Alan Watts - The Cosmic Network (FULL LECTURE)

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 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 billions 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 Democritus who were the among the great pre-socratic philosophers of ancient Greece and so we may as well begin with the a little bit about the history of the idea of an atom because this is always fascinated people what is the world fundamentally what is all this but one way of finding out is to take a knife and chop something in two so you could 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 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 any more unless we can find a finer knife and so when we get down to that bit beyond which there is no bitter that is to say it can't be chopped any further it is called in Greek atomos which means the the first letter R means none thomas cuttable and so the word adam 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 of atoms 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 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 a very strong form of nature so people have always tended to consider atoms as balls especially atoms of liquid there was a notion you see that the atoms of the element of Earth for cubes because cubes all sit together rather firmly liquid which when you put up good blue that was balls fire was made of them if I remember right little pyramids yeah I can't remember what air was made of and what their atoms were shaped like maybe sausages or something like that cuz the air is pretty difficult to get out to but they had some ideas but fundamentally what has influenced what Western thought and still influences Western thought is the idea of an atom of 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 billiards 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 will go further than that and say it's monarchic or 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 practising 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 image that I choose or remarks that I may make about this imagery because I don't suppose that anybody has come to this Roman 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 the 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 that morning prayer to which we went every Sunday the minister would pray a prayer which began our almighty and for all Almighty father high and mighty King of Kings Lord of lords the only ruler of princes who dust from thy throne they hold all the dwellers upon earth most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour 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 new obeisance and present in this potato 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 there's almost bowing and scraping because you know very well that places where they bow and scrape and weather are Thrones our places of terror because anybody who rules by force his son 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 so you go into a course today an ordinary US law court there is a very strict etiquette and if you start laughing the judge will bang the gavel and threaten contempt of court of all sorts of dire punishments because here everybody has to be serious it's like on the parade ground all those Marines lined up know and they salute the flag and I have to have a very grim expression on serious and so 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 canons and clergy flanking him on either side and so certain great Catholic cathedrals are called the with you that they've described the word Basilica and Basilica from the Greek basileus or basileus is the king so the Basilica is the court of the king very titles of God in the Bible king of kings and Lord of lords are of course borrowed from the Persian emperors the Cyrus and to the Greek word kurios meaning Lord so the mass begins with the invocation QA Eleison lord have mercy upon us the titles are borrowed from the persian emperor and so the rights that have become associated with christian religion and to some extent the Jewish religion are reflections of those great autocratic monarchs of the ancient Near East thus irises of Persia the Pharaohs of Egypt and people like Hammurabi who were the great rowdy and monarchs the universe was conceived then as being ruled on a political pattern like that so that the Hammurabi in particular and Moses after him were great law givers 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 somebody's got to tell what the rules are 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 gonna say this is the law see and you got 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 somebody told for example a wonderful poem by father Feeny about bees God to some sticky stuff not yet alive in a hive said come hum he might be in buzzes I did and sure enough it was and it did see and at the beginning let there be light a commandment so commandment is the fundamental idea so 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 where 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 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 hey VAR a in hebrew we don't really know how it was pronounced and jehovah mixes up those consonants with the vowels of Adonai and then it's all mixed up in translation but anyway that if Jehovah is a polite way of saying what can't be said because if you know the word 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 hundreds name which is why he looks so snooty [Laughter] but so also a person in what we now call primitive orders of society are loath to reveal their names because if I know your true name I can utter it and have power and 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 then 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 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 vaak VA see in Sanskrit or speech is the basis of creation but by this they fundamentally mean vibration as sound [Music] 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 earth simple as that life and death life is on that is off after after long have to have on a bath it's quite a relief but they have 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 but which means to know or to be awake bhava which means becoming comes from the root booth which means to grow so on Kurama doing comes from the root to tree 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 all together 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 them what's what's the cell 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 closing 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 and therefore you you can't say when death comes about where to put it in the words of Robert de Stevens and I laid me down with a will because we've got this hang-up 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 what happens to you is your karma and people don't readily understand that they think my Karma uh I have 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 you're 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 at being the foundation for everything that happens in the world but now it today in western twentieth 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 the behavior of animals and rocks they're not phenomena which these things obey the universe is doing its stuff but 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 and what's that let's take a clock a clock ticks regularly but the world does not tick regularly in conveniently enough the Sun does not go does not have the earth go round it in a neat 360 days this is 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've superimposed over this rather odd elliptical path the ideal figure of a circle with its 360 degrees now that is also like putting a ruler along a piece of wood and saying this piece of wood can be cut to twelve inches 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 clunk 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 saying it's so many feet long or so many spans when you stretch out the hand there's the fundamental idea of measurement and the inches of course one joined not choke on it and so the this comparison of man's body and its regular shape you see ten fingers on either side 10 I mean you know five fingers on either side makes ten five toes on the other side makes ten 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 the 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 often they did it like that and you say well it keeps on doing it and you think well this is fascinating it seems to obey me because now I can tell you any time 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 if such and such a time so many days from now it's gonna have a different shape they say my god he was right and they 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 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 just try and remember that mess and figure it out though the clever ones you see just sit look at it through a network a spherical Network then you can number all the squares in the spherical Network the core in accordance with the principles of the circle the 360 degrees 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 a doing a Rorschach test did you see oh look there's one over there that looks like a Dipper or some people call it a plough and this one there that looks like a cross there's one there that by some extreme Wang Ling 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 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 we now then in this sense then man in nature with his extraordinary symmetrical brain and it's amazing complications figures it out and it's man who introduces the law into the world he invents it but in a way in venir a 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 building balls of which the world is composed well you watch the game of billiards and there's a cue 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 billiard balls