so curious that the emphasis of the Western tradition in religion is primarily upon right belief do you believe in the right dogmas and the right doctrines and only secondarily upon right action because what you believe is in Christianity at any rate far more important than what you do because one is saved through faith not by works and early in its history the Christian Church rejected the movement in the church which had been known as canastas ISM from the Greek gnosis which means knowledge and in a way there were some sound reasons for doing so because the ganache sticks we're what I would call anti materialists they divided human beings into three classes that were called respectively pneumatic psychic and Halleck last one being h y l IC from the greek highly or they would call it now la le meaning would so the people were spiritual psychological and wooden and that is to say the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality and most closely identified with their bodies and orthodox christianity rejected this sort of distinction because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence is not inconsistent with spirituality this is something which most Christians have forgotten but they do believe as the central principle of Christianity in what's called the Incarnation that in the Jesus of Nazareth Almighty God did in fact become material become human and by this process initiated a transformation of the cosmos in the words of Saint Athanasius God became man that man might become God and you don't hear that from the pulpit very often the Christian Church therefore emphasized mistis or faith as against gnosis or knowledge because they said you can never know God God could never become an object of knowledge and in this funny roundabout way the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus only the Hindus do call this knowledge of God through faith they call it jnana which is the same as the Greek word gnosis just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things he just says he doesn't know but the original word agnosia in greek meant a special kind of knowledge it was called the dark knowledge of God the knowledge of God in the Cloud of Unknowing to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk this monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of dionysius the areopagite Dionysus was a 5th or 6th century syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from porphyry who got it from plutinos who was a neoplatonist and who probably got a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of alexandria and alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous exchange place between east and west Buddhist monks visited Alexandria it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know all Rome's gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed they bought too much luxury from India India in exchange got Roman architecture and you'll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples but Alexandria was the great Center for the Gnostics and for Christian theology and some of the greatest theologians Clement Origen Athanasius Saint Cyril all worked out of Alexandria are now going back to this strange mount Dionysus it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowledge as the knowledge of God by faith by agnosia really by unknowing and he in a book which he wrote very short book called the theologian Mystica he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads in certain parts of it the last section of it reads like the mandala kyo punisher because it's a series of negations it says what God is not and he goes very far because he says that God is not one this is our idea of unity falls far short of what God is so does our idea of Trinity so does our idea of spirit our idea of mind of justice of love all these things are not really God and he says in another place if anybody having seen God understood what he had seen what he would have seen would not have been God but some creature of God less than God some sort of angel or something like that [Music] it's perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of dionysius the areopagite he became identified you see with Sant Paul's first convert in Athens and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul now where he's known as some Denis but some Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of dionysius the areopagite as having the highest authority in only one age our Klein bottle is a three-dimensional mobius strip and it only has one inside it has no outside you can say it has an inside and no outside or it has an outside of no inside it's a fabulous little little trick but there's something like that would be the nature of space as that which does indeed Trent transcend the opposites not quite we'd have to do one extra move on a circle to make it into a wine bottle you'd have to tuck its head through the inn's through the side of its skin and make the aperture through the mouth continuous with the inside of the serpent towards the tail you see that's more or less my bottle so what I'm getting to I'm giving you something out of the general history of religions to show that what has been meant by the mystical state the state of Samadhi or awakening in certain traditions is not this state of trance but a state of consciousness in which you can perfectly well carry on your daily affairs and of course what is meant by a bodhisattva as the ideal type of Buddhist person is that he is not wrapped that he is actively engaged in the life of the world because he has gone beyond the illusion that nirvana is to be found away from everyday life so what is then the point of meditation why meditate why do you have to crawl off into a hole or go to a Zen monastery or retire and be quiet when this is only a withdrawal is there anything to be said for it our meditation is in there in that sense as a practice as a discipline is a very curious problem because from one point of view it's a help and from another point of view a hindrance and I think we have to understand first of all that meditation exercises are medicinal rather than dietary the same could be said of LSD a medicine not a diet something that is described in Zen as when you want to open a door or summon someone to open the door for you you pick up a brick and you knock on the door but you don't carry the brick into the house when you need a raft for crossing a stream you cross the stream on the raft but you leave the Raph on the bank at the other side you don't go carrying it around but a lot of people when they get into meditation or they get into religion or into any kind of exploration of this sort turn the door into a revolving door and keep on going round and round and round and never get through they say what a