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Fooled! So you can be fooled as long as you can be fooled! When you can’t be fooled you don’t ask the question anymore, because it’s all become clear.
It’s all become clear that there is no puzzle about this universe. What makes you think there are puzzles about this universe? Very simple reason: you’re trying to explain it.
And when you explain things—what do you mean by “explanation?” There are several meanings of explanation. There’s really one basic meaning, but, first of all, to be able to translate what is happening into terms of words or numbers. In other words, to describe.
But a real explanation is not just a description, it’s a description which enables us to control what we’re describing. But didn’t we see, in the last session, that to control the world is not really what we want to do? So that if all explanations have as their function enabling us to control things, then maybe an explanation isn’t what we wanted.
And furthermore, you can very simply see that what makes things complicated is explaining them! When somebody explains to you how a flower works, and he’s a great botanist and analyzes all the innards of a flower, and shows the channels, the fibers, the processes of reproduction and so on that go on in it, everybody stands fascinated, saying, “How complicated that is! How clever God must’ve been to create that flower!
To have all that complexity going!” It isn’t complicated at all. It’s only complicated when you start thinking about it. Because the vehicle of words is a very clumsy one.
And when you try to talk about the processes of nature, what is complicated is no the processes of nature but trying to put them into words. That’s as complicated as trying to drink up the ocean with a fork. Takes forever!
And so this intense complexity that we see in everything is created by our attempt to analyze it all. And so what we do is, you see, when we analyze we use our eyes and ears as scalpels. And we dissect everything.
And we have to put a label on every piece we chop off. And so we scalpelize, and we get it right down to atoms, getting finer and finer. And we suddenly thought we’ve got to the end of it, because the word “atom” means what is not cuttable; atomos.
But then they found we could cut the atom. And lo and behold, big fleas had little fleas upon their backs to bite them. And it goes on forever.
There is no end to the minuteness which you can unveil through physical investigation. For the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into pieces. And the sharper you can sharpen your knife, the finer you can cut it.
And the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed. And the sophisticated instruments that we can now make—well, there’s probably no limit to it. But in a way, all that is vain knowledge.
In a way. Because, you see, what it does is: it gives you the illusion that you’ve solved your problems. When you have control of certain things and you have solved certain practical problems, you say, “Fine.
More of that, please. Let’s go on solving problems.” And then you do. And you create a world of people, as we are today, far more comfortable than people who lived in the 19th century.
Just remember the troubles of going to a dentist when you were children—or some of you, when you were children. Of medicine. Of badly heated homes.
Of all sorts of things that we don’t put up with anymore. But the problem is: we keep running into this thing that all constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious. And when we take it as a matter of course to have certain comforts, then we switch the level on which we worry.
When you solve a whole set of problems, people find new ones to worry about. And after a while you begin to get that haven’t-we-been-here-before? feeling.
Aren’t we just going ’round on a cycle and doing this same old thing over and over and over again, because we don’t realize that we’re chasing our own tails by an eternally recurrent process of not knowing who you are? That is the hide-and-seek. That is the nature of what the Hindus call the manvantara and the pralaya: the period of the manvantara in which the worlds are manifested, and the period of the pralaya in which the worlds are withdrawn from manifestation.
In and out. In and out. “Evermore came out by the same door as in I went.” And the thing is to get to the point where you can see that you are doing that in every moment of your existence with every tiny little atom of your body.
You—now, at this minute, you see—are the whole system of inning and outing. In other words, you often think, perhaps, “Maybe a long, long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world-illusion, and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification.” My friends, there is no diversification! In other words, what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces.
But you forget that you’ve cut it. And so when you see the world as complicated and that there are life problems, and that you might one day succeed—see, hundreds and hundreds of people are running like mad after something that is success, and they have no idea what it is! So, in exactly the same way, the guru is keeping you running and running after spiritual attainment.