in the final contact with a cue 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 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 ineluctable result of a series of 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 CA te n ary catenary a catenary effect or a relationship between events is like for example - we use another illustration where you stand a row of bricks up and end up no and you knock over the first one and they katakana katakana and fall down that is a catenary sequence but it becomes increasingly obvious today to the physicist into 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 ret ICU la te reticulate from the latin rate a meaning in net-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 let's say it'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 describing this event to say i let the ball go it obeyed the lord of glory 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 could lay out in a string along 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 manufacturable 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 in 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 are 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 as towards all people that merely means you become inflexible 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 thin or of an event in nature and of course all 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 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 once if they want anything outside your skin there'd be no inside it takes the outside and the inside working together to create this situation done in the simplest way the situation that I call my body wouldn't be operating unless it was there around here to breathe this this the physical phenomenon goes with the situation of there being air now our true about inside the air in a rather complicated way and other people watching say oh something going on over there no 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 rather rapidly and you say well that's or that say hey you say to someone you see this change going on so I'm wiggling over there say what's that see I mean he knows what you mean by that that means something on the end of the finger point it's different it's peculiar see that's at that so from that comes the idea of an event or a thing that that but all these deaths that are happening aren't disconnected they go with each other just as I go with this surrounding air and just as this whole situation in which we are at this moment is it complicated going witness 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 now going witness 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 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 now that was 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 taste isn't it isn't this doesn'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 the question of it controlling you or you controlling it it's all it's all one event as Teilhard de Chardin said the whole universe is the only true atom the only truly indivisible whole so the human being though it finds this difficult to understand because we're always telling each other now you should be different you ought to change now listen this is if you're sick and I've got a system in CI I've got a system I would a real school here a thing that there's very important and you should come and study with that may not be mine it buddy maybe some big sage or pundit that I know and you should come around and study that and 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 [Music] don't know we're not ever get around to that you know I would have my half an hour's yoga practice one hour of zazen so much physical exercises and so much memory practice so much the special diet preparation to be sure that I got proper food and if I think this all through I think oh my god then another school of thought will say no that's the thing you're getting confused just do one thing see but then I say now how am I going to choose which one I'm going to do what he says obviously this one's the best and then before you know why you are you're sewed 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 five minutes every morning I just am NOT I want to my whole notion would be to set you a whole free heat so that you'd only have to attend one seminar 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 no I don't collect the following and just send them all away plenty more people to fill the vacuum [Laughter] 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 dewdrop on a multi-dimensional spider's web early in the morning and if you look at that thing one or carefully you will see that in every dewdrop there the reflections of all the other view drops so the way that dew drop looks goes with the way all the other ones look see but to kill a glimmer in it and so on it's peculiar position and everybody has to have a peculiar position in the cosmos ok so you see the reflections in every one of them are different according to the position they're in and the other dew drops that they reflect that such-and-such angles but nevertheless but the whole network all the dew drops depend on each individual teardrop and each individual view drop mutually depends on all the others and that's the sort of a scheme we're living in and it's a little bit of front sound 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 the society and all I can think I needed a father and mother but looking at it from the other point of view I find it very difficult see how the whole thing depends on me that's because we've been brought up with a put-down theory of the individual new and a little children should be seen enough hello 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 the Fluke in a mindless mechanism 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 cause you see it's you with your ingenious brain that for example turns vibrations of air and a 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 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 nebulae vast spaces there any vast in relation to you they're not really fast and if you compare them with yourself they're vast they could be considered very tiny or equally the space between two sides of the 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 101 diameter of a hair and if you think about it a long time you'll think it's of what we call a vast subject like microscopy it is a vast subject depends on on the attitude reasoning but the the the basic principle 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 as front goes was 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 all of our language it hit it underlies everything and it's important to realize and let me repeat this that the great universe does not control the small individual anymore 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 monic a monarchical image where the bus says damage you do that and the thing can't help it and so it's made to happen but say in Chinese Taoist philosophy the universe is just not seen in that way it's not seen as but 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 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 the 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 well something like knitting in knitting the stitches are all helping together by each other and something breaks at one point the thing starts raveling so the reticulate view though the net view of the universe is one in which the Buddhists say everything mutually interpenetrates everything else so as I was trying to make the central point the point of 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 ballantine via 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 something that rattles around in the universe although a given planet or a given star seems to be something that is moving on its own the 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 you have say too close together and one of them seems to go away now who is moving away from who now the toothed star saying hey we don't like you we're gonna 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 Oh 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 above us you see 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 a relativity system in which motion depends on comparison with something relatively still and there can't be any motion at all unless there is that comparison so 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 riess construct 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 both good and bad as 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 leave everything moves in accordance with what the Chinese call the Dao the way of nature and if you have that basic feeling 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 in 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 them 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 it's responsible for a good deal of the craziness of Western civilization it's 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 just say that because 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 ordinary psycho physical 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 pseudoscience but it is based on a very fundamental principle 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 are 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 the wretched little subject another disobedient one at that of an eternal king and be that you adjust the fortuitous Congress of atoms in a mindless mechanism of incredible vastness 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 positive 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 Buckminster Fuller the the principle notion of buckminster fuller's thought and if you don't know this name Buckminster Fuller is what I would call a philosophical engineer a man who is one of the most creative minds in the modern world he invented the geodesic dome which is his main claim to economic fame but