The Ultimate Lecture 3 5 Hours Alan Watts ~

in ancient times all kings had at their courts they caught fool and sometimes it probably was true that the fool was a crazy person who had a peculiar capacity for making inappropriate remarks and the something about inappropriate remarks that can be very funny I remember as a child we used to play a game in which we had first of all a booklet with a story in it but every now and then a word was left blank and then you were given a pile of cards that were shuffled round the players and in turn as the story was read by one person the players turned up whatever card they had and said the word and the most extraordinary things happened and in this way of course the person who could make up inappropriate remarks at the right moment and sometimes bring the house down but actually as time went on the function of the food became more sophisticated than that and he became a person whose function was not simply to make jokes and to be a funny man but to remind the monarch of his humanity so that he would never never get too stuffy you remember perhaps the Lions in Richard ii where the king says within the crown within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of the king keeps death his watch and there are the antics it's the antic being the court fool and they're the antics it's scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp allowing him a little time to nakaya's be feared and killed with looks and then at the last comes death and with a little tin bores through his castle wall and farewell king see that was in a way the function of the fool he was reminding you of your fine a to Dove your mortality and death at the end in somewhat the same way as monks used to keep on the desk in their cells a grinning skull and all this his course nowadays thought very morbid because today we repress death very very strongly and the whole function and role of the mortician in our culture is to pretend in some way that death doesn't happen he's a hush Appa he sweeps you under the carpet at considerable expense now then I try to think whether there is in any institution in modern society that really corresponds to the court fool and there isn't there is of course the political cartoonist there is the satirist there is the commentator but he doesn't sit in the president's office and the president can ignore him altogether if he so chooses we don't like nowadays anyone to suggest that our social institutions are not altogether serious we can't stand it because we're much too insecure and this is a very dangerous state of affairs and so it really is high time that in many ways the institution of the fool was reintroduced I want to point out a parallel to this in some ways the fool or the Joker and the monk have a parallel function the monk is a person who abandons society he is an outlaw only he's an outlaw on the upper side instead of on the lower side as the ordinary criminal is as it were below caste the outlaw in the sense of the monk is above caste and in the Buddhist religion at its inception the followers of the Buddha wore those dark yellow robes because those were the garments of criminals it's just as if today we were to take the kind of blue jeans they wear over in San Quentin and go around in those or the old-fashioned striped things that were put on jailbirds and so they took on the garments and external appearance of the lower outcasts but they were in fact respected as upper outcasts but in modern society it is very very difficult to be in that position for example in such a true Republic as France every Mountain priest is subject to military service that is not true in the United States nor is it true in England they are not quite so Republican as the French but in this kind of modern society more and more you must the long as Thoreau said wherever you may go men will seek you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company cello's and the the monks that exist today Catholic monks and Anglican monks are really a little bit of a freak in our society they don't they represent in other words the opinions and the discipline of a particular sect they are not really they have no actual official and social recognition because you see our society cannot stand non participation it cannot stand really fundamental criticism and so it's in a very very weak state in I remember as the boy in London going off into Hyde Park Corner and listening to people irate against anything they wanted to irate against they could criticize and vilify even the most sacred institutions and the police would stand by and pay no attention sort of leaned against the lamppost and let it all go on and that's because the people as a whole in those days had a tremendous sense of security they knew they were right and therefore there's no point stopping anybody from criticizing but when you're not sure you're right you have to stifle criticism completely and what the worst kind of criticism is the person who pokes fun non-participation other of the monk isn't so bad but the person who somehow suggests that society occasionally is something that needs to be giggled out it not not you see this is the whole position the Joker doesn't out rightly deride things he's not a slapstick comedian he gives people the giggles about things that they saw were terribly sacred and that is extremely demoralizing so in in our day and age you see you must belong and we need to relax on this and allow for non participation under certain conditions and these are the ancient conditions but the person who does not participate in society cannot call upon society for certain things he cannot call upon the protection of the police or of the army he cannot call upon education for his children he's not supposed to have any children he may I suppose in this day and age make what arrangements he chooses about his love life but he mustn't be the head of a family and he mustn't feel entitled to the protection and support of the community if the community respects him and wants to support him just out of its own free will and that's their affair so that's the way of the monk but the fool is in a different class from the monk and to understand his role fully we have to go into a number of preliminary things the most important of which is to understand the nature of a social institution because you see the standpoint of the fool is that all social institutions are games he sees the whole world as game playing and that's why when people take their games seriously and put on Stern and pious expressions the fool gets the giggles because he knows it's all a game he's now when I say that he sees everything as a game this does not mean mere game Hamlet although it's a play is not mere entertainment or when you go to listen to a great Orchestra it is playing music indeed but you are not seeing something purely frivolous the idea of game basically is this that the nature of the world is musical that is to say it is doing all these forms of trees and stars and people and all their complexities just to do them it has no purpose beyond doing it and in exactly the same way in music music has no destination it isn't aimed at the future it does travel in time that is true but it doesn't aim at a goal in time the point of music is every phrase as it unfolds itself and as you perceive the relationship of those phrases to earlier and later frit phrases but music itself is dance it's dancing with sound and likewise in the art of dancing you are not travelling you are not aiming at a particular place you are dancing to dance and so what you might call the musical or game theory of the world is that everything that is happening is its own point it's true that things do develop for example this seed develops into the tree and you might say from one point of view then that the point of the seed is the tree that's the purpose of the seed but that doesn't really hold up because then the tree goes and has seeds again and so you might say then that the purpose of the tree is the seed which is which the whole thing is one process you see they really aren't part the seed isn't one event and the tree another it's all one long continuous event going on and on just for the sake of going on and on now of course you can read purpose in it in another way that is to say that a tree is only possible in a certain kind of environment there have to be for there to be trees there has to be a certain kind of temperature a certain kind of atmosphere and there have to be insects and there have to be bacteria in its soil and there have to be weeds there have to be birds all kinds of things are necessary if trees are to live so you could say this is symbiosis that the tree lives to look after the birds and provide them with perches that the birds live to eat the worms which might destroy the roots of the tree and so everybody lives to support everybody else well the word - or in order to is not quite correct it's a little clumsy what we should see rather than that is that the whole relationship of trees and birds and worms and bees and so on is a network and every aspect of the network you might say every part of it depends for its existence on every other part that means you see that the network as a whole is a single organism just as in your own physical body and you call yourselves a single organism there are billions of creatures of very different kinds and they're all running around inside your bloodstream and doing their stuff they're having battles love affairs all kinds of things and this huge variety of stuff going on constitutes your life as an individual and so in turn you are some kind of a little wiggle in some other sort of stream which constitutes a larger organism yet and but really and truly this tremendous network doesn't have any separate parts it's not like a machine a machine is a lot of separate parts that are put together whereas this is different the the parts of this machine of this network don't come into it from outside I mean when you drive your car up to the shop and you want a new carburetor or something they pull the old one out they take another one off the shelf and jam it in so it comes off the shelf into the car but in this network of life that we live in things don't come in from outside everything that comes into it comes from inside which is the giveaway that the whole thing is really one process and it's all again because in the sense that it has no other object than doing what it's doing that's the fun of it but it plays you see parts it varies itself and in playing playing always involves a certain element of make-believe that is to say illusion and the word illusion is from the Latin Lu dari to play it involves the illusion of the parts being separate and so then there is there are these variety of games the tree game the beetle game the butterfly game the bird game the cat game the people games the human game and if you will look on all these things as differentiated in the same way as chess and backgammon and football and hockey and polo or as Rumba waltz twist minuet or again as concerto partita fueled sonata you will begin to see that it's a perfectly reasonable attitude to look at the world as a game system now you see we looking at the fundamental games of what we call physical and biological entities or events but over and above those we have the social institutions the subdivisions of the human game now then the social institution is of many kinds it's not simply things like marriage and the family the various forms of government the institutions of the government like the public health department it's not just things like hospitals and banks and Business Corporations it's not even money only that's a social institution so are all our weights and measures systems of timing our clocks and you see what makes these things social institutions is that they are in another sense conventions things that we agree upon from the Latin convent nari to come together we come together in agreement about where the Equator is and where longitude zero is and by agreeing about these things we can order our lives order our communal intercourse I have sometimes mentioned the Buddhist and well they're mainly Buddhist divinities who you see guarding temple gates and they're called the the heavenly kings and they're always very fierce and they carry weapons and they are the guardians of the ten directions in Buddhism Buddhist philosophy there are ten directions in eight points of the compass and up and down and it's terribly important to keep the ten directions clear because if I am NOT clear about it I could never meet you at the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street so I wouldn't meet you at all I could never have a date without knowing the ten directions and so these Dharma Kings are the cosmic traffic cops and they're keeping everything straight so that everybody can know where they are so these are the guardians of the social institutions the agreements we have to make about money and language and law and also about certain values some of these values very startlingly but they are still social institutions did you realize pain as a social institution in some cultures like ours it's very unpleasant to go to the dentist but there are cultures which in which dentistry is no problem at all but on the other hand they have extreme pain when their fingernails are cut or their hair is cut we are very largely talked into pain in extreme childhood and it varies enormously as to what may be considered painful and I think it's not only human beings who do this but animals do experimentation with hypnosis shows that pain is an extremely relative thing maybe you have to have something but where you have it