The subject which has most interested me for many many years
Is the simple question
Who or what am I?
What do we mean by the word I?
And
I find as I investigate this question and talk with all kinds of people that,
generally speaking,
the word I refers to
something that we sense or experience as a
center of consciousness and decision
living somewhere inside a bag of skin.
Common speech reflects this in many ways
We say
face facts
We talked about being confronted with reality and
We talked about the difference between the knower and the known
the subjective of the objective the internal thinker and feeler
facing an external world
We say I came into this world I
Find there is therefore a general sense that I am something
To which this external world is a stranger?
That there is a feeling that
There's deep hostility
Between the subject and the object
And this again reflects itself in our common language where we talk about
the conquest of nature
the conquest of space
And the conquest of great mountains like Everest
And all that this adds up to is that the human being
Experiences himself to be very lonely
And feels that death is a terrifying threat
Because he has been brought up
In our kind of society and our kind of culture
To experience himself as something isolated
Let's review this historically because we shall see
In Western civilization
We have been in the past 2,000 years under the influence of two great myths
when I use the word myth I don't mean a
Kind of false story
The way I use the word myth
Is to signify an image a great symbol
Men use symbols to make sense of the world
and
There are
We keep changing our symbols and different cultures have different symbols
But a myth is an idea or in generally an image
Which we use to explain the world and our own lives
So then Western man has had two great images the first image is
That the world
Is the handiwork of
a creator King
The Lord God
We are
his
creatures and he has made us
In rather the same way that a Potter makes pots or a carpenter makes tables
In the book of Genesis the
Creation of Adam is described in terms of ceramics
Because the Lord God fashioned was a figurine out of the dust of the earth that is to say out of clay and then
Having made this little figure of a man. He breathed the breath of life into his nostrils and the man becomes alive
and
It's not insignificant in this line of tradition that Jesus is the son of a carpenter?
Because the whole idea of the universe is that it's an artifact it is something made
It could have been different from that
the universe could have been considered not as something made like a table or ax or a
pot
But something grown like a plant and that
Children might say to their mothers not mommy. How was I made that mummy? How was I grown?
But in our culture. It's natural for a child to ask the question. How was I made?
Now then
This whole imagery of the human being as something made by a master
craftsman
Became too much for the Western world
Because
Everybody constantly felt that they were under the surveillance of the Lord
being watched and
Being judged at every moment. I have a friend who is a very intelligent convert to Catholicism and
In her bathroom she has one of those old-fashioned
The toilet operations Webbys of tank
near the ceiling and a chain which will fall and then was a pipe which goes down from the tank to the seat and
On this pipe. There is a little plaque
with a big eye on it this kind of eye and
Underneath in Gothic lettering it says thou God seest me
So in the most private
apartment of the house
Where one closes the door and blocks it?
There is the all-seeing eye of the eternal judge of the universe?
See this was a very very awkward idea
You know how you feel in school when you were a child
And you were doing some work you were writing who may have been doing arithmetic or writing an essay
And if this teacher comes and looks over your shoulder while you're writing
You somehow feel blocked
You wish she would go away until you finished
So in the same way
Western man
Has tended to feel blocked
by the all-seeing judge of the universe and
Therefore invented another myth altogether
The universe considered as an
Unintelligent mechanism
What a relief
No God to judge me no hell to go to
No
Conscience that I need follow except my own sense of taste a
World however that is perfectly stupid a
Vast
mechanical gadget
In which I am trapped
Like a mouse in a cotton gin
and
Very many people very many intelligent people in the Western world have since the beginning of the 19th century
settled for this conception of the universe
That it is an
Unintelligent mechanism a
display of blind forces
in which human intelligence has arrived by the merest chance of
natural selection and evolution
So that we are confronted
With a system of stupidity
Called life
In which we as
intelligent accidents
are trapped and
Which therefore we have to subjugate to our rules by every conceivable?
technological device
And we know that in the end it will beat us
That each individual will die
And this kind of consciousness that we have that seems intelligent and that is capable of loving and being loved
Will simply become nothing
That in the end life will be a brave gesture against futility
Now I want you to understand that that idea although, it sounds very realistic and hard-boiled
is also a myth and
It has been for a long time among thinking people a plausible myth
After the myth of the Creator God had become implausible
See the trouble is this
No kind of science
ever proved
That the Lord God on the throne of heaven doesn't exist
What happened was simply?