beyond that he has 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 assume with Argos workers 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 and that every complex organism as a whole has an intelligence greater than any one of its parts this again 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 is 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 Teilhard de Chardin idea of the noosphere I hope you all read Teilhard de Chardin 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 Geoff's geese geese the earth then the earth as the 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 you know Buckminster Fuller is really talking about the same thing the noosphere is the network of communication set up by technology and the 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 muddle it's a mixture of Paris with Los Angeles of San Francisco with Shanghai of London a vaguely thrown in and sort of a touch of Japan that'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 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 we have supermarkets which sell Oriental African and Japanese goods and I call them supermarkets for the unusual and more and more people are laying down tatami mats and 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 another far out Indian area of South Dakota it takes longer to reach them 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 command 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 our 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 a 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 our experimental Wars was 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 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 arouse 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 integrate it in such a way that if I need to know a certain thing I can various we 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 the 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 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 my 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 our 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 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 tell have intelligent symptoms of an unintelligent organization we belong in this world we didn't arrive here from someone else somewhere else we're not tourists in the universe we're expressions of it like branches express the tree of 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 organisms 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 bacteriological world which sometimes diseases us but most of the time assists us by its colonies its societies its methods of reproduction all these complex interrelations are the which without which not the scene a quinone of their being blood and veins and bones and intestines and all that kind of thing that's only the bacteriological 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 we are not absolutely abominated by flies because we have lots of spiders and 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 our flowers and bees that although they look very different they are one in the same organism flowers perfume and color bees buzz and fly around but you can't have the flowers of 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 into which you must add things like atmosphere qualities gas content of atmosphere on and on and on until you suddenly realize that what you call your mind and intelligence and 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 penicillin and DDT unless 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 penicillin without destroying all the stomach flora and having to build them up again on acidophilus and stuff so this is why in the taoist chinese view of nature and the relation of nature to human polity they set us fundamental the principal called whoo weh-weh which means our non-interference not quite what we mean by less affair but rather close to it that is to say when you act upon nature and you must you can't help but interfere there's no way of isolating yourself from the world every time you breathe you interfere with something see about the art of Wu Wei is that when you interfere endeavor to do so by going with the grain of things in other words if you want a split would 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 will way sailing is Wu Wei as distinct from rowing which isn't so then the Daoists you see recognized that there is this Universal organism and they thought of the cosmos as a great organism 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 run 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 well it's more familiarly known by its Japanese name GG muguet 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 could think if by some conscious science we were able to construct the universe we would do it a little differently we would have improvements too just to suggest the pom mosquitoes we would perhaps a great a great surgeon might suggest that the human body be organized a little differently we can think of dozens of things but you'll find that 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 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 you'll find out you see that they that it's based on certain absolutely fundamental principles which of course includes the game of hide-and-seek now you see it now you don't which is vibration which is the same thing as energy you've got to begin with that with that if once you start with that it implies the rest because all that we see around us is just a fantastic combination of black and white elements of what the Chinese call the yin in the end the negative and positive forces and it all leads to this but in an incredible so then 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 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 to be a kind of gooey thing with blood and flesh and wriggles and so on so if you looked only through the microscope now 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 looking through a microscope at the rest of it and therefore we don't see the sort of the total design it makes up that's much too far away from our conscious inspection and this is one of the reasons then why it's difficult for us to formulate the idea that there is an intelligence operating here because all we see is the firework display this tremendous display of radioactive mud and gas and one would say well that's sir it's just a is this just a kind of a contraption that happened to arrive there and 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 where we are and that the universe does not give a damn about it yet that the odd thing is that this wretched little kemon 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 near size or degree of comprehension by degree of comprehension man is huge by that scale so then if the principle is simply that if we can see from a perfectly physical point of view what we recall is strictly a 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 the skin because what is inside the 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 read all the books on ecology and botany and zoology astronomy and so on you say yes I see that now that's 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 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 offence 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 American confusion between symbol and reality between menu 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 the same circumstances would be termed sheer lunacy obviously 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 as you feel certain emotions when you salute a flag you don't love your country at all because of the love of the country it means to participate in its life in a loving way in a considerate way and our floor 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 are poisonous insecticides and so on and eventually they get into us that's love of country so 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 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 melt it to 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 let's chew it up because it's supposed to give you energy it'd 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 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 in the range which we use and another kind of kitchens are not to be looked on a sort of lavatories where you throw things together to put in at the upper end so that 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 heads in it and these things mutually interpenetrate each other like this now it's in your head now your heads in it now it's in your head now your heads 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 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 and see with these inert unfeeling 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 fields 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 of the Indians who originally after 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 beyond the wheel naturally comes the horse and carriage 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 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 the television worked with the agency of laser beings 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 but when you get a phenomenon like that it begins raising the question of where somebody actually is yeah when the reproduction becomes technically perfect you see you won't know that a difference between the reproduction and the original that's going to be a new kind of confusion and 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 are the biological method then we have reproduction through photocopy and all that kind of thing let's suppose to 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 there can at least put in there a radio device which will connect with the computer system of some kind which will do the same job so that then after the years go by and your