is very very variable also we know too that social institutions govern what we notice I'm an American male pays relatively little attention to the back of a girl's neck and it's perfectly okay for her to grow her hair down long and cover it but to a Japanese the jet back of a girl's neck is the most exciting sexual feature and so when you see a well-dressed Japanese girl her kimono hangs a little bit down the back like this exposing her neck they pay no attention though to breasts which seem to so fascinate the American male it's just it just doesn't seem to appear and the way that a traditional Japanese woman clothed herself is exposing the neck but looking very flat in front and not at all showing the hips she's willowy she doesn't look very willowy underneath as the rule but she does when dressed in a kimono now so you see it isn't just that nature has built in to the human organism certain attractive features about other people it's the social institution of what is to be attractive and of course this comes out very very strongly in the vagaries of fashion and how to do one pair paint one's face etc etc but now social institutions go a great deal deeper than anything we've mentioned and the most important kind of social institution is that which has to do with role playing who you are now when we ask the question who are you people think of this question in two different ways one person when asked who are you will answer I'm a doctor another person will fall silent because he realizes how profound the question is he realizes that he's been asked what his ego is but a lot of people don't realize that when they are asked who are you I notice just a little bit of difficulty in my investigations of discussing identity with people that they fix on their roll and use that to describe their identity their name their family they're placed in society what they do what their hobbies are and so on all these are roles and then also there is the role of character playing all people are more or less taught to act we are all hams from the beginning and we were schooled in acting in our childhood although it wasn't called that it was called education it was called upbringing but a great deal of it is schooling and acting and you very soon learn as a child from your peers and from your parents what acts are appropriate and what are not one it is the concern of all parents that their child learns a role in life and has an identity by which the child can be recognized it would be extraordinarily disconcerting wouldn't it if the child had one personality one day and another the next but children can do that don't you remember as a child that you were many different personalities depending on your environment that you were one person at home with your parents you're quite a different person out alone with other children then when you went to visit your uncle and aunt you were somebody else altogether and so on and finally the the the total trend of education is to shake all this down and make you more or less constant in every sort of social environment that you enter so that everybody knows who you are otherwise it's disconcerting you see so we are made to believe that we have a real self that is to say some body who really are and whom we have to find to find yourself to settle down to grow up you see means to fit into a role and there are a lot of people you see who are troubled in our society and who seemed to be misfits and are terribly unhappy because they just can't find the role that they're supposed to fit they don't know who they are there is an inner pandemonium and conflict but it's obvious isn't it that the role you play is a social institution because you can't be an object to your own consciousness at least not in the ordinary way you are a subject from your own point of view and you can only become an object to the extent that you adopt the attitudes that other people take towards you other people from the beginning of life are mirrors and by the way they respond to you you begin to learn what they think of you and therefore who you are we all tell each other who we are and so the the role we play the identity that we have in that sense is a social institution but going further there is the ego itself there is the feeling that inside us there is an eye center which receives the experience and directs action and this is the inmost myself and we have all of course been taught in this day and age that if this is not our soul it is a function of our body it is a chemical chemical sort of efflorescence of the brain the feeling of eye [Applause] now as I have told many of you before in various ways this sensation of being a separate I cut off from all other eyes is an illusion it's a pure hallucination because that is not the way we are functioning physically we are functioning physically not as separate entities but as beings that live in such a close relationship with everything else that there really is no way of dividing us from it and so you see the mystic in all times and places discovers the illusory nature of this ego and realizes with a glorious shock that the true I myself the thing that one really is fundamentally is the entire game the works the some people call it God or Brahman or the Tao or whatever you want the name doesn't make the slightest difference anyway fundamentally what you are is the which then which there is no Witcher and so relax don't worry because viewdoze is the this doesn't ordinarily come into consciousness in just the same way that the structure of your brain doesn't ordinarily come into consciousness it's very much there but you don't see it directly and you have no memory of it so in the same way you have no memory of being the Whitson in which there is no witcher but there's no need to have a memory of that because the thing doesn't need a memory memories are only necessary for creatures that have to defend themselves and to to of creature have problems they need memories but the perfectly glorious Li happy person wouldn't remember anything because every experience would be completely satisfactory all memory is really a form of regurgitation of undigested experience but you see also don't forget as we all know memory can be fun and so can burping and but but memory isn't necessary for the whole thing except in certain brief forms of memory where the continuance of anything at all is the of any particular form as a sort of memory in the sense that is a repeated gyration of certain physical vibrations but it's possible you see to wake up and realize that your ego is a game and that what we call the necessity for survival is also a game but society is playing a very very weird game the first rule of which is this game is not a game this game is serious and so the great great social institutions that we inherit from the past like the church our places to be serious I don't think that ever was a gesture in church of course the church formed itself around a particular gesture and who couldn't be stirred and so had to be crucified this is too much but the whole attitude you see of the church is that you are standing in the presence of the most serious God the Father who really is in earnest and no fooling you see and everybody has to keep a straight face and so also in the court of law in our excessively serious society I was giving evidence not so long ago and the two defendants was smiling at each other and the judge suddenly rapped his gavel and said you young men ought to realize that you're on trial for a very serious crime and it's no joking matter and I want to see probably behavior and conduct in this court and the attorney stood up and said Your Honor this is the first time they've ever been on trial and they're not used to these things they said well it's about time they learned [Music] so you see the the thing is with the game there's always the fear the underlying fear that the game may be given away now that fear isn't altogether unreasonable because part of the fascination of games is that is to get involved and in a way to forget that they're games the actor on the stage does his damnedest to persuade you that he is moving in the real world and children love to get completely absorbed in their games and get the actual thrill of adventure in playing war and so on and you see one reason why people don't really want to know the future why a really expert fortune teller gives most people a little bit of trepidation is that if you know what the future is going to be it is less worthwhile going ahead towards it if you know the outcome why bother this is one of the ways we are trying to stop war that the RAND Corporation is trying to make computer systems that at any immediate future date can predict the outcome of a war so that it won't be necessary to find it if we did fight this would happen so the person who gets the the winner claims the diplomatic advantage and we go on so this is the reason you see why we don't want to know that the game is only again now if we can make believe that the game is real whatever that means we are not really very clear about that but somehow we know what it means in our bones if we don't know very well in our heads what is for real and we're always testing things out what is for real but when the whole world game becomes too real and people become too earnest it's highly necessary to play a new game which is the game of game against non games as how far can you get away with giving the show away about the game nobody really wants to go the whole hog until you're ready for final nirvana you know then you then you give the show away so far as you're concerned and that's it but in the meantime the fascination of seeing how to put together knowing it's a game and still playing it and doing this is what is mahayana buddhism is called being a bodhisattva a bodhisattva is a person who doesn't give his show away completely he doesn't simply release his consciousness from playing the human game he is released and yet still in it he knows the human game is the game but he goes on playing it with considerable gusto and his gusto derives in a great deal from the fact of knowing it's the game you see you can do that and it's one of the peculiar properties of self-consciousness to be able to know it's the game and yet enjoyed doing it it's like being happy and knowing you're happy now a lot of people are afraid of that they feel that at the moment they say well I'm happy that it will somehow stop that it'll be like being too conscious of digesting your food there is a point there where enjoying dinner it very slowly merges into disgust Dada it needn't be like that that the real gourmet never gets into that bind and so in the same way the doing something being happy and knowing that you're happy has about it a certain quality of what I would call resonance for example if I talk in a room which is completely soundproof it's terrible I can't stand it there's no resonance no little tiny echo I feel I'm talking into the proverbial wet blanket but if there's a little resonance if there's a feedback you see that makes the thing go vibrate a bit more than it ordinarily would so one gets feedback from an audience and it's much easier to talk to an audience than it is to a microphone because this feedback and so consciousness is feedback so for that reason your voice sounds better when you're singing in the bathtub than it does when you're singing out in an open room because you get resonance and so we put resonators that let us say a guitar or a violin has a sounding box in it that's the resonator to make it echo a bit and so great churches at one time was or still are built by acoustic experts so concert halls to give them the proper resonance but when resonance gets too much you know it starts chattering its guests system of echoes set up and some of the old cathedrals which weren't built with acoustical knowledge you can hear the echoes of a choir going on forever and ever and ever it sounds very marvelous from a certain point of view but it's not from a musical point of view it's a kind of a it's more sentimental and we used even to be taught to sing in church with an echo technique in the voice so that even if you want in a great Cathedral with its echoes you slightly sound as if you were if not in that trickery for you that's real showbiz [Laughter] so to play the game and to know it's a game can be quite fascinating and not really giving the show away but giving it away enough somehow and that you see is the the Joker's function so what he is doing then is he is in a point of view where he sees all that is going on as a game he doesn't take anything seriously but don't forget that that doesn't mean that he is simply shallow and frivolous because for example if somebody were to say to me I love you and I turned to them and said are you serious she might say no I'm sincere because love isn't necessarily serious we you see we use the word serious very frequently where we should be using the word sincere and the lack of proper delineation between these two words causes a great deal of confusion just like the confusion about the word must you must do this where whether it's a commandment or whether it's a condition a state of affairs that simply is so and so in the same way we need a tariff occasion of must and we need a clarification of serious and it can be divided down into serious on the one hand or sincere on the other what is sincerity sincerity is being integrated being all of the piece now you see we often think that the person who doesn't take life seriously isn't all of a piece that is to say his heart's not really in it he is out here living history and going along and talking to people but the feeling is of an insincere person