You don’t know what you want! See, [that’s] where Krishnamurti is so clever—because he says, “If you ask me for enlightenment, how can you ask me for enlightenment? If you don’t know what it is, how do you know you want it?” Any concept that you have of it will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the situation you’re already in.
If you think you know what you’re going out for, all you’re doing is you’re seeking the past, what you already know, what you’ve already experienced. Therefore, that’s not it, is it? Because you say you’re looking for something quite new.
But what do you mean, “new?” What’s your conception of something new? “Well,” you figure, “I can only think about it in terms of something old. Something I once had.” So he doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t indicate anything positively. Everybody says, “Why are you so negative? Why don’t you give us something to hang on to?” Well, the simple answer is: it would be spurious.
You don’t need anything to hang on to. You’re it. You don’t need a religion.
But then you say, “Well, what is all this religious stuff about, then? Why don’t we just forget it?” You can try. By all means, just go away.
Don’t go to gurus. Don’t go to church. Don’t enter philosophical discussions.
Forget it! But then you’ll realize that, by having consented to forget it, you’re still seeking. What a trap!
What can you do? See? If you stay here and listen to me, or to anyone else who comes around here, you’re fooling yourself.
But if you go away you’re fooling yourself, too! Because you still think that’s going to improve your situation. It won’t.
And therefore, when you discover that it doesn’t, you’ll think, “Well, maybe it was a mistake to go away,” and you’ll come back to the guru. And he looks at you and says, “Uh-uh-uh-uh. You are very undisciplined.
Very inferior student. You need to apply yourself.” Well, I explained what he’s doing, but it comes down in a way to a sort of contest with the guru, you see? Will you call his bluff?
You’re afraid to because you might discover that, if you do call his bluff, he’s no better than you are. Well, that’s what you’re supposed to find out—but without being cynical about it. He’s as divine as you are.
But you’ve got to call the bluff. There’s going to be a showdown. And it’s a double-bind.
The whole situation’s a double-bind because it doesn’t do you any good to stay here and it doesn’t do you any good to go away. Either to do something about it or to do nothing about it. Now then, there’s something else.
When you understand that and when you realize that there’s nothing to realize—that it’s all here—then what are you going to do? Well, of course, this is the sense of a Zen poem: You know? Do whatever one does as a human being.
But there’s a little element of philistinism in that. It’s like when a child is pestering father or mother with all sorts of questions. They finally get down to the deepest metaphysical problems, they say, “Oh, shut up and eat your donut!” And I wouldn’t say that, you see, at this point.
Because life—as one looks at it, you see—is in fact a celebration of itself. When you look out at night at the stars and you really wonder, “Good god, what is all that about?” Well, it’s a firework display and it’s celebrating high holy day. It’s “Whoopie!” And the whole world is “Whoopie!” It’s a kind of exuberance.
And therefore, the proper function of religion is digging this. It’s not seeking. It’s not seeking anything, but is in a way thanks-giving.
That’s why, of course, the Christians were right in calling the mass the Eucharist—the thanks-giving. Only, they had such a complicated way of thinking about it that nobody could understand it. So in religion, all religious exercises—whether they are meditative or whether they are ritualistic—are “Whoopie!” They are not something you do in order to attain anything.
They are like art forms, like dancing: they are expressive of attainment—of the attain-less attainment. So here’s another hangup for you: when you go to Mr. Suzuki, who runs the Zen Center, he’s a good disciple of Dōgen, who brought Zen (a certain school of Zen) to Japan in the 13th century. Dōgen said, “You can’t sit and meditate unless you’re already a Buddha—in which case, why meditate?” Well, meditation is just the way a Buddha sits.
And he called this “sitting just to sit.” Not to attain enlightenment. The minute you do that, you see, you’re not meditating. So you only become a good meditator if you’re not looking for anything.