parts have been replaced the serious question arises as to are you the same individual and we would say well now you've been entirely replaced Gossett does you're being replaced all the time there 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 building's themselves are in a state of flux so that they hardly remain a constant four five 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 that you see 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 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 bit lay that bugbear to rest although I must say there is something about plastic in its present stage of evolution that is somewhat repulsive there is a state of consciousness which those who are psychedelic Lee hip or hep call the plastic doll in which everything looks as if it's made of plastic as if our 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 beatific vision as 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 profound er than the beatific 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 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 then merely exploring the things that are lovely at first sight obviously so so one should think about this funny thing of technology 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 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 it 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 you will be able to dial world information who will give you the number of any given individual if he doesn't answer is dead so under such circumstances absolutely no one can get lost and then you see as as this moves on let me develop some of its further possibilities people like twine B and McLuhan have noted that as technology progresses there enters into it equality of what they call ethereal ization and this is connected with Teilhard de Chardin doctrine of peduncles but uncle's aren't exactly relatives and we have to understand first the doctrine of peduncles now here it is here is a globule it might be an amoeba or it might be boil 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 peduncles from the Latin root pays pedis meaning a foot some sort of protrusion of a globular body so notice then that the production of a peduncle 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 peduncles have disappeared according to de Sharda this is why we do not find missing links around in the evolutionary process they vanished in accordance with the law of peduncles now in exactly the same way the human technology sets up certain kinds of peduncles 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 peduncle 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 supposing I want to see my father in England we both have these laser beam TV jobs and 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 you can conceive as some science fiction writers have what seems to us a rather appalling situation where you never never needin need to leave the place where you're sitting all food supplies and everything are automatically delivered you just die or what you want and some kind of mechanical process that transmits it to you then they go further than that but they don't 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 peduncle we have to have to get rid of and that is the black box the electronic gadget because by the time we have become as hithi realized as that we move into a telepathy and 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 you may say at first boo that is the conversion of humanity into an anthill of the worst type and this is in a way naturally but all properly educated Americans and I will add properly educated brittish's and some other people's dread it is said the Englishman's home is his castle and everybody needs a castle place we 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 and think 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 you are very very much really in the sphere of public influence when you sent them when you start to think and if you listen carefully to your thoughts insofar as they are uttered in words and they very often are 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 schoolteacher 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 millions of voices millions of influences from outside working upon you even when you are physically quite alone so weight of the quested period please 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're 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 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 you 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 there 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 now what happens is there that by group agreement with anything a says he is encouraged he is built up he becomes more articulate he finds himself sprouting but be by being disagreed with on every point begins to get baffled and confused and feel very uncomfortable indeed unless he is on to 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 count I [Laughter] shall pay no attention to you so in this way you see we're already colossal II influenced by each other and this is why I think that Harry stack Sullivan x' basic ideas about psychopathology are in some respects more profound than Freud's Freud is always looking into the individual history into the 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 Mead where he called the conceptions that we have of ourselves the interior eyes 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 there now 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 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 so all the way around there there is no propriety in the sense not of them prudish propriety but propriety in the sense of possession now also of course in the sense of prudish propriety nobody has any dirty little secrets because if I have any dirty secrets I know very well that you have to and so let's drop the whole pretense and let go so in this sense there might be a very very close fellowship between all people in which there are no barriers no defenses and we all cooperate together beautifully and love each other now let's look at the common point of view con point of view would say yes but 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 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 which is the soul as a center of action and something alive with consciousness and intelligence 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 the 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 be 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 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 almost unbelievable and then of course we are teaching the peoples of Asia medicine and sanitation industrialization so that every single coolie child can be regarded not as so much waste human material which because it's sick has to be thrown away but at some individual to be loved and cherished and properly treated and 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 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 to rescue the precious individual from the ravages of impersonal disease or impersonal political exploitation then when a kind of American capitalist liberalism achieved to some extent this sort of ideal we look then at political forms which are socialistic communistic and our leery of them because they seem to go back on all that so of course did National Socialism in Germany because the position there is this 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 Department of Commerce officials all to serve us that we call them public servants and when a policeman gets a fish he has to be reminded that we paid his salary and that his job is to serve us and not to be a kind of admirable Crichton sort of Butler who takes the upper hand but of course the very idea of a servant still calls it hasn't 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 individuals 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 feet and that's very low dollars like kissing people's feet to give massage to do all these things for other people that if there are other 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 Undertaker's now call themselves morticians janitors call themselves maintenance services I suppose barbers will soon call themselves tonsorial experts now all sorts of things like that a good are happening right now in order to give the sense of equality all-round and so the guy who gives you gas at the garage will notice your first name on your credit card and will address you by I get very irritated to be called owl I just don't respond to that form of address at all but I suppose that's my British snobbish but here it is you know where everybody slaps everybody's back 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 first-name 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 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 first-name terms but there was what was much worse and sort of effort to prove that there really ought to be that kind of relationship when neither side had any intention of for Mia 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 cause what eventually happens is that people have two first names the the the published one and the nickname known only to an internet circl used only by an internet circl about you see what we see in this then is the creeping socialism the creeping 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 there is a danger of that we have seen people disappear into amorphous masses we have seen Hitler's legions we have seen the things that Chinese can do with what they the military tactic called the human scene when swarms and swarms with 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 in which 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 you at a bar or it may be someone who fancies himself as an expert psychological guru and when you express an opinion or say you know you walk up to such an individual