there's something in the back of his mind it isn't participating that's what worries people about actors are they acting in real life are they still playing the part is this person I'm introduced to as Charlie Chaplin the same manners or different from the funny little man with the Derby hat and so actors occasionally bother and bug people and people may be apt to say well they're always on the stage they are never really genuine and we have a feeling you know when we know when somebody is being genuine see but but market when you know somebody is being genuine they are not necessarily being serious they're not necessarily being grave or solemn what I want to give the idea of is sincere laughter and also sincere play there is a perfectly sincere laughter and it may be it is ideally I mean to the sincere laughter expresses a spirit of irrepressible gaiety and it is not in other words a defense mechanism laughter is often a defense mechanism we love what we call a nervous laugh or laughing someone to scorn can very often be a forced laugh that isn't really there isn't really funny at all but the real art is of course the resolution of anxiety the anxious anxiety is serious and anxiety is a state of palpitation of the trembles anxiety comes upon us when we cannot decide which way to go or which way things are going to go and so we tremble between alternatives now and because of course we tremble between alternatives because we are under the illusion that it matters very much which of these two things happens now once one has seen the nature of the game you realize that it matters superficially which of these two things happens but it doesn't fundamentally matter because all negative things pair with positives there is no positive without negative and there is no negative without positive I heard a very amusing story which kind of goes with these rugs the question is is a zebra a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes the answer is it is an invisible horse which has been striped yellow and black so that people won't bump into it now in a similar way reality is an invisible state of affairs beyond all description and thought but it has been striped black and white so as to be seen and this is life and death up and down sound and silence the whole vibratory character of being and the the game the fundamental game that the universe is playing is to forget that this is so you see what you might say feel in theological language the invisibility of God is his self forgetfulness and the visibility of the world is the game being played now the nature of the game I think I've told some of you this before but I see some I haven't the nature of the game is let us pretend that the positive and the negative are not really identical you see they're explicitly different but implicitly the same because they always go around together and that reveals a hidden implicit conspiracy between black and white and the truth is they you can't have one without the other but if we can pretend that they don't go together that they are actually enemies then we can have all sorts of games the first game of which is oh dear black might win the next game is but white must win and from that position you can develop all the games you want and it's interesting isn't it how our so many of our table games like chess and dominoes and [Music] checkers and so on used the black and white pieces and you can find in the conventions of chess one could discuss all this the problem in terms of chess when I bring up the Joker of course we are in a way discussing it in term of the game of cards because the Joker is the card beyond roll the car that's wild that can be any card in the pack in other words it's delivered from being a particular someone and can be in anyone and it tops up here and it pops up there and the up here you never know where is the Joker who is the Joker is the thing that we have to understand really is that all the roads are the Joker claim and the Joker is looking at you out of all pairs of eyes there is only he's pretending very often that he's not the Joker at all oh no assist us me I'm not the Joker where is the Joker well let's have an intermission now to revise a little bit about this morning's talk so that we're all up to date I have been discussing the role of a certain person called the Joker the Joker being the one who has insight into the fact that all our social institutions are games the social game is played with an initial rule the first rule being this game is serious or this game is not a game and therefore there is a tendency within society to resist very strongly any notion that what it is doing is not altogether serious and at a still deeper level beneath the level of social institutions there is also the recognition on the part of the Joker that the basic forms of nature are also games the human game the rabbit game the mouse game the biga in the tree game the stone game because all these are forms of a musical nature that is to say they are forms played for themselves they are played in the most intimate interconnection and interrelationship with each other but they don't have any purpose beyond what is happening in the same way as music and dancing but when people take games seriously and part of the fun of game you must remember is to take it seriously they acquire an attitude which strikes the Joker as being half funny and sometimes a little pitiful a good Joker is inclined really not to laugh at people because if a person is terribly seriously involved in the sense of the kind of person we call colloquially ask where the Joker feel sorry for them because they live a deprived life but the point is that he is the one who is a wild man which is to say he has no fixed role he can play as the Joker can in the deck of cards in ero and in a way in that sense all of us our roles of the Joker because the real Joker of whom any human Joker is a manifestation the real Joker is Brahman is the ultimate player of the game the divine ground of the universe so then if you look upon the world as play as what we Hindus call the Vishnu Leela Vishnu being the one of the names of God and Leela meaning sport or play from which we get our word lilt then Vishnu or Brahman is the big Joker and anyone who realizes this is the little Joker and the art of the Joker is very paradoxical because it is to give the show away that it is a game and yet keep the show going on there is something about a Joker of and now you see it now you don't character so that even when somehow you find in studying all these Hindu and Buddhist texts that when they're discussing one's awakening to the very final secret somehow there is the feeling of well what did we get because you step into a new dimension you see from the standpoint of this sort of awakening that really and truly you were awakened all the time imagined going through a gate in a wall here is this great barrier you walk through it you turn around and the wall and the gate have both disappeared and you see you were always there one of the most extraordinary things that happens in entering into a sort of mystical state of consciousness one of the most delightful things about it is the discovery that you don't have to stay in ecstasy that ordinary consciousness is alright too but that is part of the whole total fitness of things you see that everybody is as it were right in the place where he stands imagine a pearl necklace how it's arranged down in the center they put the big pearls and then they trail off slowly until there are very tiny pearls of the back and so it doesn't matter whether you're a big pearl or a little pearl you all constitute the harmony of the whole so they say in Zen Buddhism a long thing is the long body of Buddha a short thing is the short body of Buddha or in the spring scenery there is nothing superior nothing inferior flowering branches grow naturally some short some long so from that standpoint you see everybody is seemed to be a perfect manifestation of the Godhead or of the void or whatever you want to call it everybody and even though the very fact that they don't know it and that they're unhappy that they quarrel etc etc etc is still a manifestation of this the whole thing is seen like this just as I was discussing the balances of the garden in which the birds eating the worms and the snails eating the lettuce all these processes of conflict built up the ongoing miracle of the garden itself so in the same way things that you see in yourself as neuroses as forms of ill health as things that you shouldn't be they are your slugs and worms and they there there is nothing nothing at all in your whole being that's unnatural all of it is an integral part of the game and if you weren't as awful as you are you might be creating very serious trouble now I don't want to say that so that you can say in turn well let me be more awful still you know some Paul got all tangled up in this he having explained that without sin there could be no grace he said shall we then sin that grace may abound and his Greek you know Missa ganito heaven forbid but this is of course a problem that simply has to be faced that the universe in its grand design has nothing special to do with morality or rather nothing no more special connection with morality than with anything else morality is a part of the universe it's a way of playing the human game and but the thing itself is really beyond good and evil now as I see it that's that's the way it is and whether one likes it or not it's always still up to you how you want to behave if we try to get people to behave decently by scaring them and saying that if they don't behave decently they'll be out of sorts with God this doesn't help at all because it merely inculcate Sanu kind of fear and a new kind of false basis for morality one can only be moral because you like to do it that way there really is no other reason whatsoever and to try and find other reasons always perverts morality in just the same way the powers of the universe the power of fire the power of electricity the power of steel there are neither good nor evil you can use either one for the blessing of people or for their destruction and so the truth itself I mean the the the the the foundation reality of the world is something like that although it does have this certain edge to it and sodas are all human activity and the edge is something like this those powers that we call positive are always in a process of overcoming those that we call negative it's the nature of the positive to win and the nature of the negative to lose but win and lose always go together nobody wins unless somebody loses nobody loses unless somebody wins their relationship is transactional in the same way as buying and selling but if it were the other way around you see if the negative were always in the situation of overcoming the positive you would get a universe that would not be a continuing game it would be 100% tragedy the very disease the positive and the negative together constitute existence we have to use existence as a neutral word that doesn't have as an opposite non existence existence already includes non-existence you could say being and non-being constitute existence just as we know physically sound is constituted by sound silence in very rapid alternation so being non being constitute existence and existence is something of which you may say the game is worth the candle if it weren't it wouldn't be it's like that some people try to say there is good and bad with small G and small B and they together constitute good capital G or one might say that humanity is and the good of humanity is a curious combination of beneficence and rascality of reason and passion and if human beings didn't have those two sides they would be less than human man is in a certain sense redeemed by his passions redeemed by being something of a rascal because if he weren't he would be like a stool with no salt in it the salt somehow is something that in a large quantity is horrible but in a certain small quantity delightful and so everybody has to be salted with a certain amount of unrespectable 'ti otherwise they're impossible and intolerable the only thing is as a as a as a as a fervent cook don't overdo it it is in that respect you know that it's said of great gurus in India they have a very funny thing they say be Western us go over and they meet this man who's supposed to be extremely holy and they're all a God you know and then after spending a few days with him they begin to wonder they find he smokes cigarette they find that he occasionally loses his temper and they begin to think well is this man so holy after all I mean he surely should not be dependent on these little habits and luxuries and so on and then they find he has a girlfriend and then they leave because they're so scandalized well then they the Hindus say are now you shouldn't get so upset about this because if this man didn't have a few little vices he would cease to manifest he would simply disappear he has to have these things to keep him grounded to keep him in the world or if suddenly you know he gets terribly angry with a certain student and seems to lose his temper they say oh no no no he's that's a tactical anger that he did on purpose to wake you up to something it was for your own development if your own good he didn't really feel angry at all [Laughter] oh dear but do you see the point there is something in the fact that if we didn't have these little attachments he wouldn't be manifesting he'd simply disappear there's something in that only don't take it to piously I think you get the point so then we now have to explore a very important aspect of the Joker as equivalent to were Jeff's sly man you see he points out