And therefore, you realize what a great thing it is to be able to sit, and what a great thing it is not to dissect the world with your analytical intellect, to be able to look out at the water or the trees or at the floor and the light on it in front of you without calling it “light” or “floor” or “trees,” or thinking that it has parts, or thinking that it’s complicated. It isn’t. So when you can sit without thinking—not with an empty mind, mind you (I’m going back to that point); not with an empty mind, but just a non-analytic mind, a non-probing mind where you’re not creating problems all the time by trying to control it, by trying to control your mind, by trying to control your experience, what you see and hear—you then just simply discover that there is no way of controlling what you’re experiencing because what you’re experiencing is you.
And to try and really fundamentally control that—that’s just going around in a circle. So if I would say to you, “Now, what you have to learn is to let it happen,” that’s wrong, too. There’s no one to let it happen.
If I say to you, “Accept your experience. Be calm and open to things,” that, again, perpetuates the illusion that you’re something different from it. And so we go ’round and ’round.
But if there are some people who want to get together—ike we would get together to play poker, or to have a walk, go fishing, or sail a boat—if there are some people who want to get together to meditate and to have rituals and to chant, great! It’s an art form. And you can only use it and make it a good art form if you’re not using it to get something.
And this is what really is the bane of temples all over the world. You go into Buddhist temples where they theoretically don’t believe in any god. But there are the people praying.
And they are all doing it in order that we get a male child next time around, or that the horse recover from a disease, or that mama gets cured of the dropsy. And all these petitions are going on and on and on: people always coming to the temple to ask for something. Lowbrow people for lowbrow things, highbrow people for highbrow things.
And then all the vendors sit outside and sell souvenirs and magic and charms, and all the people go in and do this, and all these serious priests sitting there really having to keep up face, and say, “Yes sir, we can provide these services!” On the other hand, if you go into one of these temples along with all the faithful followers and have a ball—buy a bead, buy a candle, buy a this, buy a that, buy some incense. Go in and dig this great thing going on! Salute the Buddhas, or the altars, or the crucifixes, or what you will—but don’t take it seriously!
And this is one of the great important transformations of today, in our consciousness: is that a great many people are finding out that religion is not supposed to be taken seriously. This is a shocking thing to many people. There used to be an old saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh across the altars.
That’s true in one sense. When the priests know that they’ve got a racket going they don’t believe one word of it and they are laughing across the altar because of all these suckers around doing it, then it’s true: the religion is dead. But when the priests laugh at the altar because they’re having such fun, because this whole scene is so beautiful—well, it’s the difference between some stuffy old Buddhist priest humming a sūtra and Allen Ginsberg chanting a sūtra.
That’s the thing to hear. Because these priests are going, “Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh”—you know, they go off interminably. “Bwugh, bwugh”—it’s a bore!
They’re sick of it, but they get paid for it. This is magical. But when Allen Ginsberg chants a sūtra, everybody gets in a circle, and he gets these little bells, and they get going.
It’s just like a jam session where everybody is absolutely delighted. Well, that’s the way to do it! And if you can’t do it that way, forget it!
It was as a result of looking at paintings like this that I first became interested in Eastern philosophy. That was many years ago, when I was a boy only about fourteen years old. And the thing that grasped me and excited me about this vision of the world was the astonishing sympathy and feeling for the world of nature.
Think, for example, of a painting like this, which is called Mountain After Rain: a painting by the Chinese artist Gao Kegong showing the mist and clouds drifting away after a wet night of pouring rain. And it’s fascinating for us to think that pictures of this kind are not what we would call just landscape paintings, they are also icons. That is to say, they are a religious and philosophical kind of painting.
We are used to, of course—in thinking of iconographic or religious paintings—thinking of pictures of human figures; of angels and saints and divine beings. But when the mind of the Chinese expresses its religious feelings, it expresses it in the objects of nature. And their feeling for nature is in one very important respect strangely different from ours.