and say good morning how are you thinking this is why do you ask and he immediately as he breaks the social rules whereby you communicate with another person without actually saying anything so the phrases like how are you nice day isn't it ah 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 etcetera etcetera and you know you're in touch so in the same way 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 snail which we don't think about that which we absorb unconsciously unless they smell very strong then complete with bombs and then and then we get the feeling do I want to explore this relationship further we test but then those people who see who invade your privacy instantly it's either the drunk or the child who's quite innocent or the probing psychologist who is playing his special game maybe of one-upmanship of some kind and this is how uncomfortable he can make you now what are what are the tactics of response to be in these various situations when you get the probing psychologist you can shrug your shoulders and say does your mother ever teach you manners or you can simply not defend yourself some people just don't need to defend themselves at all and so they're 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 Krishnamurthy does that if you make a comment about somebody in his presence that is in any way adverse or critical he gives us no response at all so if you suddenly feel like the Buddha said you spat at the sky and the spit falls back into your own fairies and 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 it was one of those tangible silences and suddenly someone at the table turned him and said you know I can't stand people who use silence as a weapon no conversation then started but yeah and it was a very rather a disagreeable conversation so there is you see always the the response to psychological attack an invasion of privacy as Allen Ginsberg does it if anybody presses hit on him too hard he'll strip naked and if anybody challenges him to fight he said all right you challenged me I choose the weapons who's gonna undress first and he has this kind of marvelous feeling that there really isn't anything that he's hiding I don't know maybe but certainly that doesn't impress me as anyone who really hides anything so that you see to enter into a human relationship where there is nothing to hide and you don't depend on any sort of property gimmick for your personal worth and that's the thing we get very easily hooked on it may be your car maybe your clothes it may be your cameras your style of watches your fountain pens your heaven only knows what your home that you possess and that is inseparable from your personality and you can't be you if you'll start naked so the confrontation of people in an atmosphere of physical or spiritual nakedness is one where many individuals seem they have completely lost because they can't play they're accustomed bro because I have a certain advantage that even if I'm to start naked I can still talk but now supposing they say now you shut up don't defend yourself with language that's like taking off her an extra set of clothes but as I say there's a certain kind of individual whom this doesn't faze at all because he knew from the beginning 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 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 to a mental hospital all the John's are completely exposed everything is smooth walls there are no corners there are no secrets everybody sort of herded around and they all look the same but the same uniform have the same haircut and and also in the army and they 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 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 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 you can get round the things that seem threatening in the society where there is no privacy the 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 they don't really they're not really in communication with each other at all except insofar 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 they 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 Sieg Heil you know then they answer back but all as a collective because along the lines of this kind of communication supposing I talk to a whole 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 the group has no leader because it is itself an organism and so the lines of communication run first of all like this very well drawn was they were an odd number in it at the thought now they're much more complicated than that they are also this now I see what's going on let's go this one around who isn't he talking to yet he isn't talking to that one talking to this one to this one you see how I'm not gonna draw this oh and take forever but the thing is that these that this sort of pattern is group communication this sort of pattern is crowd communication so a group an effective group a true 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 represented 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 if it's necessary to go higher than that and include a still number greater number of collectivity of small cells through the representative group representative sub one will represent elect representative sub two 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 because 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 of 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 and 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 was the mass communication to see everybody getting the same thing now oddly enough you see McLuhan 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 itself and have a 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 Amerindians why they don't like the idea of voting they have a powwow 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 unreasonable 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 great national hookups so everybody in the United States is watching whatever it is that comes over ABC or NBC at the major hours and but that is I think a very temporary phenomenon with the development of uhf ultra high frequency television broadcasting and the more we develop micro electric machinery the greater the capacity for the 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 video tape machine now made by Ampex costing six thousand dollars and a sony television camera costing two hundred and fifty dollars you can produce a television show with only one technician the average TV show produced in the studio requires fourteen 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 when you touch a person physically which is a sort of their direct communication you don't necessarily say anything it is just the act of touching that may 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 a living and saying do anything to each other in words but this this the exciting feeling of being involved in this colorful goings-on and so in the same way when we are plugged in if not turned on to a huge in an outing of human communication we feel very like an old Italian peasant lady leaning on the windowsill and gazing at the busy street watching life flow by and in a way you see the something when you see it in terms of the old Italian mama watching the world go by there's something very fundamentally good about that something we associate with colorful villages exciting streets and the romance of an archaic peasant type person but you see that that sort of thing of watching and ever varying panorama of life is not completely excluded by electronic technology especially if people in their net structure are organized here has true Nets this is not a true net this is just a trap one of the reasons is that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks it's an information network and it's called money about which we have the most unbelievable superstitions and psychological blocks which have been gone into at some length by Freud who equates our valuation of money with our attitude to excrement and a very complicated lot of complexes grow up around that money and our psychological attitude to money is a major obstacle to a proper development of technology enabling it to do what it is supposed to do that is to save labor and to produce goods services and so on adequately so I must introduce this with a story which is entirely legendary indeed quite apocryphal the great banks of the world at one time got absolutely sick of the expense and security measures involved in shipping consignments of gold from one bank to another and so they decided that all the chief banks of the world would open offices on a certain island in the South Pacific which was balmy and comfortable and there they would store all the gold in the world and they put it in great subterranean vaults reached by deep elevator shafts and then all they had to do when one bank or one country owned gold to another was to trundle it across the street and this was very efficient and it went on beautifully for five or six years then the presidents of the world banks got together and said let's have a convention out on this island and take our wives and families so about seven years from the date of opening or all those presidents and their wives and families went out for this Pacific island and they inspected the books and everything was beautifully in order then the children said Oh daddy can't we see the gold they said of course you may see the gold and they said to the managers let's take our children down to the vaults and show them to gold and the managers said well it's it's a little bit inconvenient at this time and perhaps the children would not really be very interested after all it's just only old plain gold another manner and the president said no no no come now they'd be thrilled let's let's go down and see there was further humming and hawing and delays and finally it came out that a few years before there had been a catastrophic subterranean earthquake and all the