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So, in exactly the same way, all our bodies appear to have constant form, but we are a flowing of energy. So we keep coming in and out. Also, it isn’t only in this way that we’re the constant flow; that you cannot say “I’m a separate event,” but it’s also because every thing that could be called—could be recognized—as a wiggle or a unit of any kind in this world has its existence only in relation to all the rest of them.
This is the principle that, in Buddhist philosophy, is called jiji muge (事事无碍): ‘the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.’ This is very important. I’m sure some of you have recently read in, say, the Scientific American, about holograms: a method whereby you can take a small square out of a photographic negative and, by the use of laser beams, reconstruct the whole negative out of which it was taken. Because the little part is nurtured and comes to be in a field of forces in such a way that all the lines of force within the little part imply the lines of force of the total photograph when it was taken.
It can be reconstructed. Maybe Wynn can explain this more accurately than I can. But this is essentially the hologram.
Because, you see, every part—anything that can be designated as a part of something—implies the whole just as the whole implies the part. Thus, a clever anthropologist can take a jawbone and can reconstruct from the jawbone, through all his anthropological knowledge, the beast or man to which it originally belonged. He’ll say, “A jawbone like this, you see, implies this kind of a skull,” and so on and so forth.
So, every single thing in this world exists only in relation to the whole system, to all the other things, because—the important point to realize here is that existence is relationship. Relationship is another word for existence. There is no yang without the yin.
It is the relationship of yang and yin that enables yang to be possible and yin to be possible, solid to be possible and space to be possible, up and down, life and death, being and non-being. It is a relationship. So that, for example, if I have a drum but there is no skin on the drum, it doesn’t matter how hard I hit it, it will make no sound.
Because the sound is the relationship of the drum skin and the hand. And you can carry that principle all the way along; that, in other words, if I shout in a completely non-resonating environment, I will make no noise. In other words, if I shout in a vacuum, there is no sound because I have to make waves, you see?
And I can’t make waves if there’s no water. So, existence is relationship all the way along. And fundamentally, then, the relationship of all of us together, of all society, constitutes every one of us.
We are—as individuals, as personalities—what we are in terms of a human community and of an interlocking complex of communities. And you may remember when you were children—I remember it very vividly how my personality changed in relation to each community that I went into. In other words, I was one boy at home, I was a completely different boy among my peer group in school, I was another boy altogether when visiting my uncle, and I realized I had all these different personalities in relation to different communities.
And eventually, I put them together in some sort of way and integrated. But I feel, still—although I’ve got it more or less together—I like to come on differently in different sets of people and play the joker. Which, instead of playing a fixed role, and you can say, “Well, is that always you?
Can we rely upon you always to have this sort of behavior, mannerisms, and reactions?” I say, “No, I’m not going to get fixed up in that. I’m going to play tricks!” But you did notice that, you see, when you were a child, because—you see—you were being defined all the time by the groups you were in. And so you are what you are, as a person—that is to say, as playing a role in life—in relation to the groups with which you move.
And that is a little model of the fact that everything is what it is in its place. Now, for example, it has been a sort of convention of scientific thought hitherto—especially in the kind of science of the 19th century—to try to understand anything and say what it is by a process of analysis. You understand it by asking, “What is it made of?
How is it composed? How was it put together?” And so you dissect it. You get your microscopes out and you try to dissolve it down to the smallest possible component parts.
And that gives a certain explanation of it, you see? But what is equally important is to look in the other direction. What anything is is defined not only in terms of what it’s made of, but of when it is and where it is: its context in time and space.
Just as the meaning of a word is dependent on the context of the sentence, or the paragraph, or the book in which it is found. So, likewise, we, with our rather myopic way of looking at things. Because analysis—the ability to analyze and to think analytically—comes from great skill in dividing wiggles.
See, you may think that this is a very, very fine wiggle. You see? But I can make wiggles so little that you can’t keep track of them, because you’re not as sharp as I am, see?
I’m going to make wiggles and we’re going to have a little competition: who can make the smallest wiggle and keep track of them? Because that’s a test. If you can keep track of them and you can prove it to someone else.
Of course, if you get down so small [that] nobody can keep track of you, then they don’t know whether you’re a charlatan or not. But if you can keep track of the wiggles and prove to other people that you kept track of them—see, this is the whole game of scholarly one-upmanship: if you can keep track of it. It’s the same with certain kinds of music, you see?
You can do very complicated rhythms, and they’ll believe you if you can do it again. It’s not enough to do it once, they say, “Do that again! Or was that a fluke?” That shows, you see, that you’re in control and you’ve been able to count out the beats.
So, through the analytical mind—which pays attention to the details—we have got great skill in doing that. But you do that at the expense of neglecting completely the other side of things: in what context does every individual wiggle happen? See?