gasp it is to be in this revolving door it's anything a good definition of a parasite is the person who goes through a revolving door on someone else's push so there are all sorts of people in the religious racket who are going through revolving doors and they're very bitter about people who walk right through and leave the door behind because they say well you haven't paid enough respect you must really understand religious one-upmanship it's a tremendously important thing and don't be caught out by this because what happens is there's a little game going on which I'm going to initiate you in and it's played in Zen which is it works like this if you go to a teacher and ask for spiritual instruction or even if you come to a seminar like this you are by doing that confusing yourself because you are looking for what you're asking for outside as if someone else could give it to you as if you didn't have it so the teacher knows that as long as you do that you haven't understood but he doesn't just tell you to go away we may sometimes just say go away I'm too busy and I'm any in any case I can't tell you anything well people won't take that for an answer they won't take no for an answer and furthermore if he just said go away they would just find some other teacher who would exploit them and maybe keep them as followers for years and require a great deal of money by so doing what he does is another thing he tries to give them the put down as if to say you have a great long distance to go yet your attainment is not at all perfect and where are they they're always talking about other sects and other schools and saying well they haven't really got the point see so that you keep losing faith in yourself and feeling my goodness I haven't yet attained this thing and that keeps you working but all the time you're being taught doubt it's like someone who's a pickpocket and he's stolen your own watch and is selling it to you but just so long as you can be talked out of yourself you deserve to be now you become very aware of this if you ever do momentarily slip into some sort of a mystical experience you become aware of this tremendous gamesmanship going on and you see it as sort of continuous with them with all sorts of cosmic games that are going on of creatures eating other creatures up and the creatures that get eaten costs transform themselves into the creatures that eat them and then in turn eat other creatures and you you see the whole hide-and-seek game going on and then you realize very clearly that the state of development that you are in now is no better and no worse than anybody else's state because it's like space again which planet is an or which star is in the best position well it's all equal they're all in the middle anyone can be considered as the center one any point on a sphere is the center of the surface of the sphere so you know that in the same way everybody in all his behavior whatever he's doing whether we call him from a certain point of view sick and you could if all the texts of dionysus his work had been lost you could restore most of it from quotations and some Thomas he wrote really two very important books one was the one I said the theologian Mystica the other was called the divine names these two books presented the two phases of his theology the book called the divine names was a discussion on the nature of God in terms of what God is like by analogy and this kind of knowledge of God he called katha fatik from the Greek Femi to speak or say katar meaning to say according to that is to say to speak by analogy where he used though entirely negative language about God this sort of discourse was called apophatic and the word appo meaning away from to talk away from just as a sculptor when he makes an image reveals the image by removing stone and so darkness has explained that one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts which is exactly what the Hindus mean when they say of God one can only say neti neti not this not this not any conception thus in hindu philosophy the highest state of consciousness in Samadhi is called nirvikalpa samadhi which means literally non-conceptual vikalpa means a concept near is a negation so the non conceptual knowledge now people have greatly misunderstood this they have imagined that unknowing the state of the highest contemplation was the acquisition of a blank mind from which you first discarded thought he went on to discard perception he went on to discard any kind of sensory content in awareness until you were so far as anyone could say aware of nothing and they supposed that this kind of catatonic state was mystical consciousness this is often believed in India if you go to the Vedanta Society and asked what do you mean by nearly Kalpa Samadhi they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever of the sensory world that he is completely absorbed as you sometimes see Hindu holy men sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf to everything going on around them the founder of Chinese then known as way nun described people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood said is a very serious mistake indeed to confuse soon yata the sanskrit word for the great void which is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof it is a great mistake to confuse it with nothingness it is rather to be thought of as space or like space because space is not empty it contains the whole universe so in the same way the state of mind of a person who is truly enlightened he is not empty it contains everything but like space it is not stained by what it contains and it's often said in Zen imagery you can't hammer a nail into space you can't spit on the sky and silent if you try the spit will just return and hit your own face so they go on to say the consciousness in all of us your basic mind is like space it is completely pure but of course by purity they don't mean unsexual which is of course what purity generally means in the Western world blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God person who's pure in heart is generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts you know what not he means means vain negative empty a naughty person therefore as one who doesn't amount to anything was just nothing that's the real meaning but our this misunderstanding of the nature of contemplation existed not only in India from which it was transmitted to China but also in the West you read many treatises on Western mysticism and the still the feeling that getting into a deep deep trance sometimes called rapture again the word rapture has undergone some transformations we talk about rapture as people being beside themselves with pleasure but to be wrapped means to be taken away from the body so also ecstasy we now interpret as meaning in a