vaults had been swallowed up and all the gold have disappeared but so far as the bookkeeping was concerned everything was in perfect order what this means then is that money is nothing but bookkeeping it is figures it is a way of measuring what you owe the community and what the community owes you it is of course as you all know a substitute for barter if you worked on a farm and the farmer paid you in terms of years of corn onions cabbages and other vegetables and yet you wanted a pot and pan of some kind and you took a few vegetables over to the mouth whoo so who made pots and pans and you swapped some people used calorie shells to stand for money so that you wouldn't have to barter and carry around all these inconvenient loads of goods and then of course gold was used because gold was rare and because gold was supposed to have a constant value you might ponder the question when a banker buys gold with what does he pay for it the answer is a mystery called credit credit is bookkeeping and as the economy of the Western world developed it was found that there was not enough gold around if it were to remain constant in value to exchange goods and services you could of course have changed the picture by putting down the price of goods and services to keep pace with the amount of gold in circulation but nobody will ever put down the price there's something in our psychology whereby prices always tend to go up but at the same time therefore because the the amount of gold in the world did not provide an adequate channel for the circulation of goods and services all great industrial nations went heavily into debt they created a thing called the national debt which year by year gets bigger and bigger and bigger to the horror and consternation of old fashioned Republicans who pay their bills but the reason for the increase of the national debt is extremely obvious it is that in an X with an expanding gross national product there needs to be more and more money that is to say tokens of exchange in order to circulate the amount of goods produced which is ever-increasing now I'm not an economist and I can refer you to the work of those who really are but any fool can see certainly extremely fundamental principles about this whole situation and I'm speaking of the thought today of a man called Robert Theobald who sort of ties in with the general picture of people like McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller in having very far-out thoughts and very adventurous thoughts about what we should do about money but he is in the following of a man like Frederick Soddy who was a Nobel Prize chemist who was one of the first people to think really freshly about economics or people like Silvio Gesell in Austria and major Douglas in England he's in that following and the proposition that he puts forward is very simple that money is a circulation of information and in itself has no value gold of course has some value it has some value for an industry and some value for dentistry and some value for jewelry but as a means of exchanging the goods and services of the world it is as primitive as post-horses for carrying the mail we must recognize them that money is a pure abstraction I was on a television show a little while ago with Ted Sorensen and Raymond moly and they were having a long long discussion which sounded like something that goes on in a smoke-filled back room of party bosses well they were talking about the prospects for the Republican Democratic parties in 1968 and then they got on to the question of automation and the problems of unemployment that it was making and the difficulties of transferring workers from this to that when they were only trained for this finally I said the trouble with you gentlemen is you still think money is real and they looked at me and said aha someone who doesn't think money is real because every now anybody knows money is money and it very important about it just isn't real at all because it has the same relationship to real wealth that is to say to actual goods and services that words have - meaning that words have to the physical world and as words are not the physical world money is not wealth it only is an accounting of available energy economic energy now what happens then when you introduce technology into production you produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods but at the same time you put people out of work you can say oh but it always creates more jobs there will always be more jobs yes but they will be lots of them will be futile jobs there will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these of completely unnecessary things that aren't even beautiful and therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work bureaucratic and otherwise it has to be created in order to keep people working because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for idle hands to do but the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary and if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self frustration so then if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force and they have to operate on a very much diminished income say some sort of dole the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products and therefore he has invested in this expensive ottoman automated machinery to no purpose and therefore obviously the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce that people say that's not fair where's the money gonna come from who's gonna pay for it the answer is the machine the Machine pays for it because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community this is not saying you see that this is not the statist communist idea that you expropriate the manufacturer and say you can't own and run this factory anymore it is owned by the government it is only saying that the government or the people have to be responsible for issuing to themselves sufficient credit to circulate the goods they are producing and have to balance the measuring standard of money with the gross national product that means the taxation is obsolete completely obsolete it ought to go the other way Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income now you see that absolutely horrifies most people say all these wastrels these people who are out of a job because they're really lazy see given the money yeah because otherwise the machines can't work they come through blockage this was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still in a material sense a very rich country with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories everything going but suddenly because of a psychological hang-up because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy about the banking we were all miserable and poor starving in the midst of Plenty just because of a psychological hang-up and that hang-up is that money is real and that people ought to suffer in order to get it but the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering which is an ingenuity you see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th and here comes the problem so what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money into wealth and furthermore to pleasure and furthermore to the nature of work and this is a formidable problem it requires the best brains in public relations in propaganda and all that kind of thing in all the media television radio newspapers everything to try to get across a message to the vast general public about what money is you see the difficulty is this when the public suspects that the money that is being issued the dollar bills being issued by the government are only paper and stand only for paper they start putting up prizes so you get an inflationary situation where the more paper money there is the higher and higher and higher the prices go which is a very stupid psychological maneuver and people have to be persuaded the least effective way of persuading people is passing laws but they have to be persuaded somehow not to put up the prices but to play fair with each other and keep some sort of standard correspondence between how much is produced and how much credit is issued so this goes very deep into us it goes deep deep deep into a problem we have about guilt I wonder often if there's any relationship between guilt and gold that the love of money is the root of evil very true saying because you see I was saying yesterday that the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money with the sole purpose of making money and there are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it there is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanization but if you do a job if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money you are absurd because if money becomes the goal and it does when you work that way you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure yes one can take a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically water your mouth over them but this is this kind of a person who is confused like a Pavlov dog who salivates on the wrong Bell it goes back you see to the ancient guilt that if you don't work you have no right to eat there if there are others in the world who don't have enough to eat you shouldn't enjoy your dinner even though you have no possible means of conveying the food to them and while it is true that we are all one human family and that every individual involves every other individual while it is true therefore we should do something about changing the situation the one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it because when people feel guilty about a situation they most usually instead of doing something practical to change it they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of expiation they go to confession they see an analyst they do all kinds of things which will be ways of actually not doing anything about the problem but feeling alright about it instead and guilt