the four ways the monk the here the yogi and the sly man and all the first three ways are ways of great difficulty they involved very very strenuous discipline and of course as we get it through the books about Gurdjieff the way of the sly man involves the discipline to but I I think there's more to be said about the way of the sly man then appears in any of those writings because this is very closely connected with the whole approach of Taoism the Chinese philosophy of Wu Wei on non-aggression and with the what is called in Buddhism the middle way when the Buddha first discussed the middle way he put it like this he said to try and solve the problem of suffering by immersing yourself in pleasure only leads to a hangover to try and solve the problem by asceticism also brings no liberation you merely get tied up in a kind of masochism where you say I know I'm right just so long as I'm hurting and all that is doing is expiating you're kind of infantile guilt sense so he said there is a middle way between asceticism on the one hand and hedonism on the other but actually the middle way is more subtle than that and it's beautifully discussed in Professor Baum a book called the philosophy of Buddha that's be a H M professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico and he gives a very very fascinating analysis of the middle way in the form of a dialogue whereby the it works simply like this the student brings the problem to the teacher and he says I suffer and it's a problem to me and the teacher says you suffer because you desire if you didn't desire you wouldn't suffer so try not to desire and the student goes away and says I'm not very successful in this I can't stop desiring it's terribly difficult and furthermore I find that in trying to stop desiring I'm desiring to stop desiring now what am I to do about that and the teacher replies do not desire to stop desiring any more than you can and so the student goes away and practices that but he comes back to the teacher and said I still find myself desiring excessively to stop desiring and it doesn't work so the teacher says do not desire too much not to desire to stop desiring now do you see what's happening step by step almost like Achilles approaching The Tortoise the student is being brought together with himself to the point where he catches up with his own inner being and can't accept it completely and that is Lucy the most difficult thing to do to accept oneself completely because the moment you can do that you have in effect done psychologically what is the equivalent of saying in philosophical or theological terms you as you are now are the Buddha just as I was explaining few minutes ago that's unbelievable because we are always trying to get away from ourselves as we are now in one fashion or another and it's only we we will only stop doing that through a series of experiments in which we try resolutely to get away from ourselves as we are so that is the middle way not ordinarily in these other ways the way of the yogi the fakir and the monk the individual makes a big thing out of the work of liberation and especially likes the kind of teacher who will put him through the most severe paces it's interesting how there arise from time to time schools in the West where someone comes along offering the people say look it's all very well to go to discussion groups and talk about these things but that's not the real thing what you need is really to get down and do some work and often these teachers are very rude and very stern but people love it and such a person will always attract a great following because people get the feeling now we're at serious business here this is really something you see and this you see there can be an awful problem let's suppose that you have some difficult and distressing habit like drinking too much and you're assured that once you've become the victim of this habit it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to get rid of it and it requires intense willpower and so that kills you right off you're a dead duck from then on it's as if you see you had said to the devil one more look I'm going to get rid of you I'm not going to have anything to do with you anymore so the devil who is an archangel and his terribly clever he's all set for you and because he knows that you are getting out of his way he surrounds you with greater temptations than you ever imagined if you are going to outwit the devil it's terribly important that you don't give him any advance notice and this is where the work of the sly man comes in put it in other terms in Hindu or Buddhist terms in the popular terms of popular Hinduism and Buddhism liberation is getting out of the toils of karma it's like this during your many past lives you've done all kinds of deeds good and bad and you are reaping the consequences of these deeds today and also today you are setting up future consequences now before you can be liberated you've got to pay off your karmic debts and so the moment you set your foot on the path of liberation you are apt to find that all your karmic creditors will come to your door and that's why it's often said that people who start out on a serious work of yoga suddenly gets sick and lose their money and their best friends drop dead and all kinds of ghastly things happen that's because you see they served notice that they were going to do this and so all the creditors came around if you're going to leave town and you owe lots of money you know you mustn't announce that you're leaving or give a farewell party to your friends because the growth they will find out so the the art of the Flyman is to make no contest but simply to leave without one word in other words though that's the meaning of wuwei in in the technical vocabulary of Taoism were way not to interfere not to force things that's the best translation of Wu way not to force things but so he just drops it like that but you are here in this respect you see you your own worst enemy because even if you serve notice privately on yourself that suddenly you're going to drop it all already the devil knows because who do you think the devil it is now this lies behind the whole problem that is discussed in the book then in the art of archery the necessity of letting go of the bowstring without first deciding to do so another way of putting it is that the decision to release the bowstring and the action of doing so must be simultaneous not to decide and then act but to act decide all at once now why is this if you are going to be an expert Archer you must shoot before you think otherwise it will be too late you don't aim and then shoot it's all one action and this is true likewise of any sort of shooting a pistol shooting as well that if you aim if you if you decide and then fire you're apt to do things like pulling the trigger instead of squeezing all kinds of wrong things are done and you're always the moment too late if you decide first you have to act and decide simultaneously so what does that do you see that puts up a very curious problem which in its own turn becomes a bind to try and act quickly enough so that you over take the preliminary decision to try not to decide first and that is an impossible problem I wonder if you ever read von Kleist story about the fighting bear the this is included in Nancy Wilson Ross's book the world of Zen has a kind of Western Zen it's a story about a man who has a fight with a circus bear and the the bear reads his mind and always four stalls any attack that he makes on it there's absolutely nothing he can do to get past the bear and so in the same way you might imagine a guru who is a mind reader and he always knows if you decide before you act and if you do you see the devil will catch you instead you see of deciding that you won't be an alcoholic anymore the only thing to do is not to drink without any previous decision on this matter but how can anyone do that you see that's the question how can I decide not to decide how can I announce that I won't make any announcement without making an announcement you see there is no way out of that bind try as you may you go on and on and on trying as Harold did to release the bowstring without thinking first to release it but then strangely enough one day the thing happened he did it and this is involved in our learning of almost all techniques that we work and work to achieve that final point of perfection and it doesn't come it doesn't come and then one day it happens and what is the reason for that is it simply and this is really you know a way it's usually explained but this is an oversimplification mean it is not that we have practiced it so often that it suddenly becomes perfect it is much more subtle than that what happens is that we've practiced so often that we find out we can't do it and it happens at the moment you know you can't do it when you reach a certain point of despair when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim at that moment you're swimming because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call don't care you stopped trying you stopped not trying trying to get it that way you just I have arrived at the insight that your decision your will doesn't have any part in the thing at all and that's what you needed to know you've overcome you see the illusion of having a separate ego there is no way of telling anyone that that's an illusion and getting appropriate action because we are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that it's real and if I say well I'm going to get rid of my ego that's what the Daoist call beating a drum in search of a fugitive he hears you coming so the ego that is to say the illusion of having a separate will and a separate eye center that can be an effective agent that cannot be overcome by a decision which seems to be centered in the ego you might as well put out fire with fire it can come only when an attempt to act from the ego Center has been revealed to be completely futile then the thing happens because you've really discovered that it was after all an illusion now be very careful how you formulate this sort of thing philosophically this could of course correspond to the kind of person who feels unafraid and who feels very free because he's a complete fatalist a lot of people are and are very happy in their fatalism they they they really feel that they they don't do anything it just happens and that it's all life and that when they when they won't die until it's their time to die and so why worry everything they have the sense of everything is just happening to them and this is a kind of a floating feeling it's as if you didn't have to push things at all they just float along well now that state of affairs that's a feeling of you don't have to push anything it just floats along it's very similar to the experience I'm describing if not the same thing but this person has interpreted it as a fatalist in a rather passive way that is to say he has felt that there still is some kind of a little differentiation between himself as the experience on the one hand and that force or set of forces called fate on the other he is pushed around but he witnesses being pushed around now in this state this person still has a little fragment of impurity left there's still one fly left in the ointment and that is the sensation of being pushed around there is still a fundamental division between the knower and the known and in this case the case of the fatalist the knower seems to be the passive thing and everything known the objective world or the goings-on of his own physiology they appear to be the active end and the Noah just has the experience of himself being moved moved moved moved by the tides of life the important thing to find out is this that the sensation of being the knower and the experience of all this is not as it were aside from everything else that's going on but part of it just as you although you experience your own existence subjectively you are nevertheless part of the external world you are in my external world just as I am in your external world so in this way the final barrier between the knower and the known has broken down there is nobody as it were being carried along by fate there is just the process and all that you are is part of the process then there is a curious flip the individual who has always felt himself to be the tiny little thing on the end of the big determining process suddenly goes bloop have you watched sometimes a tiny little piece of mercury coming nearer and nearer to a large piece of mercury the sudden moment when they touch each other and put the little thing vanishes into the big one almost more dramatically than a drop into the ocean in this case that I'm talking about it isn't that the individual organism vanishes the individual human being doesn't vanish but he experiences no longer a passive relationship to the world he simply sees that all that he is and all that he ever was was something that the entire process was doing at the time in other words when he felt himself to be separate he sees that that is in a certain way just what he should have felt because that was what the process was doing in him in exactly the same way that it was giving him bla brown or blue eyes or blonde or brunette hair and that's going through the door and turning round and seeing there wasn't a door a finding that you aren't fated that you're not trapped because there's nobody in the trap and it takes something trapped to make a trap we'll begin by refreshing memories as to what went before in discussing the theme of the Joker I have been talking about a point of view the Joker's point of view from which not only our social institutions but also all the formations of the natural world