state of high pleasure but it means to be outside yourself to stand outside yourself your soul has left you it is with God as Arabs say of all crazy people be kind to them they're not here their soul is with God but actually if it can be true as Buddhists say that Nirvana and sansara are one and if it can be true as Christians say that the spirit can be made flesh the word can be made flesh then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting some in a trance like a lump on a log with a perfectly blank mind because if that were the highest state of consciousness it would be an exclusive state a state of mind that shuts out life and in that sense it could not qualify for being what the Hindus call non-dualistic they always speak of the highest reality as being not one because one excludes many not nothing because nothing excludes something not being because being excludes non being and vice-versa so they use this word non dual to mean that which doesn't exclude anything which as it were has no outside as we say space has no outside you can only have outsides inside space you can't have any outsides outside space there is no outside space even though space may be curved finite so if you want to think incidentally of that curved space go and take a look at photograph in the life a book on mathematics well there's a picture of a Klein bottle which is a three dimensional mobius strip it might be a strip you know is a piece of paper that is twisted once and then join and it has only one side but then in fun we could cut the atom and lo and behold big fleas had little fleas upon their backs to bite them and it goes on forever there is no end to the minutest which you can unveil through physical investigation for the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into pieces and the sharper you can sharpen your knife the finer you can cut it and the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed and the sophisticated instruments that we can now make that is probably no limit to it but in a way all that is vain knowledge in a way because you see it what it does is it gives you the illusion but you've solved your problems when you have control certain things and you have solved certain problems practical problems you say fine more of that please let's go on solving problems and then you do you create a world of people as we are today far more comfortable than people who lived in the 19th century just remember the troubles of going to a dentist when you were children some of you are the children of medicine of badly heated homes of all sorts of things that we don't put up with anymore but the problem is we keep running into this thing that all constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious and when we take it as a matter of course to have certain companies then we switch the level on which we worry when you solve a whole set of problems people find new ones to worry about and after a while you begin to get that haven't we been here before feeling aren't we just going round on a cycle and doing the same old thing over and over and over again because we don't realize that we are take chasing our own tails by an eternally recurrent process of not knowing who you are that is the hide-and-seek that is the nature of what the hindus call the manvantara and the pralaya the period of the manvantara in which the worlds are manifested and the period of the pralaya in which the worlds are withdrawn from manifestation in and out in and out evermore came out by the same door as in I went the thing is to get to the point where you can see that you are doing that in every moment of your existence with every tiny little atom of your body you now at this minute you see are the whole the whole sister avi nning and outing in other words you often think perhaps maybe a long long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world illusion and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification my friends there is no diversification [Music] in other words what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces we do you forget that you cut it so when you see the world is complicated and there are life problems and that you might one day succeed the hundreds and hundreds of people are running like mad after something that they caught that is success and they have no idea what it is so in exactly the same way the Gullu is keeping you running and running after spiritual attainment you don't know what you want see where Krishnamurti is so clever because he says if you ask me for enlightenment how can you ask me for indictment if you don't know what it is how do you know you wanted is it any concept you have of it will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the situation you're already in if you think you know what you're going out for all you're doing is you're seeking the past what you already know what you've already experienced therefore that's not it is it because you say you're looking for something quite new but what do you mean new what's your conception of something new well I figure I can only think about it and down to something old something I once had so he doesn't say anything he doesn't indicate anything positively everybody says why are you so negative why don't you give us something to hang on to well if these simple answer is it would be spurious you don't need anything to hang on to your it you will need a religion but then you say well well what is all this religious stuff about them why don't we just forget it and try by all means go away don't go to gurus don't go to church don't enter philosophical discussions forget it but then you'll realize that by having consented to forget it you're still seeking what a trap what can you do you see if you stay here and listen to me or to anyone else who comes around here you're fooling yourself but if you go away you're fooling yourself too because you still think that's going to improve your situation it won't and therefore when you discover that it doesn't you'll think well maybe it was a mistake to go away and you come back to the guru and he looks at you and says uh-uh-uh-uh you are very undisciplined very very inferior student and you you need to apply yourself well as I explained I explained what he's doing but it comes down in a way to a sort of contest with a guru will you call his bluff you're afraid because you might discover that if you do call his bluff he's no better than you are that's what you're supposed to find out but without being cynical about it these are divine as you but you've got to call the bluff there's going to be a showdown and it's it's a double bind the whole situation is a double bond because it doesn't do any good to stay here and it doesn't do you any good to go away either to do something about it or