That we through scientific investigation
we acquired a
sense of the universe a
Conception of time and of space
Which made the old-fashioned idea of the Lord God simply implausible
The universe
Was something much grander
Much more spectacular than could possibly have been worked out
By an old gentleman with a white beard on a golden throne
surrounded with winged angels
That was all besides he was a nosey Parker, and we didn't want him
But the new idea
that man
That intelligence and consciousness and love and so on are flukes in
an utterly irrational universe
or rather
mechanical universe
Is simply to be understood as
a reaction
against the first myth
Because as a matter of fact the idea that man is a fluke in a mechanical universe is palpably absurd
But it has an enormous influence on the way we think and
above all on the way we feel I
Said we say normally I came into this world
Why don't we say much more correctly I came out of it
Because you see a human being is a symptom of the
Universe in exactly the same way
That an apple is a symptom of an apple tree
When an apple tree produces apples
We might say this tree apples
using apples as a verb and
So in precisely the same way that an apple tree apples we are living in a universe which peoples
We are symptoms of the kind of system in which we are living and
Our appearance in the system tells us about the system
That is to say just
As in the words of Jesus
Figs do not grow on thistles nor grapes on thorns
so human beings
Do not grow
On a tree, which is early mechanical
Because human beings are not merely mechanical
What we have to realize is that a
Universe which people's
Is an intelligent thinking?
organic
living system and
Furthermore
We are not just
Separate little islands of life and consciousness existing in this world
But rather we should say that myself my consciousness
Is something that the whole universe is doing
You know in ancient times
when people wanted to draw a map of the human soul
What they did draw was a picture of the universe as
It was arranged at the moment when the individual was born
This was called his horoscope
The whole arrangement of the planets and the stars as they were then known as
They were at the moment of your birth, and this was supposed to be a picture of your character and of your destiny
Now the way through there was a lot of superstition in this but one thoroughly valid idea
That the real you
Is not just something inside your skin
The real abiding you is
all that there is
the works
as
It is focused
Here and now
At a particular place and in a particular time and
We call this particular place of time my body my organism
So your soul is not something inside your body
Your body is something inside yourself
Because your soul
Is the total cosmos all?
Stars or galaxies the whole thing
Focused here, and now at this moment
and
Just I know you've had experiences this around here that maybe this may be an unfortunate illustration, but just as a tornado
Dips down out of the sky
Here, then it withdraws and then here and then here
So in the same way
everything that there is
Dips down and
becomes an individual and
then withdraws, that's what we call death and it dips down again and
It shall I say incarnate again, and it's doing it all over the place
Has all ask people all us rabbits dogs cats trees mountains stars everything
But why don't we feel that way?
Instead of having this feeling that I am a lonely
little creature watching the world almost from outside and
Feeding that it's something with which I have to do back up
Well the answer is we've been brought up the wrong way
We've been brought up
To play the game of cops and robbers
Good guys and bad guys
That is to say
The game
Of pretending that each one of us is separate
Each one of us
Behaves on his own
And
This gets us into the most amazing messes
Think back to your own childhood
Think that
To how you came to find out that you were you and to have this sensation of being a
Separate and lonely individual
For example
We are told by our parents that there are certain things that we must do
You must go to sleep
You must love your parents you must have a bowel movement every day after breakfast
Now what is the meaning of this word must?
Is it a commandment, or is it simply
Stating us set of affairs set of conditions to be human you must have a head
Did you ever see people going around trying to have heads
No
well so in exactly the same way you remember very well that when you tried to go to sleep you stayed wide awake and
Supposing you try to love somebody so supposing you as a husband or a wife say to your spouse darling. Do you really love me?