are seen as games be careful of the word game it doesn't mean as trivialities because when we say it's just a game this often means it is just trivial there can be important games as when we play the piano or musical instruments we are not necessarily doing something frivolous but we are playing and there is something in the nature of all play that is not serious but at the same time may be sincere and I tried to give you the picture of the multiplicity of natural forms on the one hand and of human social institutions and all the things that we do and consider important and busy ourselves with as human beings I tried to give you the point of view from which these can be seen as games as things being done as it were simply for themselves and not for some ulterior motive and therefore these games are in a way best played when they are played as games although it's really alright for people to take them seriously except that they are a little bit deprived they're missing something and so when the Joker sees a person taking his life seriously and regarding himself as extremely important there is something a little bit funny about it and he is inclined to get the giggles and it's it's all he knows that the very intensity of seriousness with which the individuals concerned are taking these games will be a kind of foil for the subsequent bursting into laughter when he sees that it wasn't serious after all you see that you might say there are these classes of people there are the very far out people and the very far in people now ordinarily we say someone's very far out when they are oddballs when they are exceedingly unconventional but I want you to turn the picture round and look as a conventional person look at a square as a person who's very far out that is to say he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost he doesn't know where he started from and he thinks he's there but he's completely lost because he is actually under the cover of his assurance of his status of his position in society he's really a very anxious person I said a lot yesterday about the way in which our society shows anxiety because it cannot permit the existence of people who don't belong and it cannot really permit the criticism of laughter you cannot permit the presence of the old-fashioned court jester because these people are so far out they are so involved and one from a certain standpoint you see from the Joker standpoint he doesn't condemn such people he rather congratulate them on their heroism for getting so lost and involved but to keep the far out people from going quite insane there have to be far in people and the far in people are those who keep contact with the original goings-on behind the scenes they are like the prompter in the theatre where there are the actors out on the stage relying on their memories etc and they're supposed to get completely involved in the play but there's a concealed prompter with the script in front of him and he is the connection of the actor on the stage with the greenroom behind the stage and you see in in this dramatic analogy of the universe the green room is the central point the still point of the turning world the green room is how God is when he's back home not involved in all these games and takes off the mask see on the Hindus theory that everybody is a mask of God the like wonderful line in one of Chesterton's poems and now a great thing in the street seems any human nod we're moving strange democracy as a million masks of God the million masks of the Joker because the Joker is the player the trick player who plays ultimately the great trick on himself so really there can be no resentment about this nobody to blame nobody to turn around do in the end and say you you bastard you did this to me because it's always you who are ultimately responsible so this prompter you see keeps the actor on the stage in touch with the greenroom and so there are certain people in the world who might be a kind of a priesthood sometimes although priesthoods are apt to become corrupt and square but a kind of people in the know there always has to be somebody around in the know so that as it were the wheel of society and of existence the wheel of the squirrel cage the wheel of the rat race can have an axle firmly planted and at the center then there have to be the far in people so this is the domain of jokers now having developed that side of the Joker the person who sees through the social institutions of games I went on in the second session to discuss another aspect of the Joker as the sly man in comparison with the monk the fakir and the yogi who undertake all those three undertake in certain different ways disciplines which have the intent of releasing them from their Karma the individual in other words challenges his involvement his attachments his limitations his fine a toot and endeavors to overcome it but in each of these three cases the individual involved stirs up in immense opposition because he serves notice upon the devil or shall we say upon his karmic creditors that he is about to leave town and so all the creditors come rushing to the door all his past sins catch up with him and the devil lays his temptations in the way all the more thoroughly so that the sly man is the one who when he is going to leave town does so instantaneously without any prior announcement and so in this way there is shall we say a cunning manner of becoming a Buddha and that is to become one instantly without any preparation or warning whatsoever this is why Zen is called the sudden school and why Satori is a sudden awakening because it has to be done without the slightest warning now but then I pointed out that the moment you have any idea about doing this you've already ceased to be sudden if that is to say the moment you seek for some spiritual attainment which is becoming a Buddha becoming awakened becoming release getting in there you've already served notice upon your creditors so that somehow or other you find that you have to do it without intending to do it and that is a double bind where would you impose upon yourself when you say I must find a way of doing this spontaneously that's the old old basic double bind you must be spontaneous you are commanded or you command yourself to do something which is acceptable only if it happens spontaneously then you think about that and say well well well what a fix that is here am I saying I must be surprised and I'm going to lay plans to surprise myself so by going through this you discover of naturally that that can't be done you can't surprise yourself on purpose yet that's what you have to do so what about it you come to a state of total paralysis you're stuck the one thing that is terribly important to be done can't be done it has to happen it really does if you're earnest about this you want to get out of the trap but you can't do anything about it either actively or passively but then as you begin to see what you are doing all the time you notice a very odd fact which is that you can't help being spontaneous if I say to you good morning and you say good morning what is that did you plan this answer did you make preparations to grow your hair do you make decisions about having blue eyes you see about breathing is this all planned about beating your heart and what about your thinking even if it's very blocked thinking even if you feel from a certain point of view that you're all mixed up what is going on anyway you see you can't stop it it's like trying to we were discussing the good Jeff thing yesterday the self remembering exercise the attempt to live completely in the present well that's not only a good Jeff idea that's a very ancient yoga and Buddhist discipline to be completely here and now but of course as you pursue this you discover you can't do it because you couldn't even you know know where to go shopping unless you made plans and started thinking about the future because you couldn't move but then you discover you see that in the long run there's nothing to think about except that here and now there isn't anything else because even when you make plans for the future and you remember the past you are doing it all in the present your memory is the present activity there's no way of not being self remembering and present and having presence of mind so when you discover that there's nothing left to you but to have a good laugh well now I want to develop to a greater extent something I only touched on yesterday afternoon when we were discussing anxiety and laughter and the relationship between the two I suggested that anxiety and laughter are really the same phenomenon but seen from different points of view as we all know we can have shadows of horror and shadows of delight tears of grief and tears of joy and it's the same shudders and the same tears in either case that they have a completely different meaning now life said life is a matter of oscillation life is vibration it scene III III the whole time and all the way through question is how are you going to interpret that is it tremble tremble tremble or is it laughs laughs laughs that's the that's the great thing and sometimes it's one and sometimes it's the other so that the the whole thing of the Joker is the book the he comes into being as it were at the point when the anxiety interpretation of the trembling becomes the Laughing interpretation we were talking about monks who had skulls on in their cells to remind them of mortality and we think a grim thing the skull is a grim thing but Chesterton had the poem about the state of the skull chattering Finch and water fly are not merrier than I here among the flowers I lie laughing everlastingly no I may not tell the best surely friends I might have guessed death was but the good Kings jest it was hid so carefully so you can see the skull not as the grim thing but as a laughing thing it's all that's left of a human being and all the the surface is peeled off and nothing but this beautiful bone remains it laughs now why what is it about death being adjust we discussed the problem of the zebra you remember whether a zebra is a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes and of course you can see it either way and you can argue to all this blue about which side is right and let's suppose that a black horse is the horse of ill-omen even though striped with yellow and a yellow horse the horse of joy and good omen even though striped with black this is our eternal problem we are in the state of egocentric consciousness firmly convinced that death is a threat we are so convinced of this even though individuals may say well I'm not really afraid of death what I'm afraid of is dying in an unpleasant way nevertheless since almost all spare moralists and people concerned with ethics seem to agree whatever their differences of opinion that survival is a good thing in some sense if not survival in this body even the most I mean the people who would rather be dead than red firmly believe that that is true because they believe there is the hereafter where they can go and where they can be rewarded for the courageous stand against evil which they have taken you see so that still some kind of insistence on the valley the value of survival and we all cling to this idea of survival with tremendous passion but we have been fooled because survival is an important ideal only so long as you have bothering you the bugbear of death that the world might stop altogether and that your death so far as you are concerned is curtains forever and that is really the bogey you see that's all very well to rationalize and say no it's not death I'm afraid of its the pains of death but if you think about it deeply there are several stages in thinking about it deeply the first stage is the real horrors of endless night of the futility of the whole conception that one's own life or indeed the whole life of the cosmos might be nothing but a flash and beyond that nothing nothing nothing in all directions when for example we think of the physicists idea that the universe is running down that all energy is seeking a stable state supposing for example to give an illustration of what they mean I have a jar of black pepper and a jar of salt and I pour them together into another jar and I can see the white salt and the black pepper fairly well are delineated then I start shaking the jar and slowly slowly slowly the black and the white disappear into a grey that can never be sorted out again into black and white in this sort of way as things go on the universe they say it tends to attain a stable state to run down run down run down until that's the end and nobody knows how it could possibly start all over again but I always say and I feel it's in a sort of funny intuitive way that what happened once can happen again if this world started at some time supposing there was a colossal explosion which set all these galaxies flying out then what existed before that explosion must surely have been something like the stable state to which we shall run down in the end and if it went bang once there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't go bang again I suppose there are temperaments in logic I have a temperament whereby I just cannot it mean it seems to me absolutely basic that what happened once can happen again but there are other people who so cherished the unique that they can conceive the idea of something like existence happening only once but you see something that happens only once doesn't happen at all what happens if you a given sound consists of only one vibration what is the up crest of a wave apart from the down crest can you conceive that that's the same cone as what is the sound of one hand you see it always takes two you can't have a purely