And that is as a result of the sensation that the human being is not someone who stands apart from nature and looks at it from an entirely outside position, but the human being has himself the feeling of belonging right in nature. And this is very startlingly illustrated if you look at another painting, this one by the great Song Dynasty painter Ma Yuan, called Poet Drinking By Moonlight. You’d think it was just a landscape painting and struggle to find the poet.
But if you look very closely at the bottom part of the painting, you will see him right there drinking a cup of wine, sitting at a table, with his boy attendant beside him—I suppose that’s the equivalent of what would be a graduate student for a professor of English literature these days. But that tiny man, lost in the landscape, is representative and symbolic of the whole attitude of the Chinese mind and of Chinese philosophy to the harmony of man and nature: man not dominating nature, but fitting into it and feeling perfectly at home. But, you know, our attitude is very strange and different.
And we constantly use a phrase which, in the ears of Chinese people, sounds very peculiar indeed. We speak constantly of the conquest of nature: the conquest of space, the conquest of mountains (like Everest). And they would say to us: why, what’s the matter with you?
Why must you be in such a fight all the time with your environment? Aren’t you grateful to the mountain? That it, itself, lifted you up when you got to the top of it?
Aren’t you grateful to space, that it opens itself out for you so that you can travel through it? Why do you think all the time of getting into a fight with it? That is indeed—isn’t it?—our dominant feeling: that we are using science and technology, the powers of electricity and steel, to carry on a fight with our external world and to beat our surroundings into submission with bulldozers.
And it’s also the same with our attitude to our own nature, because we’ve been brought up in a religio-philosophical tradition which has taught us to a great extent to mistrust ourselves—that is to say, it has taught us as reasoning and willing beings to mistrust our animal and instinctual nature. We have inherited a doctrine of original sin which tells us not to be too friendly, to be very cautious, with our own human nature. And this is something which is all very well, for we have indeed achieved marvelous things by technological interference with and alteration of nature.
But if this thing is carried beyond a certain point, it gets us into very serious trouble indeed as a result of what I would call the law of diminishing returns. Now, it’s something like this, to illustrate it in a very simple way. Supposing you start mistrusting your own senses.
Supposing you are the sort of person that, when you go out for a walk in the morning, you’re going down to the market, and you wonder: did I turn off the gas stove? And you’ve only gone a few paces from your house, and you think you must go back and take a look in the kitchen and see if you really did turn it off. So back you go, and you open the back door, look in the kitchen—yes, you did turn it off.
So you close the back door and off you go again. And then, a few paces out, you think: I wonder if I really saw correctly. Did I look carefully enough?
And if at that point you break down and go back again, the more careful you’re going to be, you’re never going to get out shopping. You’re going to be tied in a bind. And although you may say: well, that’s only the sort of thing a very stupid person needs to do, as a matter of fact, this is what our culture is beginning to carry on in very big dimensions.
For example, we are privileged (in the United States) to enjoy freedom in a way that many other peoples in the world don’t have it. Yet, at the same time, we are very anxious to be sure that our freedom won’t be abused. And we keep saying when somebody does something that is an abuse of freedom: there ought to be a law against it.
And so hundreds and thousands of laws are put into effect to prevent people from abusing their freedoms. And so much legislation involves the most complicated processes of record-keeping as, for example, the record you have to send in every April to be sure you didn’t cheat on your financial affairs. Records which become more and more complicated so that, nowadays, sending in an ordinary individual income tax return is as complicated as extracting the cube root of a complicated number.
And the net result of our anxieties to write down just exactly and to the hair—so that some shyster lawyer won’t find a loophole—exactly and to the last hair what we may and may not do, the net result of this is: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do anything at all. In other words, if you want to start a business enterprise, if you want to, say, create a nonprofit society, you have to hire lawyers, you have to have whole staffs of secretary to attend to the bookkeeping, the records, the returns that must be made to the government. And some of our great universities even have vice presidents in charge of relations with the government.