What kind of answer do you want?
Do you want your spouse to say darling? I'm trying my best to do so
No
What you want is an answer that the question do you really love me you want the person to say
I can't help lovin you. I love you so much. I could meet you
But yet
We can say
to our children
Such a remark as darling
All good children love their mothers, and you ought to love your mother not because I say so but because you really want to
Do you see this is a request which says I
Command you to do something which will be acceptable to me only if you do it voluntarily
And that situation is called a double bind
And it goes on all the time
The most important double bind that we are put under in our upbringing
Is one which could be expressed as you must survive
We call it the instinct for survival
But actually if there is nothing of a kind, but you must survive is something really
Pushed into us, I remember talking some years ago to a woman who came to me and said
I'm scared too out of my wits. I have high blood pressure, and I'm afraid I'm going to die and
This terrifies me
So we had a long conversation. I wanted to try and find out what she was really afraid of in death and
We found out that it wasn't pain. It wasn't the idea of annihilation of
just endless not being
She said do you know what I'm really afraid of is what people are going to say
They're going to be at my funeral and they're gonna say poor old girl. She couldn't make it with you
Because you see the something disgraceful about dying your
Will to live gave up
You didn't have the guts to go on you succumb to bad
In other words it's an injury to one's pride
Because you must go on living
Now this is the double bind again because living is a spontaneous process
Just like sleeping breathing
growing air
Shaping your bones, and so on you don't have to think how this is done it happens
marvelous, but it does and
To make to let it happen optimally you mustn't get in the way of it I
Mean if you try to color your eyes blue
What a ridiculous thing is there brown?
So living you see is something that happens of itself
the Chinese term for nature
When translated to eat into English means that which is of itself so?
Which happens by itself automatically they're not in the sense of a machine, that's automatic
So if you tell the process of nature the process of life you must happen
it's exactly the same sort of thing as telling another person you must love me and
if they try to obey that commandment they put themselves into a state of contradiction I
Am trying to love you means I don't love you I
Am trying to go on living is also a an approach to life, which turns life into a drag
Know that a lot of people would really like not to go on living in to commit suicide
But they feel it's their duty to go on living because they have dependence
They also feel afraid to die because the social injunction thou shalt live is so powerful
The suicide is a crime in many
countries and states
You must do this so you see you go on living
desperately
It's so desperate that if you have terminal cancer
The doctors have to keep you alive
They keep you on the end of
tapes and tubes and Wiles a
ghastly
tortured organism must go on living because
The doctor is out of roll
When he is faced with an incurable disease
He doesn't know what to do with it without breaking his code of ethics
Now
When we are at the state of mind in which we must belong living?
Our children who are the alibis for this that is to say we feel we must go on living because we are
responsible for bringing up the succeeding generation, but all we do by this is that they
Catch the same attitude from us and they are going to drag on
For the sake of their children we're going to learn to drag on the sake of their children well isn't that great?
This is simply a system of hereditary stupidity
Because you see children learn more from the adults attitudes
Than they do from anything that about say
We try to say the right things, but the way we actually live is what counts
So if we go on living under a sense of compulsion
Mossler must get on must own that living must make that that grade whatever it is
Must
Look after the family must be faithful to your wife husband or whatever
That's a mockery and everybody knows it but won't admit it
And that you see that double bind you must love me
Is the trap in which we live and
Constitutes the main cause for our feeling isolated
from the rest of the world I
Do not live I do not feel that I live
As an expression of
The whole cosmos
Just as a leaf or an apple is an expression of a tree
But I am taught to feel that I live in spite of the cosmos
Only to the degree that I struggle against it
To rest my life
from the soil and
the waters
we
Breed a race of human beings a culture which is in technical psychological jargon alienated?
and
which feels that it has a sacred duty to beat the physical world into submission and
the symbol today in Western culture especially in the United States
Of this state of mind is the bulldozer
I
Don't know how it is here in Michigan, but where I live in California the bulldozer is ubiquitous
And this great lump powerful shoving thing it has on the front of it is knocking down hills
Is putting flat track slots in the middle of mountains and
Is the most aggressive
domineering symbol of man
Flattening the earth I
Sometimes wonder whether that passage in Isaiah
every Valley shall be exalted and
The hills laid low in the rough places claim. Is that a prophecy of something night or a
forecast of doom the
Flattened out earth no mountains no valid how boring can you get?