left-sided person imagine so in in this way just as you can't have just one vibration mean it's like the saying the greatest strength of mine is to eat one peanut and so you which can hardly be done so there isn't just one vibration and a dip but no dahhh sort of thing you you have to have it do more so in the din just the same way when you magnify this principle there isn't just one cosmos a one big explosion that starts and stops all stopping implies starting someone just wrote to me we haven't parted because we never met [Laughter] so the whole point of saying this is the realization that existence is eternal the going out of existence implies for coming in and some Thomas had some points here when he said there could never have been a time when there was not being because if there had been a time when there was nothing there was nothing in nothing to produce something but he didn't quite have the point because what he didn't see was that nothing is productive in the sense that you can't have nothing without something they go together and all this thing is an argument again about whether the zebra is yellow stripe black or black stripe yellow and what we see is that the black and the yellow the darkness and the light are simply two phases of the same and that realization is exactly what transforms anxiety into laughter suddenly to see that you just after all this anxiety that you don't have anything to worry about now that doesn't mean that there will not in our future lie some extremely painful experiences or experiences that we would ordinarily interpret as horribly painful we may all die of ghastly diseases or of radiation burns or of unimaginable things but look here I very briefly touched on pain yesterday and the way pain is interpreted if if you interpret pain as something that is destroying you and is going in the direction of total death then it's very serious indeed and it's perfectly terrifying but I've been investigating experiences of people who've undergone torture I don't know if anybody in this room has it's always possible but and then then if so you can correct me but the worst part of torture is the beginning when of course you're full of all your illusions and all your fears about black and white and the terror that black may win but it's said that as torture proceeds it slowly changes the state of mind of the victim to a kind of drunken masochistic giving in to the torture so that it becomes something that he cooperates with and that if the the torturer notices this he knows he's through and has to kill him so in other words there is a point at which pain becomes an experience without having a negative interpretation put upon it becomes in other words converted into ecstasy it simply becomes you see a way of going through extraordinarily far out sensations which have no meaning if they have meaning the meaning of threats the meaning of death looming at the end and you know this is the tearing apart and the destruction of you then you see it is absolutely horrendous but if it has no meaning at all just transpose yourself into another dimension to illustrate it because what the dimension I'm talking about it's a very tough one but let's go back to a simpler one let's take Psalms now if you lie down and listen to all the goings-on in this area and you will hear planes moving in cars and foghorns and all kinds of crazy sounds you see people this way and that song and you could listen to that and find it very interesting very beautiful but if someone were to do what John Cage does and put you in a concert hall with the expectation of hearing music and by having a purely silent playing of the piano compel you instead to listen to all the sounds going on around you you would be shocked and feel that some kind of avant-garde hoax had been perpetrated you see it depends on the set on the way you approach the experience now you can listen to sounds that are ordinarily considered unpleasant in a totally unprejudiced way you can listen to the discordant musical noises and find them extremely interesting if you listen carefully enough you can listen to a squalling brat and find it musical that this child I'll never forget waking up one morning and listening to a child whining child wasn't saying anything were no words in it it was just a plaint and it wasn't exactly crying it was the kind of [Music] there was something marvelous about it this child's wonderfully articulate protest against some sort of nuisance and so listening into those things without interpreting them listening to one's own interior frustration and pain in the same way without interpreting it as being on one side or the other on the good side or the bad side on the black side or the white side is what makes it possible you see to transmute these things but you you can't do this you can't really honestly transmute paying into a form of play a form of weird far-out sensations that are basically just that so long as you fail to see the inner unity of the opposites so long as you fall for the idea that you are nothing more than this particular life than this particular ego which came from nowhere and is going nowhere while you remain under that illusion you see you you first of all you don't see your identity with everything else that exists now if death then is the joke I remember the biggest joke on death I ever saw I mentioned this in my book we visited the Capuchin friars crypt in the Via Veneto in Rome some of you may have seen it where there are three underground chapels where everything is made of bones and the altar is made of bones the pedestals of the altar are all shin bones and then there are piles of skulls and the decoration of flowers on the ceiling our ribs alternating with vertebrae and the vertebrae of the flowers and the ribs curl this vehicle this facial this way the twining stems and our whole thing is bones and they have even a fused full intact skeletons dressed in monk's robes standing on either side of these altars it's the craziest thing you ever saw and then when you have seen it and you come out there is a little friar with a beard taking your offering at the top of the steps and had a funny wicked gleam in his eye and one could see that this was a joke the whole thing was a joke it was constructed by people would somehow overcome the fear of death couldn't possibly have such a thing as that and so I was fascinated by it because I thought that on the day of the resurrection there's gonna be a tremendous Kapil fitting all those bones together and everybody getting up the stairs for the Last Judgement well so if if if it is seen the death is suggest but the question is you see we are so tormented by the bugbear of it being the real end by the imagination of the possibility of being in the dark forever now you really must think this through because it is a pure delusion if you think first of all seriously about annihilation of consciousness you will realize that an isolation of consciousness couldn't possibly be an experience but being in the dark forever could be an experience exposing you who were buried alive and somehow you were immortal that you had to stay shut up in a tomb for always and always and always that would be pretty grim but the annihilation of consciousness is not an experience at all there isn't anything there to be afraid of so if that's what's going to happen there's nothing to worry about I'll show you but on the other hand if you think about it longer about a state of eternal just not being at all you know you realize that nature abhors a vacuum and that since just as the unit of the universe happened once it could happen again since you were born once you know it did happen really well it can happen again only the the next you won't remember the one now just as the one now doesn't remember the one before not because you've forgotten but because memory is transmitted along certain channels it requires the vehicle of brains for example it requires books and other records to maintain it but as I pointed out yesterday the fundamental what-have-you that underlies all this doesn't need a memory doesn't need to store memories and so just in the same way as you don't need to be conscious of the inner formations of your brain also I mean here I'm talking speculatively also there are curious connections where we don't see any that is to say the interval between events is not insignificant just as you don't hear melody unless you hear the interval between tones it's the interval that counts so in the same way at blank intervals between successive manifestations of the universe and blank intervals between you're forgetting who you are altogether and dying and someone suddenly becoming a baby the blank intervals are not insignificant every painter knows every architect knows that the space around an object or inside an object is just as important as the object that again is the fact if you don't notice the importance of intervals and you don't notice the importance of space it is as if you had settled on the top it here for the black design being the thing and the white background is having no no significance so what about the inside of this room what about the shape of space that it encloses we would say this is nothing more than the certain quantity of air but don't you see that the distance the the the the space between that wall and this window is life room that is not nothing that it's just as important it comes into being at the same moment as the walls come into being it connects them and so likewise the space between our planet and other planets is not insignificant so once you see that intervals of apparent nothingness our significant intervals that their size makes all the difference to what's happening when the intervals between dits are short the note is high when the intervals between the dips are long the note is low or large the high being little C why do we say high and low as distinct from little and big big instruments make big noises little instruments make tiny noises but at any rate it's the interval that's important so then once you see the importance of the interval you have seen that the whitus is important as the black or the other way around if you want to change your analogy you see how you can switch these analogies in one case the white can be the nothing the unimportant whereas the black is the mark somebody made with a dick with a crayon or the other way around the black can be the darkness and the white is the flash of lightning that appears in the darkness change your analogies like saying once we used to say about high matters you know high matters lofty thoughts but now we don't it's more fashionable to say deep matters and profound thoughts I was telling me yesterday in the group here that they will going to an Indian village in New Mexico where they have the Christianity but when the speaker referred to Jesus and God and so on he pointed down all the time because you see he felt that things grew up like this from below whereas of course the ancient cults out of which the Jewish and Christian religions grew had the idea that the life of the Sun and the rain came down from the heavens and fertilized the feminine earth which then responded but these things keep changing because you can keep switching your point of view you can see the black is the design against the white background and the white as the design against the black background and you can flipped back and forth back and forth back and forth and the more you do that the more you realize that the pair's go together anxiety is the state of trying not to flip all life is flipping it's called it's flip-flop ability is the condition of life this way in that way when you are trying to resist flip-flop ability you're anxious you see when you push against it it throbs in a way that you interpret is fear and all rigid personalities people who can't swing who have no movement in their hips as it were in psychologically they are resisting flip-flop ability but when you understand flip-flop ability and that this is the way things are then you laugh because that is the big flip-flop this morning I was discussing the joke of death and the principal point that I was making was that death and life or that is to say in other words the interval and the event death being the interval between events between one appearance and another of human beings in the same way as winter is the interval between the appearance of the leaves in spring and their disappearance in the fall but there is you see the chronic fear that the interval may be all that there is that the interval may triumph and there may be no event and I was trying to show you that there is that polarity between the event and the interval between events in such a way that you can no more have the one without the other then you can have the crest of the wave without the trough and that this goes on and on and on in endless cycles where there are small intervals making up small intervals and waves which grouped together and make up a set of intervals and waves and they in themselves constitute the crest of a larger wave with a much longer trough and then again that comes the group of intervals and waves on a short rhythm and that this thing that goes like you see like this you see that this thing in its turn is the crest of a still greater wave and that the nature of being is that this is the scheme of things but the joke about it what makes it exciting is the constant anticipation that there might not be anything again after the interval that it might all come to an end and the real problem in order to turn death into a joke that is to say suddenly to recover from this terrible anxiety that it might be finished and then transmute the vibration