The same thing comes out, for example, also in our animosity to nature in the sense of wanting to obliterate distance. We want to go faster and faster everywhere we go, and so annihilate the span of the Earth between ourselves and the place we want to reach. But what is the ultimate result of this?
Just think: if you’re getting faster and faster from point to point, and obliterating the distance between points, two things happen. In the first place, all points that are set next to each other—by, say, jet propulsion—begin to become the same points. In other words, the faster you can get from Los Angeles to Hawai’i, the more Hawai’i becomes exactly like Los Angeles.
And therefore tourists keep asking: “Well, has it been spoiled yet?” And by that they mean: is it just exactly like home? And furthermore, if we begin to think about our goals in life as destinations, as points to which we must get, it begins to cut out all that makes the points worth having. It’s like saying: well, instead of giving you a full banana to eat, I will give you the two precise ends of the banana.
And that would not be in any sense a satisfactory meal. But that is what happens as we tend to fight our environment and to want to get rid of the wonderful limitation of space and distance. And, you know, if we carry this kind of thing to its ultimate extreme we get into a most extraordinary tangle, which I think I can very well illustrate in this way.
Let’s go and have a look over here at a sentence which has been written on the board. That is a sentence which is behaving like we are behaving in our mistrust of nature. That is a sentence which fundamentally does not trust itself.
And it says of itself, “This statement is false.” Now, what do you see funny about that? This sentence behaves in an extremely peculiar way. Because if it is true, then it is not true.
And if it’s not true, then that’s what it says: it isn’t true, so it’s true. So that if the statement is true, it is false, and if it is false, it is true, and so on and so on. In other words, the meaning of the sentence is oscillating.
It’s shaking from true to false, true to false, like an electric bell vibrating. And, in other words, you might say that this particular sentence is suffering from anxiety. For anxiety is the condition that comes upon us when we fundamentally mistrust ourselves, when we mistrust our own nature, and are trying to keep such a tight grip on it that we start to tremble as one’s hand starts to tremble if you become extremely anxious to hold it still.
Now, Chinese thinking—of which there are really two main currents: the Taoist current and the Confucian. Taoist, that’s spelled t-a-o-i-s-t, and Confucian. And both of these main currents of Chinese thought agree on one fundamental principle, and that is that the natural world in which we live and human nature itself must basically be trusted.
They would say of a person who can’t trust his own nature: well, if you can’t trust your own nature, how can you trust your very mistrusting of it? How do you know that that’s not wrong, too? And so if you don’t trust your own nature, you are as fundamentally balled up as anyone can get.
Now, it’s interesting to look at the fundamental Chinese word which we translate as “nature,” because it has a rather different meaning from the word that we use. In Chinese, “nature” is written like this. You know that Chinese characters are fundamentally pictures.
And this first one—here’s the picture (自)—used to be a face, and so it means “one’s self,” or “of itself.” And the second character—I don’t know what this was originally; it’s become now a very abstract figure (然)—that means “so.” And so the whole figure (自然) means “of itself so,” and we should give the rough English equivalent of that as “spontaneity.” That which happens of itself just in the same way, for example, that your hair is growing by itself, your heart is beating by itself; so that if you feel your pulse, you get the funny sensation of movement going on inside your body, and you think, “Oh, I’m not doing that! That’s something queer going on inside me over which I have no control.” But when you come to think of it, what is more fundamental, what is more central to you, what is more the very middle of yourself than your own heart? And so this idea of nature—that which happens of itself so—is a process which is fundamentally not under our control, which is happening all on its own just as our breathing is happening all on its own and just as our heartbeat is happening all on its own.
And the fundamental thought of Taoist philosophy is that this self-so process has to be trusted. If you turn, now, to Confucian ideas, we will find another word that represents the basis of human nature. This word, written like this (仁), has a funny pronunciation.
Although, when we romanize this word in English, we spell it j-e-n, which is pronounced ren. Sort of like rolling an “r,” or rather saying “r” but not rolling it. And this word is the cardinal virtue in the whole system of Confucian morality.