invariably produces that sort of reaction it is a destructive emotion and instead we need to have a different attitude to our mistakes and to our misdeeds Walt Whitman always admired animals because they do not lie awake at night and weep for their sins animals are practical in the real sense as our children who haven't been taught this extraordinary hang-up of guilt because if you've done something wrong or you have made a mistake and somebody makes you ashamed of it I'm guilty you run around licking the sores of your wounded ego because you feel your pride has been hurt the first thing to understand is that it is not a serious failing in a human being to make mistakes everybody has to make mistakes there is no way out of it you can't learn anything unless you make mistakes we find for example in Japan the Japanese have a terrible hang-up about making mistakes they therefore never have the courage to practice their English properly they've had seven years of English in school most of it very very badly taught and it's irrelevant English they learn all about Shakespeare and Dickens and Thackeray and Thomas Hardy and so on and therefore they can't carry on in everyday conversation it's like the way the English study French all about pens of gardeners ants and things like that and so but they are ashamed to try out their English unless drunk so if you want to get into conversation with the Japanese in English you have to go to bars and then they say University students and so long there will loosen up and talk because they're no longer have the inhibition the shame of saying the wrong thing so likewise I know a very great anthropologist who was taught music playing the piano in the same way I was when I was taught music the schoolmarm who taught me used to put an india-rubber and erase though it's called in this country on the top of each hand so that I would have my hands in good posture and every time I play a wrong note she'd hit my fingers with a pencil and this great anthropologist that had a similar sort of musical education and when confronted with the piano in the presence of an absolutely marvelous teacher in San Francisco she said she was amazed he was completely incapable of reading notes he blocked at everything so another great teacher of the piano I knew said simply you must not be afraid of playing wrong notes just forget it play it wrong and then eventually go over it again and you'll eventually get it right but you must not block always keep the same rhythm going even if you have to slow it down but keep the proportionate rhythm of one note to another and if it's the wrong now play the wrong note as long as you play something in the right rhythm so you know this is a way of taking away people's blockage people's guilt and shame about making mistakes so you absolutely freedom means basically the freedom to make mistakes the freedom to be a damn fool and then not to recriminate with yourself when you do finally realize that it was a mistake but simply don't do it again or at least do it less off so you know this is the puzzle when you go to confession in the Catholic Church which is an enormous method of inculcating a sense of guilt very subtle one says of course that Catholics are on the whole less guilty than Protestants more relaxed and there's some truth in that but only some Protestants of course have chronic guilt and you can work this out by a very simple little formula that when the Protestants in England abandoned what is called auricular confession to a priest they inserted in their prayer book a general confession in which the congregation all made its confession together now what does a Catholic say when he makes his confession the formula is I confess to God Almighty the Blessed Mary ever-virgin Blessed John the Baptist the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints that I've sinned exceedingly in thought word and deed by my fault by my own fault by my own most grievous fault well for I beg blessed Mary etc a new father to pray for me to the Lord our God and the priest says Almighty God have mercy upon you forgive you your sins and bring you to everlasting life by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ committed unto me absolve me from all thy sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit very now instead of that yeah what they had to introduce into the Anglican formulary was instead of this very simple confession of sins and before the whole company of heaven an absolute grovel wherein they say that they have sinned so horribly and that the remembrance of these sins is Grievous unto us the burden of them is intolerable have mercy upon us have mercy upon us most merciful father and all this cringing and crying breast-beating and wallowing in guilt and then the priest instead of saying a simple formula of absolution quotes all kind of scriptural texts to prove from the Bible that those who do truly eternity repent will be forgiven by God because they're very uncertain about it therefore have to quote all the authorities and this absolutely groveling form of confession replaces the old one because they were a little bit scared about abandoning direct confession of sins to the priest but now that the the the going back to the Catholic problem about guilt you say when you have confessed after saying this formula about to all the saints you confess the specific sins you've committed and you know I stole something committed adultery three times so on whatever it was and then you say at the end for these and all my sins which I cannot now remember I firmly purpose amendment and humbly ask for pardon of God now I firmly purpose amendment that is where the fly in the ointment consists because the doctrine is that you have made a true confession if at the same time you have a sear intention of acting differently in the future now no sensitive Catholic can say that without having grave doubts as to whether actually he isn't going to do some of these things again so if you're a workaday Catholic like a Mexican peasant or something like that you know that the confession is just a safety valve you're going to go on living just as lackadaisically as ever and but you go to church every so often and you get rid of the of the the guilt and the evil it's like going to the bathroom but when you get the thought we get thoughtful about these things and you wonder whether you do really mean what you say whether your motive is pure and your intention is right you get into a rightful hanger so you see how this idea of the the somehow there is a book kept somewhere God's black book in which he writes down every mistake you made and then at the day of judgment there's going to be in accounting see and they're going to add up on one side and add up your good deeds on the other side and weigh them instant Michael's ballot balance the Archangel Michael carries in one hand a balance and in the other hand the sword is the older sort of prototype of the figure of justice and it's the good deeds against the evil deeds as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead you see the heart of the deceased weighed against the feather of truth that's a little more profound than the good deeds against the bad deeds you know your your heart has to be light as a feather you mustn't be heavy hearted so then as a result of this there arose in the latter part of the Middle Ages an enormously complicated system of celestial bookkeeping it was argued you see that the Saints and especially the Blessed Virgin Mary had lived lives of such sinless character even though to be a good saint you have to say you're a miserable sinner often wondered about that but therefore they have many merits that are surplice merits that they don't need in order to get into heaven and therefore by a very clever dispensation the surplus merits are put at the disposal of the Holy Father and they are available in the form of what are called indulgences and if therefore you make certain pilgrimages or save certain prayers or make certain contributions above all you may receive a plenary indulgence which means you get off the whole of the time due to you in purgatory or a partial indulgences which say of 300 days which means 300 days off your period in purgatory whatever days in purgatory may be and so an enormous ly complicated banking system was set up whereby people could settle their heavenly accounts by using credit issued by the Saints who were of course producing surplus goods like machines so now this is why I made in the earlier part of this seminar such a big point about human behavior being able to be seen at its deepest level at which level and only at which level it is completely harmonious with the order of the universe this is what one is enabled to see by cosmic consciousness by seeing that the good things and the evil things that human beings do are just like the behavior of other creatures animals insects worms fish and flowers and that the good side has to have the bad side to balance it so that you know that it's good in the words of the Taoist sage Duong sir those who speak of having good government without its opposite misrule and those who speak of good behavior without the presence of its opposite bad behavior do not understand the great principles of the universe it is as if they could have the Yang without the Y in the positive without the negative and such people must be either knaves or fools now that's a saying which really sets us back because we Westerners are dedicated to the abolition of evil and but the Jews are much more sensible about this than the Christians because the Jews don't think that evil is something extraneous to God they believe that God created evil where it is said in the book of the prophet Isaiah I am the Lord and there is none else i form the light and create darkness I make peace and create evil either Lord do all these things and they believe that God implanted in the human heart at the beginning of creation