do nothing about it now then there's something else when you understand that and when you realize that there's nothing to realize and it's all here then what or whether we call him healthy whether we call him good or bad neurotic normal psychotic saying all the manifestations are just like the leaves on the trees and in each being in a unique way he is as Christians would say manifesting the will of God so they're really in from that point of views there is nothing to do to attain buddhahood nothing at all but you see that's very difficult to understand because a lot of people when they hear that there's nothing to do try to do nothing and you can't because you are karma and karma means action you can't do nothing but the thing you're looking for or think you're looking for is what you're doing is what's called you only of course as we all know we've got ourselves into the idea that oneself is so difficult to see because it's like as I've often said trying to bite your own teeth or look into your own eyes and you can't find it it's always behind it's like your head is from the optical point of view a blank space neither light nor dark it's right in the middle of everything and so one of the great tricks of gurus is to set people looking for their heads there's a famous story of a king in India and ancient times called yajna Tata and one morning he woke up and reached out for his mirror brought it over no head he was looking in the wrong side of the mirror you know he was kind of leery eyed and had a hangover so he summoned servants and said he gods I've lost my head find it and they said but your majesty it's there on your shoulders he said it is not I can't see it in the mirror nobody can show me my head so they were rushing all over the place now the trick to that is of course that you are perfectly well aware of your head only not in a form in which you expect to be aware of it you expect to be aware of your own head in the same way as you're aware of other people's heads but that wouldn't be true of you because you've got an inside view on your head you have an outside view on about the people's heads because of course you're taking an inside point-of-view but the way in which you are aware of your head is in terms of what you are seeing and hearing because all sites and all sounds are what the nerves inside your head are doing that's how to be aware of one's head you are aware therefore of yourself the mysterious self that you have in terms of experience because there isn't really any difference but that always escapes people you see so perpetually so long as you don't understand that you can be talked into going on to all kinds of weird excursions and just so long as you believe it you're a sucker you're hooked and it takes a tremendous inner confidence and nerve finally to say it don't pull that stunt I I see through your game and because guru's a very clever at putting you down but they're just trying to see how strong you are testing you out see if they can hoodwink you so long as they can you see they're gonna go on doing it because they're gonna get you to the point where they can't do it to you anymore then they'll graduate and so one of Rin XY's students after he saw through it said well it wasn't much in RINs Eyes Buddhism after all Koster wasn't he said boldly and straight out my teaching is just like using an empty fist to deceive a child you know when you play games with a child and pretend you've got something here the child goes into all kinds of tizzy to get you to open your hand and show what it is and then there's nothing fool so you so you can be fooled as long as you can be food when you can't be fooled you don't ask the question anymore because it's all become cleaner it's all become clear that there is no puzzle about this universe what makes you think there are puzzles about this universe very simple reason you're trying to explain it and when you explain things what you would what do you mean by explanation there are several meanings of explanation there's really one basic but first of all to be able to translate what is happening into terms of words or numbers in other words to describe but a real explanation is not just the description it's a description which enables us to control what we're describing but didn't we see in the last session that to control the world is not really what we want to do so that if all explanations have as their function enabling us to control things then maybe an explanation isn't what we wanted and furthermore you can very simply see that what makes things complicated is explaining them when somebody explains to you how a flower works and he's a great botanist and analyzes all the innards of the flower and shows the channels the fibers the processes of reproduction and so on that go on in it everybody stands fascinated see how complicated that is how clever God must have been to create that flower to have all that complexity going it's been complicated at all it's only complicated when you start thinking about because the vehicle of words is a very clumsy one and when you try to talk about the processes of nature what is complicated is not the processes of nature but trying to put them into words that's as complicated as trying to drink up the ocean with a fork takes forever so this intense complexity that we see in him he is created by our attempt to analyze it all and so what we do is you see when we analyze we use our eyes and ears as scalpels and we deceptively and we have to put a label on every piece we chop off so we scalpel eyes and we get it right down to atoms getting finer and finer and we suddenly thought well we've got to the end of it because the word atom means what is not cuttable otama sheet is not this state of trance but a state of consciousness in which you can perfectly well carry on your daily affairs and of course what is meant by a bodhisattva as the ideal type of Buddhist person is that he is not wrapped that he is actively engaged in the life of the world because he has gone beyond the illusion that nirvana is to be found away from everyday life so what is then the point of meditation why meditate why do you have to crawl off into a hole or go to a Zen monastery or retire and be quiet when this is only a withdrawal is there anything to be said for it our meditation is in there in that sense as a practice as a discipline is a very curious problem it caused from one point of view it's a help and from another point of view a hindrance and I think we have to understand first of all that meditation exercises are medicinal rather than dietary the same could be said of LSD a medicine not a diet something that is described in Zen as when you want to open a door or summon someone to open the door for you you pick up a brick and you knock on the door