trembling of anxiety into laughter it is the same thing only the trembling of laughter is the trembling of anxiety seen from a different point of view now what are the things that are obstacles to our being able to see that it's almost as if life were itself a guru and you know how gurus throw out tests to their students to see if they can pass these various initiations all of which require nerve in the face of some formidable obstacle all fairy stories are full of this and so life itself throws out all kinds of reasons for supposing that we are faced with something serious instead of something playful and I want to discuss with you a few ways which in West Western history this obstacle has been thrown out and how we today are bamboozled by these obstacles in the history of Western civilization there have really been in the past two thousand years two dominant mythologies one has had a long run and the other has had a fairly short run but they are both ways of terrifying you so that you won't see the point but at the same time they are perhaps not merely negative things but challenges barriers of the same kind that a guru would offer for example in the study of Zen each Cohen is referred to as a barrier and if you can pass the barrier you see you get in in in but the function of the teacher is to put the barriers up to see how you'll react to them so in a way we could say that the two great mythologies which have dominated the Western world in the past 2,000 years are two barriers the first of course is the Christian mythology and in the Christian mythology the individual is made to feel that he is strictly on probation that he does not really belong that if he is at all a son of God he is so by adoption and grace he isn't really one of the family let me explore the theology of that a moment in Christian theology God has only one son the mahogany's or the only begotten Son of God who is the second person of the Trinity the Lagos the divine idea of itself the Trinity constitutes a family and naturally it's therefore threefold because all four for the Greek mind and it was the Greek mind that molded Christian theology meaning entirely depends on the structure of the Greek language and Greek in common with all Western languages and indeed also Sanskrit from which it is derived has a sentence structure in which there is the subject the verb and the predicate and we can't make any sense without those three things we have to have and I love you or and I know you sentence for there to be any love author for there to be any knowledge there must be the lover the lover can't love without having a beloved and the lover doesn't relate to the beloved without the relationship of love between so there you have the subject the predicate of the verb and so naturally in Greek ideas the net the very inner nature of reality of the Godhead itself must be threefold following the structure of Greek thought and Greek grammar so in this way the inner life of the Godhead is completely self-sufficient there is the Sun the object of God's love so that God doesn't need any created world of finite beings as the necessary object of his love so that he can be loved missing so then the created world is something extraneous it's something that the Lord threw off in a fit of exuberance and although it is very much beloved by him he doesn't in any way depend on it he in a sense fathered it but he fathered it out of nothing it had no true mother and so in a way it's an orphan and the relationship between the creator and the creature in popular Christianity has always been the relationship between the king and the subject and the relationship between the king and the subject is very very strange as strange because the king in the archetypes of kingship which existed in the Near East in ancient times and upon which this theological imagery was originally modeled the king was really afraid he always appeared in the throne room was his back to the wall he didn't stand in the middle of his people and say you know and look around at everybody like that he stood with his back to the wall like this it's funny how all altars Buddha's and things have their backs to the wall because there you can't be stabbed and you have your gods in your henchmen on either side of you and all the people prostrate themselves because that way you can watch them all they can't see you and you can see them so you're safe and that's the imagery you see which has given us our Western conception of God of the Father who whose children have become a little bit too much for him he's had too many and they have to be kept in their place and [Applause] so he's a little bit frightened and so the rules are set up you just do son son son so and you must feel grateful for having been father you're a miserable worm and therefore in inwardly because without me you might not have been you owe everything you have to my having produced you and you are a debtor and because you are debtor you have a duty duty is the same word as debt debit you owe life to me to produce you although I won't admit I had a great deal of fun doing and so you must all crawl now you see that that conception of our relationship to reality has been the popular idea for centuries in the Western world so that you never really knew where you stood with the authority because the authority gives you the impression that you are so bad intrinsically that at any time you ought to be punished and eaten up and it's only a matter of mercy that you're not being eaten up so the prayers of the Christian Church are full of the idea Oh Lord we are not worthy and since it is only a guy great mercy that we continue to survive at all we humbly beseech the etc.etc and magic going around with that feeling about the nature of reality that it is watching you all the time that you're always on probation like a released prisoner and therefore there is an all-seeing eye at every moment of the day and night survey surveilling you much more efficiently than any Big Brother could watch you through TV tiny TV cameras in your bedroom I know a friend of mine who is the devout Catholic and in her toilet did but she is different she has a sense of humor and in the toilet you know it's an old-fashioned one there's a tank and a pipe coming down to the John and there's a little placard on it with the big eye painted and in gothic letters underneath it it says thou God seest me [Music] so always everywhere according to this mythology there is the I of the paternal judge watching you now what can you do with a situation like that if that's the way things really are you don't know whether this Lord has a sense of humor and whether you can say to him hey look don't take such an advantage of me like that turn down that light a little close off your eyes sometimes you don't need to be all that particular you know I can't do anything to you I can't knock you over why do you need to bug me all the time is too much and so people couldn't stand it you know 600 years of it was enough and it gives it became intolerable really intolerable because everybody knew they were sinners and if they were doing all the things against the rules in the book and nobody could possibly put up with it so the only thing they could do to relieve themselves of this horrible father figure was to make out that the universe didn't have a father at all that it was really an often not even virgin born they didn't even have a mother in other words in order to escape from the mythology of a conception of ultimate reality which was much too intelligent and much too nosy people had to invent a conception of the ultimate reality that was completely banal and dead so the second Western mythology is the mythology of the mechanical universe which is a fluke emerging from a process of absolutely blind energy and you must notice the language in which the great thinkers of the 19th century thought about the world Freud for the basic psychic energy used the word libido which in a 19th century Vienna was exceedingly uncomplimentary libido blind lust and so in the same way the science philosophers of the 19th century talked about the world as being based on brute force unintelligent energy and worked out a conception of man as a really rather unfortunate natural fluke consciousness reason and indeed also the passions and feelings and desires of the human heart were nothing but the end product of a roulette wheel of natural selection if the most curious paradox that those philosophers of the 19th century who denied the supernatural origin of man and who insisted that man is simply a part of nature one of the members of nature nevertheless set up a state of alienation between man and nature without precedent I am a part of nature I am something that nature fluked into being but nevertheless this fluke is something that Nature doesn't care about it doesn't care about my ego and its future all that is important in nature is the species the individual is irrelevant at the same time this philosophy arose when we were becoming conscious of the sheer magnitude of the universe and it took the first impression of this vastness as a pretext for making little of human beings and saying what do you matter in this huge cosmos just a little sloop you're just a little nothing at all this thing goes way on on on on on beyond all imagination and therefore man is just so much fungus on a rock and a very tiny rock at that in other words it took the standpoint let's set up a scale between two limits we will under this is the traditional western opposition on the one end of the scale to the left here you have matter the inert the clay put into shape by the potter on the other end of the scale you have spirit which is intelligence and these are what the mathematicians call limits and the limit is something you approach but you never actually get there now what the 19th century mythology did was to think of all things towards the limit called matter it's said in effect there is this dead material stuff it is energetic but the energy is unintelligent it's an a kind of roaring mechanical energy like fire or electricity or so on it is not intelligent and everything is really that what we call human intelligence and consciousness are merely complicated forms of this primordial energy and they are nothing but that in the same way we are evolved from lower orders of animals and I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasm oh I love you too parses and you know that's what you really are you're only a complicated protoplasmic rock w now do you see the intent behind this mythology the intent is to deprecate the intent is as we say now to put down the human being because the human being felt that hitherto he had been put up too far in the wrong way you are a child of God and the Lord loves you very dearly but you know that's just insulting that way you have an immortal soul your life is endless but it can very well turn out to be a life of endless agony when you fry in hell and that was a very serious threat to both of Protestants and Catholics and so it's much better much more comfortable to have a dead universe than a living universe so everlastingly threatening so then the mythology of the 19th century under which most of us still operate because we operate under it because it has become so plausible the science out of which this mythology arose has been so effective it has produced such a marvelous splash of technological novels that its point of view or the point of view of those scientists who started the whole going has become amazingly persuasive and convincing after all if I can reach into your brain with a very very subtle instrument and I can poke about inside and press there and suddenly and a certain point when I press it a world of memory comes to life so vividly that you see it before your very eyes I remove the instrumented vanishes I touch another place you experience intense pleasure absolutely unbelievable pleasure I remove it the sensation vanishes every time I touch inside you get a sensation externally of intense reality and I say after all I was only just pushing things in your brain you see what a push-button thing you are that's it I can just poke around and you can see anything but all this happening is I'm putting a little electrode or something on your brain that's all you are poor fish you're just you're just that kind of a sensitive sponge inside your head bone well that gets very persuasive see and people are therefore in a position they are prejudiced to favor a mythology that will make out that you are after all nothing but something or other nothing but a kind of complicated neurological jello and that point of view as I said has become enormous ly convincing it's plausible today whereas the old point of view of God the Father and all the Angels isn't plausible if it seems kind of weird in relation to what we know about the state of the universe now what we have to see is that both of these points of view are equally mythological and there's no more reason to take one than the other and that what these points of view reflect are nothing other than certain attitudes to to living now you see if you want to live in a way that always is saying I think that life is disgusting supposing you want to deny being then you can always describe it in ways that are offensive you can always say playing the violin is just scraping cats entrails with horsehair that puts it down and use their you know and you say people who play golf they're a bunch of idiots who go out on it take a walk and they hit a stupid little ball with sticks all that people who like music are just a bunch of idiots who sit around and go out of their minds listening to a lot of complicated noises see there's always a way