And the funny thing is this
That when people want to live in the hills they want to live in the hills because the hills are great
They like the hills
But if by going and living there are they destroy them is that sensible
What eventually happens of course through all these track blocks in the hills is that the Raiders come and the houses fall down the slope
Because they've upset the natural balance of the area. They've torn off all the topsoil
Scrubbed up all the brush and the vegetation
because that's tidy in need
according to these people's notions
But all the sort of thing is a symbol of man at war with his environment
Because he does not realize that his own physical existence
Includes the external world
Let me put it in another way
Your body is not just what is inside your skin
Your body
includes
What you call the external world the?
Skin doesn't divide you from nature. It joins you to it
Because the skin is simply a spongy
porous membrane
Through which you breathe and through, which your nerve ends have contact with everything outside it
It's the bridge
between you and the outside and
You on the inside and it on the outside always go together
You see look you know the most fundamental important thing in all metaphysics
You understand everything you know all mysteries of the universe if you just realize that every
Inside has an outside and every outside has an inside
These are still together
as do incidentally black and white
Light and darkness and life and death
They go together in the same way as the crest and the trough of a wave
Did you ever see a wave with the crest and no trough?
Or a trough and no crest never was there such a wave. Did you ever see an inside without an outside?
Could you have life
Without the contrast of darkness or vice versa and of course not
This is the simplest thing that everybody should learn before they learn one two three or ABC
But it's always left out
And easy when that's left out
And you don't understand that black and white are brothers they're inseparable although different
See they're explicitly different that interests. It's a one
If you don't understand that you get involved in the game or all black might win
In other words it would be easier for there to be death than life
If you've seen a little bit funny, isn't as if
Anything exists at all that ever struck you I?
Mean it'd be so much easier for there are not to have been anything because being is a bit of an answer
In a very much more rational universe if nothing had ever happened
But as a matter of fact, that's an impossible state of affairs there can't be nothing
But something
Existent
is not just being
It's an alternation of being and non-being
Do you understand that listen to the listen to a sound?
Noise there are noise something you hear
But noise isn't just sound it is an alternation of sound and silence. It's a vibration
It so now you see it now you don't and
Everything is that way
Supposing I'm sitting next to a pretty girl in the movies
And I put my hand on her knee and leave it there in the short time. She will cease to notice it
Because
It's pure being
but if I pepper underneath
Then she notices that she knows I'm still there
Because I put my hand on and take it off and on and off on and off and on and on and that's what creates
existence
So in the same way
All our
sensations
Are sensations of vibration of?
Now you see it now. You don't and these two together constitute being
life and death black and white
solid and space something and nothing
But we play the game you see that that nothing might win
Now when you see you've forgotten the connection between these two things which is the secret?
The Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle
When you've forgotten that connection and you are afraid that the black side may win that everything may be lost
That all existence may plunge into the abyss of endless night
Then you play the contrary game, but white past win
And that's where you get in trouble you must love you must live
And that's the biggest hoax ever invented
So
We go around doing battle against our own nature
Now
Can we get out of this trap
Or are we hopelessly hypnotized?
Is there anything I mean supposing you realize this is true
Can you change your state of consciousness
So that you don't any longer have to feel that you are
An isolated island
Or since sensitivity locked up at a bag of skin could you come to feel that you are really deep down
simply a particular expression of everything that there is
Could in put it not more strongly
Could you realize as?
Clearly as when you put your hands on something hard, and you know it's there. Could you realize that clearly?