but you don't carry the brick into the house when you need a raft for crossing a stream you cross the stream on the raft but you leave the Raph on the bank at the other side you don't go carrying it around but a lot of people when they get into meditation or they get into religion or into any kind of exploration of this sort turn the door into a revolving door and keep on going round and round and round and never get through they say what a gasp it is to be in this revolving door it's anything a good definition of a parasite the person who goes through a revolving door on someone else's push so there are all sorts of people in the religious racket who are going through revolving doors and they're very bitter about people who walk right through and leave the door behind because they say well you haven't paid enough respect you must really understand religious one-upmanship it's a tremendously important thing and don't be caught out by this because what happens is there's a little game going on which I'm going to initiate you in and it's played in Zen which is it works like this if you go to a teacher and ask for rich spiritual instruction or even if you come to a seminar like this you are by doing that confusing yourself because you are looking for what you're asking for outside as if someone else could give it to you as if you didn't have it so the teacher knows that as long as you do that you haven't understood but he doesn't just tell you to go away we may sometimes to say go away I'm too busy and I'm many in any case I can't tell you anything well people won't take that for an answer they won't take no for an answer [Music] and furthermore if he just said go away they would just find some other teacher who would exploit them and maybe keep them as followers for years and acquire a great deal of money by so doing what he does is another thing he tries to give them the put down as if to say you have a great long distance to go yet your attainment is not at all perfect and where are they they're always talking about other sects and other schools and saying well they haven't really got the point see so that you keep losing faith in yourself and feeling my goodness I haven't yet attained this thing and that keeps you working but all the time you're being talked out it's like someone who's a pickpocket and he's stolen your own watch and is selling it to you but just so long as you can be talked out of yourself you deserve to be now you become very aware of this if you ever do momentarily slip into some sort of mystical experience you become aware of this tremendous gamesmanship going on and you see it is sort of continuous with with all sorts of cosmic games that are going on of creatures eating other creatures up and the creatures that get eaten costs transform themselves into the creatures that eat them and then in turn eat other creatures and that you you see the whole hide-and-seek game going on and then you realize very clearly that the state of development that you are in now is no better and no worse than anybody else's state because it's like space again which planet is an or which star is in the best position well it's all equal they're all in the middle anyone can be considered as the center one any point on a sphere is the center of the surface of the sphere so you know that in the same way everybody in all his behavior whatever he's doing whether we call him from a certain point of view sick or whether we call him healthy whether we call him good or bad neurotic normal psychotic saying all the manifestations are just like the leaves on the trees and in each being in a unique way is as Christians would say manifesting the will of God so they're really it from that point of views there is nothing to do to attain buddhahood nothing at all but you see that's very difficult to understand because a lot of people when they hear that there's nothing to do try to do nothing and you can't because you are karma and karma means action you can't do nothing but the thing you're looking for I think you're looking for is what you're doing is what's called you only of course as we all know we've got ourselves into the idea that oneself is so difficult to see because it's like as I've often said trying to bite your own teeth or look into your own eyes and you can't find it it's always behind it's like your head is from the optical point of view a blank space neither law and light nor dark it's right in the middle of everything it's so curious that the emphasis of the Western tradition in religion is primarily upon right belief do you believe in the right dogmas and the right doctrines and only secondarily upon right action because what you believe is in Christianity at any rate far more important than what you do because one is saved through faith not by works and early in its history the Christian Church rejected the movement in the church which had been known as canastas ISM from the Greek gnosis which means knowledge and in a way there were some sound reasons for doing so because the ganache sticks were what I would call anti materialists they divided human beings into three classes that were called respectively pneumatic psychic and Heilig last one being H Y L I see from the Greek highly or they would call it now LA Ely meaning wood so the people were spiritual psychological and wooden and that is to say the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality and most closely identified with their bodies and Orthodox Christianity rejected this sort of distinction because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence is not inconsistent with spirituality this is something which most Christians have forgotten but they do believe as the central principle of Christianity in what's called the Incarnation that in the Jesus of Nazareth Almighty God did in fact become material become human and by this process initiated a transformation of the cosmos in the words of Saint Athanasius God became man that man might become God and you don't hear that from the public very often the Christian Church therefore emphasized mistis or faith as against gnosis or knowledge because they said you can never know God God could never become an object of knowledge [Music] and in this funny roundabout way the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus only the Hindus do call this knowledge of God through faith they call it jnana which is the same as the Greek word gnosis just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things he just says he doesn't know about the original word agnosia in greek meant a special kind of knowledge it was called the dark knowledge of God the knowledge of God in the Cloud of Unknowing to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk this monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of