when he very first made Adam something called the yet Sahara or the wayward spirit because he knew that if that wasn't there human life would be insipid and without the least significance there has to be this element and so the Jews say yes God is responsible for evil but he put it in us so that we could have something to fight against and so in this way you can see at one level that the evil side of things is part of the total harmony it must be there but that the function of its being there is to give you something to chew on to work out you will never get rid of it but the joy of life is being in the process of getting rid of it so in other words you might say that the function of the devil is to be always losing the battle but never finally lost and the function of the good side is to be always winning the battle but never to be the victor and by this means the part is kept boiling interest is kept up and everything is kept moving so that of course if we solve certain economic problems for example and we have a world where people are not committed to drudgery we shall discover social evil in some new form it's exactly the same is when you are worried sick about money and are you going to make the payments on the house and the car and all that the insurance you think if only I could have a lot more money I'd be so happy and then somehow you get it and for a few days you're ecstatic and walking on air then you suddenly realize that you might get sick or that someone the government or burglars or something might take your money away from you and you start worrying about that with just the same intensity as you had formerly worried about not having enough money so we always find if you are a worried bird you will always find something to worry about it no matter what happens in your external circumstances and so we may be assured that when the human race goes to full economic prosperity and there is nothing to be worried about in the way of housing and clothing and food that we shall instead worry quite fervently about something else because you see we are always really in the same place this is the basic understanding of relativity it always reminds me of so Cedric Hardwicke when asked about his life he died just a little while ago and he lived there for across the centuries he said if I had really had my wish as to when I would have liked to live I would have liked to have been a grown adult in the high Victorian age with penicillin [Laughter] now those of us therefore who remember from childhood the abominable dentistry of the British are very thankful indeed for American dentistry I remember as a boy that dentistry was just torture and the American dentists have changed all that I am therefore in a position of relativity to remember this change and still feel its effect and I'm very grateful for it but my children who are accustomed to fine American dentistry from the beginning are less appreciative of the situation and therefore have other worries so you see when I would say one of the great philosophical questions is are we going to make it that all beings at every scale whatsoever from the angels and gods at the very highest development of evolution down to the most obscure little creepy crawlies all feel about life the same way how are we going to make it an Angels problem is a very different kind of problem from the problem of a common worm about as meister eckhart said if a stone were as aware as an angel a stone could be as happy as an angel or perhaps as miserable it is said in the holy texts of christianity that there are occasions upon which the Angels weep what sort of thing would make an angel weep here you see the problem of life at every level of evolution in the whole thing it's always the same blue sash our Bissell mm shows more it changes the more it's the same thing because everybody's really in the same situation the great dare are we going to make it because this is the situation of the cosmos the cosmos when the Hindus say God is playing hide and seek with himself and every now and then the Brahman the supreme self deliberately falls into the illusion of Maya and pretends that he's all of us well that's God also saying how far out can I get next time around yeah yeah am I going to make it and therefore thinks up some fantastic way of getting lost we are one of these ways you see and creates the horrors and the shudders and most appalling situations in each one of which says am I going to make it and the answer is no you're not gonna make you're gonna get away with it for a while yeah you'll get away with it for a while but in the end no you're not gonna make it oh why not but for obvious reasons look at a star a star is a great burst of fire see well the question is how far to go the fire goes out and out and out and out and out and then suddenly it begins to fade the energy falls away and there's darkness unless something is there to reflect the more tenuous form of the fire which is light that is being thrown out to immense distances but eventually light gives up and that's why some of the farthest galaxies are beginning to disappear because it's too far for the light it gives up eventually because if there isn't a point you see where the light gives up all the radiance gives up it fills everything and therefore has no way of realizing itself because you can only realize light by the contrast of darkness and that's why then you as a ray which shoots out of the Godhead will say are we going to make it in other words how long a ray there to be it'd be a long long ray or a little short one and some people think well if I'm only a short ray it's not really a great success I want to be a long ray I want to live till I'm 90 or maybe a hundred get longer and longer then you must listen to the Zen poem which says in the spring in the scenery of spring there is nothing superior nothing inferior flowering branches grow naturally some short some long and when one of the great Zen masters was asked about the meaning of Buddhism he said to the Enquirer wait till there's no one around and I'll tell you when there was no one around he took this Enquirer out into the garden and pointed at the bamboos and The Enquirer said I don't understand and he said what a long bamboo that one is what a short one that so what a long way that one is what a short one that is see if you look at some sort of stellar form object it adds great interest to it if it's rays are of unequal length if they're all equal it looks sort of flat and mechanical by having all sorts of different lengths as you find them in some of those gorgeous radiolaria creatures that are minut and amount fools of the ocean you see all these there's a certain balance of length there's a certain average which gives it a globular form but many different lengths in the stems so you see are we gonna make it how far out can you get this is always the question but then you're not gonna make it at that point the Ray finishes and we call that death but you are actually not the Ray so much as the source of the Ray that's where you are ready and the sauce doesn't vanish you see the sauce is there always but is shooting out shooting out shooting out and then vanish so then if you remember that for that at every stage of the universe whether you are up there with the gods or whether you are down there with the what we could call human refuse you have you are basically in the same situation because everybody is basically in the same situation for the reason that everybody is basically the divine being working out the panorama of its life in millions of different ways and these differences of ways require spectra of many kinds there's the spectrum of color there's the spectrum of tones but there is also the spectrum of orders of being so that from the most minut animalcules right up through all kinds of animals through human beings of every grade to the gods you'll have a great spectrum and just as at one end of the spectrum you have purple and that the other you have red but now look what is purple purple is blue mixed with red spectrum goes right the way around and therefore if we say that do begin any end you want to but if we say that the purple end like the deeps of the waters of the very primitive forms of life and the red the most radiant they are actually if you see the spectrum as a circle they join so that when you get up the only place to go is down unless somehow you can go back into the white light at the center which is neither up nor down neither good nor bad just what there is substance so I think that one of the things that should be drawn is a symbol of a circular spectrum instead of one that's stretched out on a tape and that would tell something to people that no amount of words can convey it would speak to the unconscious in us to the depth of understanding that are much more subtle than our intellectual thinking and everybody could see this everywhere and it would convey the message about ring-around-the-rosy as is said in the Chinese texts of drunk sir what is the center of a circle the center of a circle the true center is any point on the circumference because you can start the circle anywhere and finish it anything so there's a Cohen in Zen which says Indra built a seamless tower you know when a sleeve has a seam on it this is a zip where where the cloth begins and have to take it round and sew it so it has a seam now imagine here's a tower but it has no seam Indra built the seamless tower where did he begin so in in the in nature then one has this seamless order where every point on it is central and therefore feels in the same situation envying those above and pitying those below and there is always a below maybe the most primitive animalcules imaginable have pity on the angels so let's take an intermission [Applause] you you

Channel: True Meaning

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Length: 212min 30sec (12750 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2017