That your real self
Is the works is the whole cosmos how would you go about that?
a lot of people do know this
In the East they call them Buddhas
And
They know this in a very natural way
But in order to approach that kind of knowledge they're really the main problem about it is
To get rid of our chronic objections to it
For example
This is not something you know
In quite the same sort of way that you
Know a thing you can look at from the outside by looking at your own end
See the funny thing about consciousness is this is like the headlights of a car
The headlights of a car shine down the road
But they don't shine on the wires
Immediately behind the bulb that connects it to the battery
There ain't even shine on a battery
consciousness does not assume in its own origin
You are conscious. You are aware that you don't know how?
That's because consciousness looks out instead of in
But in just the same way that underlying your consciousness is the whole complexity of your nervous system
Which is very much you but you don't know it
So in just that sort of way
Your essential self
Looks out rather than in
You don't feel it just as you don't see your own brain
But there it is and
When you die
You'll go back as it were you are withdrawn into yourself
The place the center
From which you came out when you were born
and
What happens once?
Can happen again?
Deven think it is funny to be born
Think about what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up?
Think about that
imagine
to die and
That's that
Now don't imagine yourself lying around forever in the dark in a dark room?
buried alive as an in gallant oh
No experience of darkness no experience of anything
neither darkness not light I
Can give you an immediate illustration of that
By asking you what color is your head
From the point of view of your looking around without having a mirror in you what color is your head I
Can't see it
But do you experience darkness there
No
It's not dark. I don't have a black thing behind my eyes I
Don't have a white thing. I can't get out of the door just has no color
You see
But it's a very lively thing isn't it
You can't have any conception of it
But it arm this thing which you can't get a color on on this dependence all the colors. You can see
So in the same way when you are dead
You'll go back into this thing
Which can't be seen and which can't be thought about?
As you see the moment you think about what would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up?
There comes the
Corollary why does it like to wake up without ever having gone to sleep in the first place in other words, that's birth
Now you were born you have no memory of having existed before and
What happened once can happen again
Doesn't matter how long the interval between is suppose you would ever bother you
If I mean everybody on this planet is suddenly annihilated and the huge atomic explosion
Well maybe in a
several billion years
The human experiment will happen again
In some other galaxies, and it will feel just like we feel no
That's the way it works just as there is in the seasonal way the apples come on the trees
But what we need for our health
at this time
Is human beings who have the sense of belonging?
Who have the sense that they really do
Come out of this world
Because people who have that sense
Are in a way better fitted to live in the world of those who don't have it
They're benefiting to live because they respect their environment
They respect the earth as they respect their own skins
And you aren't fit to
Interfere with the outside world and you must interfere with the outside world, there's no way of getting around that
But you aren't fit to interfere with it unless you reverence it
Unless when you build a
Town you
Do it with love
Now the striking thing about our countryside
Americans are materialist everybody says that
They're not
They hate material
Look at any
American city almost any American city
Does it look as if it was made by people who loved material?
Now it's a junkie
It's a set of fronts down Main Main Street and behind
There are wrecked automobiles and fats and junk of every conceivable
description
The most fantastic example of this is Los Angeles you can drive from Central Los Angeles way out of Fairmont
40 miles to the east and go continuously through pasteboard and junker
This is not a materialistic culture
It is devoted rather to the abolitionist material in all its aspects to the abolition of time and space
Not to the civilization of the universe but to the Los Angeles Asian of the universe
But don't think that because I put this thing after 2,000 miles to the west that it isn't here, too
A race of people you see who is not at home
doesn't love the environment and
is blind
You can go to the mountains of the West the most gorgeous valleys and see cities put up
By people who obviously don't know where they are
huge billboards
Weird and grotesque structures that absolutely are out of any kind of harmony with the environment
Expensive audience
And so by this means this is merely a symptom of the fact that we are destroying our planet
And we are destroying it because we don't realize and have no awareness of the fact that this planet is
Ourselves
The earth is not nearly our mother. It's the
Close to our heart
And
Closest still is the solar system in which the earth moves
Closest still to our heart as the galaxy in which the solar system moves and the very heart apart
Is the whole system of universes and galaxies?
in which we exist
That is the middle of you
not something far off