dionysius the areopagite Dionysus was a 5th or 6th century syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from porphyry we got it from plutinos who was a neo-platonist and who probably got a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of Alexandria and Alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous exchange place between east and west Buddhist monks visited Alexandria it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know all Rome's gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed they bought too much luxury from India India in exchange got Roman architecture and you'll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples but Alexandria was the great Center for the Gnostics and for Christian theology and some of the greatest theologians Clement Origen Athanasius Saint Cyril all worked out of Alexandria are now going back to this strange mount Dionysus it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowledge as the knowledge of God by faith by agnosia really by unknowing and he in a book which he wrote very short book called the theologian Mystica he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads in certain parts of it the last section of it reads like the mandala Punisher because it's a series of negations it says what God is not and he goes very far because he says that God is not one this is our idea of unity falls far short of what God is so does our idea of Trinity so does our idea of spirit our idea of mind of justice of love all these things are not really God and he says in another place if anybody having seen God understood what he had seen what he would have seen would not have been God but some creature of God less than God some sort of angel or something like that it's perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of dionysius the areopagite he became identified you see with some Paul's first convert in Athens and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul now where he's known as some Denis [Music] but San Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of dionysius the areopagite as having the highest authority and you could if all the text of Dionysus his work had been lost you could restore most of it from quotations in some Thomas he wrote really two very important books one was the one I said of the theologian Mystica the other was called the divine names these two books presented the two phases of his theology the book called the divine names was a discussion on the nature of God in terms of what God is like by analogy and this kind of knowledge of God he called katha fatik from the Greek Femi to speak or say kata meaning to say according to that is to say to speak by analogy where he used though entirely negative language about God this sort of discourse was called apophatic and the word appo meaning away from to talk away from just as a sculptor when he makes an image reveals the image by removing stone and so darkness is explained that one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts which is exactly what the Hindus mean when they say of God one can only say neti neti not this not this not any conception thus in hindu philosophy the highest state of consciousness in samadhi is called knee ravi culpa samadhi which means literally non conceptual vikalpa means a concept near is a negation so the non conceptual knowledge now people have greatly misunderstood this they have imagined that unknowing the state of the highest contemplation was the acquisition of a blank mind from which you first discarded thought you went on to discard perception he went on to discard any kind of sensory content in awareness until you were so far as anyone could say aware of nothing and they supposed that this kind of catatonic state was mystical consciousness this is often believed in India if you go to the Vedanta Society and asked what do you mean by nearly Kalpa Samadhi they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever of the sensory world that he is completely absorbed as you sometimes see Hindu holy men sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf to everything going on around them the founder of Chinese then known as Hainan describe people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood said is a very serious mistake indeed to confuse sunyata the sanskrit word for the great void which is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof it is a great mistake to confuse it with nothingness it is rather to be thought of as space or like space because space is not empty it contains the whole universe and so in the same way the State of Mind of a person who is truly enlightened is not empty it contains everything but like space it is not stained by what it contains and it's often said in Zen imagery you can't hammer a nail into space you can't spit on the sky and silent if you try the spit will just return and hit your own face so they go on to say the consciousness in all of us your basic mind is like space it is completely pure but of course by purity they don't mean unsexual which is of course what purity generally means in the Western world blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God person was pure in heart has generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts you know what not he means means vain negative empty a naughty person therefore as one who doesn't amount to anything is just nothing that's the real meaning but this misunderstanding of the nature of contemplation existed not only in India from which it was transmitted to China but also in the West you read many treatises on Western mysticism and the still the feeling that getting into a deep deep trance sometimes called rapture again the word rapture has undergone some transformations we talk about rapture as people being beside themselves with pleasure but to be wrapped means to be taken away from the body so also ecstasy we now interpret as meaning in a state of high pleasure but it means to be outside yourself to stand outside yourself your soul has left you it is with God as Arabs say of all crazy people be kind to them they're not here their soul is with God but actually if it can be true as Buddhists say that Nirvana and sansara are one and if it can be true as Christians say that the spirit can be made flesh the word can be made flesh then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting in a trance like a lump on a log with a perfectly blank mind because if that were the highest state of consciousness it would be an exclusive state the state of mind that shuts out life and in that sense it could not qualify for being what the Hindus call non-dualistic they always speak of the highest reality as being not one because one excludes many not nothing because nothing excludes something not being