of talking about something to make it sound terrible equally there's the way of talking about I'm gonna make it sound great now what do you want to do do you want to live your life in such a way that you're always saying to it you know you want it is that a good way to conduct things or do you want to live your life in such a way that you you used to take taunt let's go you see let's let's let's swing this thing on the one hand you see you're always in tension against it do you remember our tours out to you in the legend this morning there's a person who's anxious constantly anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-flop ability of things life is vibrating is going blood all the time the anxious person says don't do that you know you might do it too much I don't look like this makes me feel nervous it and so as he puts his weight on this blood like this you see it get something so instead of a kiss thing come on let's bullet let's go and do this thing so in exactly the same way the person who wants to say well you are nothing but you're nothing but some kind of chemicals and they're just a lot of you're a bag of pus and blood basically with a few bones inside and that person is doing the same thing as the person is putting pressure on the flip-flop ability of things and said he gets anxious and the person who does this he wants to say he's always look but think about your friends and the people who are philosophical and enthusiastic materialists they're always going to pose themselves as a certain kind of hero after all you're just a dreamer but I face facts see I'm a hard-headed realist and I I'm as a matter of fact I'm an intellectual porcupine I have my prickles out all over the place because I'm the kind of person who in the academic world at any rate is full of rigor I ask what precisely is the evidence about this and I'm analytical and I'm believing III don't like woolly and vague thinking I like it clear-cut and you can see that porcupines bristle going right through like that see well this is the personality type who wants to play that role whose message in saying all this jazz is I'm the kind of person who is all dry as a bone but I believe that that is strengths and that's reality not a kind of person says to him oh you are intolerable yes they're dry yes they're down you rattle you don't have any juice in you and what we need is juice and we need flow we need lilt and rhythm and gaiety you see so that's an opposed mythology and that's another character part you're going to play so we've got to consider these are games you see as I tried to show you earlier that the kind of roles we play the kind of games we play so but the question is that which is the optimal game certainly we can't do without some prickly people because life is prickles and goo and it's basically gooey prickles and prickly goo but the gooey people are always trying to make out that it's only goo and the prickly people are always trying to make out it's only prickles now we do need both see but the question is fundamentally which game works better the game that resists the vibration the flip-flop or the game that goes with it obviously the game that goes with it that cooperates with the general scene will be a longer game and a more amusing game than one that totally resists it although i don't want it i said totally advisedly because it's great fun to resist it at times see it's just like when somebody massages you know and they're really expert and those fingers are just vibrating like this on your back you can give and just go poof but it's also fun sometimes to tighten yourself your muscles against it so as to feel the full impact of this thing but what I want to the real point I want to get across is that what seems to us the hard-boiled common sense of a mechanistic view of the universe is nothing other than a myth you don't have to be taken in by this because there is no more solid argument that that is the way things are than any other argument about any other way things might be now it goes like this you see again think of the idea of limits but we'll take different limits this time we'll take one limit on the right-hand here as consciousness extreme lively sensitivity now on the other hand we'll take the opposite limit which is geological the stone the blind energy the electrical force without any consciousness whatsoever these are observable things we see the living human being on one extreme and we see the stone or the fire on the other now our 19th century mythologists wants to describe this limit in terms of this one he wants to say that consciousness is nothing but a very complicated form of minerals why can't you go the other way and just as easily say minerals the very simple form of consciousness that works doesn't it I mean after all here's this mineral [Music] I knock it and it says that to me this is a rudimentary form of consciousness this thing inside is not making a noise to itself because that requires is but in some way this thing is going I to itself it's shaking like that and that's it's consciousness its response its resonance it isn't totally unconscious but it's consciousness is extremely simple now you may think I'm spinning fairy stories but is that any more of a fairy story than to say that your consciousness is nothing but chemistry I mean you think you're conscious and that you have this high-and-mighty state of affairs but actually possibly look at this very realistically all this is just colloidal substances bobbling around see both that that story and the other story can be made to seem equally fanciful but the question is this if I say about the gong look my friend I respect you because you are a little bit conscious they you relate to me or you're kind of a younger brother and you know then there's something endearing and warm about this attitude to things whereas if I say you're just a piece of metal and as a matter of fact I'm just a piece of metal too that's the kind of insult now the people who believe that are really suicidal mania they want to put themselves down they are against their own life and they take a great pride in being that way and they call it being realistic and it's I only saying it's a better gamble to take it the other way and say the best thing you can say about it that this is a living being but not so much of a living being as a snail or something that actually wanders along and Wiggles so you see the pressure upon us of the whole mythology of the 19th century the whole attitude of putting down the universe because the previous myth had been to uncomfortably alive is simply a way of looking at things let me give another illustration of the same thing if you study the various forms of life from the standpoint of natural selection you may come up with a rationalization for everything somebody wants to know why do butterflies have eyes on their wings some butterflies well somebody scratches his head says oh well there must be an explanation for that there's an explanation for everything why is there an explanation for everything because the universe is really a tight engineering job so why does some butterflies have eyes well it so happened that some fluke of a butterfly once got an eye on its wing and birds would avoid it because that I looked at them and it was just too much so those butterflies that had eyes on their wings bred whereas the butterflies that didn't have eyes got eaten up more easily although some of them had other alternatives they because of not having eyes they were invisible and the birds couldn't see them and so more of that kind survived although those were the terrifying eyes survive and so they didn't get eaten up either so those it tended to multiply so is this a perfectly easy simple explanation of why butterflies have eyes on their wings of other things some birds with extraordinary plumage ins which look so obvious that anybody could catch them any cat any hunter no they survived because they were so attractive to their females and so they bred very well if the mattress act this isn't true they didn't and you know but any explanation will do provided it seems to explain how that is one way of looking at things you can make an extremely consistent theory for the different kind of species of flowers and birds and insects and all their markings and so on just why they have them but on the other hand you can equally well explain it in complete a different way you can say it would be exceedingly rare if there were nothing but one uniform type of life this opposing there never been anything but amoebas and there were just globules and they divided and then they divided again and then they divided again you know that could have gone on and come in terribly efficient because the minute you went to hit an amoeba you would strike it but suddenly find you'd killed only one of them because it split just before you hit marvelous arrangement and you know they could split very fast you could suddenly go at another with two hammers hoping to catch they both amoebas but suddenly they split split split split and there were eight of them before you knew where you were that would be fine but actually all the reason why there is all this colossal variety and all these patterns on butterfly's wings is that nature is a poet and it's simply having a wonderful time making all this variety and doing all these various things and that explanation is just as plausible as the efficient explanation it's a easy the philosophy is to a large extent or a matter of taste what sort of explanation suit your personality if you're if you're an anal-retentive type and rather tight then you like the efficient explanation on the other hand if you're an effusive type you like the poetic explanation [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] but there are though beyond that certain considerations of which of these explanations affords better games and the the economic anal-retentive explanation can give good games up to a point because there's all the thrill of working out the chains of interconnection all the reasoning whereby finally with you go through all of the rational connections and explain why the butterfly is a big eye on its wing fine but where do you end up you end up in a mechanical straightjacket you've got to be careful along the other line of approach that you just don't end up in a morass you could do that so you you you you look for a middle way but the point that emerges from all this is II don't be bamboozled into fearing that the black will win because and the white is the only thing there is and the black the nothing that surrounds it will eventually engulf it all these are as it were nursery stories to terrify children you live in a cosmos where the light of consciousness and the darkness of unconsciousness go back and forth just as the crests and the troughs of the waves and this situation of Yang and Yin positive and negative is exceedingly productive it's like a male and a female who become the parents of all sorts of children and out of yang in the end black and white come all these adventures through the original stratagem of pretending that the one is and the other isn't that yang is and that Ian isn't both have equally good arguments on their side and one now wins and the other now wins back and forth back and forth back and forth but don't be deceived the two are always together and the thing that you most fear the awful awful thing that could happen think it through what could that be what could the very end be what is it that you dread and you'll find out for this you go down down down down down down down into what you dread be swallowed up be annihilated let the horrible scorpion spider mother the octopus thing catch you and take you down into its inmost guts what will it do with you why it will transform you into itself and then when you are it as I said every creature feels like it's a human being because after all that's I so fish when they've eaten up something and that thing is to come you know and then the fish looks around and says gee that was a good dinner and it feels human and the fish looks around makes these things that aren't fish and they look like cows and human beings wandering around there they look like predatory monsters of some kind awful looking things got the teeth and weird um inhumane arms and legs on them not nice orderly fins and Tails and beautiful scared inside like a really good person should look so you know this thing the thing of death and of being transformed is where our life reaches a certain point where it has to go boom and in the moment you go build you forget you lose control the see that's the sensation when control is going there just on the verge of the crisis which can rule and you say well where was I geez the strange I'm alive I don't remember where I was before that's the sensation of becoming to birth and you grow and grow and you become more familiar with this and more familiar when you're completely familiar it goes blue and your new all over again seems quite different we can never believe you see when it gets to the point where we know it's about to go blood we never believed that it will go into into life we'll always think it's going to go into something dreadful but you see once you know it's it's going to keep flipping and it's it's gonna keep flipping and it's it's gonna keep flipping and the only thing is to go with that flip see get ready to go are you ready book then you can laugh because you know there's no way out

Channel: Groundless Ground

Views: 68,616

Rating: 4.7973461 out of 5

Keywords: The, Ultimate, Lecture, Hours, Alan, Watts

Id: Mc7QbpakLgQ

Length: 211min 6sec (12666 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 23 2019