It’s usually translated “human-heartedness” or “humanness,” but when Confucius was asked to give a precise definition of it, he refused. He said, “You have to feel the meaning of this virtue. You must never put it into words.” And the wisdom of his attitude about not-defined ren is simply this: that a human being is always greater than anything he can say about himself and anything he can think about himself.
If we formulate ideas about our own nature, about how our own minds and emotions work, those ideas are always going to be qualitatively inferior—that is to say, far less complicated, far less alive than the actual author of the ideas themselves, and that is us. So there’s something about ourselves which we can never get at, which we can never define, in just the same way that you can’t bite your own teeth, you can’t without the aid of a mirror look into your own eyes, you can’t hear your own ears, and you can’t make your own hand catch hold of itself. So that you must basically trust this.
Confucius would say he would rather trust human passions and human instinct than he would sometimes trust human ideas about what is right. For example, when people go to war, they very often go to war about who has the right ideology? Who has the right of this particular dispute and who has the wrong of it?
And because there can be no agreements, no compromise between principles of right and wrong, ideological wars generally tend to be vastly disgusting. On the other hand, when we go to war for simple ordinary greed, because I am greedy of another peoples, another nation; I want to carry off their goods, I want to carry off their women—I would at least be sure in going to war with them that I don’t destroy the thing I want to possess. And so if we are, then, bound to trust our own nature, this attitude of hands-off, of not interfering with one’s self beyond a certain point, is called—again, in Lao Tzu’s Taoist philosophy—this: wu wei.
This character means “no,” “not,” or “don’t,” and it’s said to have been originally based on a picture of bunches of grass tied together, like this, indicating that a certain area is taboo. “You mustn’t step on this area. The ground is sacred.
So don’t. Keep off!” is its meaning. And it’s possible that this was originally a drawing of a hand over a bird, like this.
Well, the meaning of this is “grasping a bird.” The whole idea is: “don’t grasp the bird.” In other words: don’t clutch at what is living. If, for instance, you—like sometimes, little children pick up a kitten, and they’re so eager to hold the kitten they squeeze it tightly, and the kitty says Meow! Meow!
and scratches the child all over the place. It’s because he is loving it, he is grasping it, too tightly. And so, in the same way, we have to allow all living things to let go and manage themselves.
Look, supposing if, in drawing, I wanted to be absolutely certain that my hand didn’t go away from a line, and I began to get anxious: is it going to go straight? And so let’s bring in this hand to hold onto it. Oh, and let’s bring this on straight.
But now, how can I be sure my left hand’s going to stay still? Indeed, the right one’ll have to catch hold of it. Oh, and then we’re in a total mess.
But, you see, we in the West are basically afraid that, if we trust our own nature, everything will turn into chaos. We’re afraid, as it were, not to keep holding a club over our heads, to keep watching on our instincts and our passions and our so-called uncivilized animal natures, fearing that they will go awry. But, you know, when you let go of that grip on yourself, sometimes astounding things happen.
You get out of your own life. You’re functioning altogether in one piece. I mean, after all, a person who is basically divided against himself, who is in inner conflict and is trying to go in two directions at once, he can’t go anywhere.
He just has to sit and dither. Whereas if I’m going all in one direction, then at least I’m going—and even if I’m going in the wrong way, I can change the direction. But if I’m trying to go in two ways at once, I don’t get anywhere at all.
Now, artists in the Far East have made a great deal of what they call the controlled accident: marvelous things which happen as surprises. When an artist does not try to dominate his medium, but lets his medium itself do some of the work. Take, for example, this cigarette jar that I have here.
Do you see the glaze has just been slopped on it in a swift motion of the wrist? And do you notice, as I turn it, that there are all sorts of little flecks of light inside the black outline there? And little flecks of black, like right here, outside the main band of black?

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