because being excludes naam being and vice versa so they use this word non dual to mean that which doesn't exclude anything which as it were has no outside as we say space has no outside you can only have outsides inside space you can't have any outsides outside space there is no outside space even though space may be curved finite so if you want to think incidentally of that curved space go and take a look at photograph in the life a book on mathematics where there's a picture of a Klein bottle which is a three dimensional mobius strip it might be a strip you know is a piece of paper that is twisted once and then joined it has only one side and only one edge our a Klein bottle is the three-dimensional mobius strip and it only has one inside it has no outside you can say it has an inside and no outside or it has an outside and no inside it's a fabulous little little trick but there's something like that would be the nature of space as that which does indeed trail and transcend the opposites right we'd have to do one extra move on a serpent to make it into a wine bottle you'd have to tuck its head through the inn's through the side of its skin and make the aperture through the mouth continuous with the inside of the serpent towards the tail you see that's more or less what bottle heads so what I'm getting to I'm giving you something out of the general history of religions show that what has been meant by the mystical state the state of Samadhi or awakening in certain tradition and so one of the great tricks of gurus is to set people looking for their heads there's a famous story of a king in India and ancient times called yojna Dutta and one morning he woke up and reached out for his mirror brought it over no head he was looking in the wrong side of the mirror you know he was kind of bleary-eyed and had a hangover so he summoned servants and said he gods I've lost my head find it and they said but your majesty it's there on your shoulders he said it is not I can't see it in the mirror nobody can show me my head so they were rushing all over the place looking for the head now the trick to that is of course that you are perfectly well aware of your head only not in a form in which you expect to be aware of it you expect to be aware of your own head in the same way as you're aware of other people's heads but that wouldn't be true of you because you've got an inside view on your head you have an outside view on about the people's heads because you're taking an inside point-of-view but the way in which you are aware of your head is in terms of what you are seeing and hearing because all sites and all sounds are what the nerves inside your head are doing that's how to be aware of one's head you are aware therefore of yourself the mysterious self that you have in terms of experience because there isn't really any difference but that always escapes people to see so perpetually so long as you don't understand that you can be talked into going on to all kinds of weird excursions and just so long as you believe it you're a sucker you're hooked and it takes a tremendous inner confidence and nerve finally to say it don't pull that stunt I see through your game and the cars gurus a very clever at putting you down but they're just trying to see how strong you are testing you out see if they can hoodwink you so long as they can you see they're gonna go on doing it because they gotta get you to the point where they can't do it to you anymore then they graduate and so one of RINs eyes students after he saw through it said well wasn't much in wrens eyes Buddhism after all course there wasn't he said boldly and straight out my teaching is just like using an empty fist to deceive a child you know when you play games with a child and pretend you've got something here the child goes into all kinds of tizzy to get you to open your hand and show what it is and then there's nothing fooled so you so you can be fooled as long as you put the food when you can't be fooled you don't ask the question in it because it's all become clearer it's all become clear that there is no puzzle about this universe what makes you think the Rapunzel out this universe very simple reason you're trying to explain it and when you explain things what you would what do you mean by explanation [Music] there are several meanings of explanation there's really one basic meaning but first of all to be able to translate what is happening in terms of words or numbers in other words to describe but a real explanation is not just the description it's a description which enables us to control what we are describing but didn't we see in the last session that to control the world is not really what we want to do so that if all explanations have as their function enabling us to control things then maybe an explanation isn't what we wanted and furthermore you can very simply see that what makes things complicated is explaining when somebody explains to you how a flower works and he's a great botanist and analyzes all the innards of the flower and shows the channels the fibers the processes of reproduction and so on that go on in it everybody stands fascinated see how complicated that is how clever God must have been to create that flower to have all that complexity good it seemed complicated at all it's only complicated when you start thinking about because the vehicle of words is a very clumsy one and when you try to talk about the processes of nature what is complicated is not the processes of nature but trying to put them into words that's as complicated as trying to drink up the ocean with a fork takes forever so this intense complexity that we see in it is created by our attempt to analyze it all and so what we do is you see when we analyze we use our eyes and ears as sculptors and we deceptively and we have to put a label on every piece we chop off so we scalpel eyes and we get it right down to atoms getting finer and finer and we suddenly thought where we've got to the end of it because the word atom means what is not cuttable optimist but any family could cut the atom and lo and behold big fleas had little fleas upon their backs to bite them and it goes on forever there is no end to the minutest which you can unveil through physical investigation for the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into pieces and the sharper you can sharpen your knife the finer you can cut it and the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed and the sophisticated instruments that we can now make that was probably no limit but in a way all that is vain knowledge in a way because you see it what it does is it gives you the illusion but you've solved your problems when you have control certain things and you have solved certain problems practical problems you say fine more of that please let's go on solving problems and then you do you create a world of people as we are today far more comfortable than people who lived in the 19th century just remember the troubles of going to a dentist when you chew some of you and the children of medicine of badly heated homes of all sorts of things that we don't put up with anymore but the problem is we keep running into this thing that all constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious and when we take it as a matter of course to have certain countries then we switch the level on which we worry when you solve a whole set of problems people find new ones to worry about and after a while you begin to get that haven't we been here before feeling aren't we just going round on a cycle and doing the same whole thing over and over and over again because we don't realize that we are take chasing our own tails by an eternally recurrent process of not knowing who you are that is the hide-and-seek that is the nature of what the hindus call the manvantara and the pralaya the period of the manvantara in which the worlds are manifested and the period of the pralaya in which the worlds are withdrawn from manifestation in and out in and out evermore came out by the same door as in I went the thing is to get to the point where you can see that you are doing that in every moment of your existence with every tiny little atom of your body [Music] you now at this minute you see are the whole the whole system [Music] are leaning and outing in other words you often think perhaps maybe a long long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world illusion and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification my friends there is no diversification [Music] in other words what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces will you forget that you cut Italy so when you see the world is complicated and that there are life problems and that you might one day succeed the hundreds and hundreds of people are running like mad after something that they caught there is success and they have no idea what it is so in exactly the same way the Gullu is keeping you running and running after spiritual attainment you don't know what you want the where Krishnamurti is so clever because he says if you ask me for enlightenment how can you ask me to enlighten if you don't know what it is how do you know you want is that any concept you have of it will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the situation you're already in if you think you know what you're going out for all you're doing is you're seeking the past what you already know what you've already experienced therefore that's not it is it because you say you're looking for something quite new but what do you mean new what's your conception of something new well figure I can only think about it in terms of something old something I once had so he doesn't say anything he doesn't indicate anything positively everybody says why are you so negative why don't you give us something to hang on to well if the simple answer is it would be spurious you don't need anything to hang on to your it you don't need a religion [Music] but then you say well well what is all this religious stuff about them why don't we just forget it try by all means let's go away don't go to gurus don't go to church don't enter philosophical discussions forget it then you'll realize that by having consented to forget it you're still seeking what a trap what can you do you see if you stay here and listen to me or to anyone else who comes around here you're fooling yourself but if you go away you're fooling yourself too because you still think that's going to improve your situation and therefore when you discover that it doesn't you'll think well maybe it was a mistake to go away and you come back to the guru and he looks at you and says uh-uh-uh-uh you are very undisciplined very very inferior student and you you need to apply yourself well as I explained I explained what he's doing but it comes down in a way to a sort of contest with a guru will you call his bluff you're afraid to because you might discover that if you do call his bluff he's no better than oolong that's what you're supposed to find out but without being cynical about these as divine as you are but you've got to call the bluff there's going to be a showdown and it's it's a double bind for the whole situation is a double bond because it doesn't do any good to stay here and it doesn't do you any good to go away either to do something about it or to do nothing about it now then there's something else when you understand that and when you realize that there's nothing to realize and it's all here then what are you going to do well of course this is the sense of Zen poem supernatural activity and marvelous power drawing water carrying fuel do whatever one does as a human being but there's a little element of philistinism than that it's like when a child is pestering father or mother with all sorts of questions they finally get down to the deepest metaphysical problems they say oh shut up a teacher don't and I wouldn't say that you see because life as one looks at it you see he is in fact a celebration of itself when you look out at night at the stars and you really wonder good god what is all that about well it's a firework and it's celebrating high holiday as Whoopie and the whole world is Whoopie it's a kind of exuberance now for the proper function of religion is digging this it's not seeking it's not seeking anything but is in a way Thanksgiving that's why of course the Christians were right in following the mass T of the Eucharist the Thanksgiving only they had such a complicated way of thinking about it and nobody could understand it so there in in religion or religious exercises whether they are meditative or whether they are ritualistic ah Whoopie they are not something you do in order to attain anything they are like art forms like dancing they are expressive of attainment of the attained less attainment so here's another hang-up for you when you go to mr. Suzuki runs the Zen Center he's a good disciple of Doge M who brought them a certain school of Zen to Japan in the 13th century Dogen said you can't sit and meditate unless you're already a Buddha in which case why meditate well meditation is just the way of Buddhist it's and he called this sitting justice it not to attain enlightenment as the minute you do that you see you're not meditating so you only become a good meditator if you're not looking for anything and therefore you reel [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Civilian Intelligence Agency

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Id: V0GayGN9ZDg

Length: 152min 12sec (9132 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 03 2020