That’s just the other side of it. It’s very important to define the wiggle, but you can’t define the wiggle unless the wiggle has an environment. The outside of the wiggle is just as important as the inside.
So, in the same way, everybody has an outside and everybody has an inside. We identify ourselves with what is inside—we say, “That’s me”—and thereby ignore the fact that what is outside you is just as much your outside as what is inside you is your inside. And that’s always overlooked.
And, I mean—when I talk about your outside I don’t mean just the surface of your skin. I mean everything outside your skin, that’s your outside. And if that isn’t functioning in a certain way, the inside doesn’t function either.
They go together. It’s like when a snake moves: the snake makes a curl, and so one side of it is convex and the other side is concave. Which side moves first?
Why, they both move together. And so, in the same way, the inside world and the outside world are not different—in the sense that they’re not separate. They’re different, yes: one’s inside, the other’s outside.
But they’re not separate. They move together. Only, we’re unaware of it—in the ordinary way—through a kind of psychological myopia of fixing on, of being hung up on certain ways of looking at things.
There’s a Buddhist word—kleśa (क्लेश) in Sanskrit, bonnō (煩悩) in Japanese—that we normally translate ‘attachment’ or ‘defiling passion.’ The exact translation of kleśa in modern American is ‘hangup.’ It’s a perfect word for it: to have a hangup. And so, to be hung up on a fixed way of looking at things that the world is only divided in this way, and that way, and the other way is to fail to see what I’ve been describing, then, as the going-togetherness, the inseparability of all insides from all outsides and vice versa, and of all organisms from their environments and vice versa. You can get this very clearly when you realize that, if you get hung up on the viewpoint of separateness, then even your body is not a unity.
You are just a mass of cells. And if, then, you take in physics: you’re not even cells, you’re molecules. Not even molecules, just atoms.
Not even atoms! Just subatomic particles; wavicles, or whatever. And you disintegrate everything into that, and you realize that there are vast spaces between all these tiny little wiglets—whatever they are; wavicles—huge spaces.
Y’know, if a molecule in your body was magnified to the size of a tennis ball, the nearest one would be quite a way away. Well, what ties all this together, you know? How can you look at that as a unity?
Well, it’s tied together by space, fields of force, gravitation. And so, in exactly the same way, look at us behaving around here from a larger level of magnification, and you could very easily see that we are just as tied together as the molecules in our hands, and that generation after generation—you know—we come and go. You look at the leaves coming on the trees in the spring, and you can say—you can describe this in so many different ways.
You can say “These are new leaves. Last year’s leaves fell off and have fallen into the ground, and now a new generation of leaves come which are quite different.” And if a leaf had an ego—you see—it would say, “Wowee! I’ve come into being!
I’m new.” But from another point of view you could just say, “The tree is leaf-ing again.” This is something the tree does, like every so often a man gets up in the morning and he shaves: he’s shaving. See? And he stops doing that; the next morning, he’s shaving again.
Now, is the shaving as if something that has an ego? And that every day’s shave is a different shave? It is, from one point of view.
It is different, but it’s also shaving; it’s the same. It’s because we’re so fascinated with the individual details of people that, generation after generation, we say they’re quite different. But somebody who really was from Mars and didn’t understand people would say they keep on coming, they’re just the same ones coming back.
So every year’s leaves are the same old leaves coming back, see? They die, they are re-absorbed, and they keep coming back. The thing keeps doing it again, but there are these spaces in it, you see?
It’s like the troughs between the crests of a wave. And we say—where there are those spaces we don’t see anything—so we say, “That’s finished!” So, when you die you think, “Well, that’s finished. Too bad!” But, you see, what you are—really—is the energy field, and it keeps doing you!
It keeps peopleing. And it’s you who keep peopleing. Who else is responsible?
Only, of course, we mustn’t admit that we’re responsible for this because the whole game is to pretend you aren’t. See? It’s happening, but it has nothing to do with me; I’m not in control of this.
In this morning’s session I was emphasizing primarily the theoretical aspects of ecological awareness, showing how our differentiation between separate things and events is an abstraction and that the whole world is an inseparable unity. Not of separate parts, but of the kind of system in which everything that might be called a part—when we talk about it—everything that might be called a part is, in fact, an expression or function of the whole thing. And that—if we came to our senses—we would be aware of ourselves not as only on the inside of our skins, but we would be aware that the outside is us, too.
That there is a relationship between the organism and the environment, the subject and the object, and the individual and the world such that the two presuppose each other. And I did get around to the point of mentioning—towards the end—the reason how and why this can become apparent if our minds are not constantly obsessed with verbiage. If, in other words, we can come to contemplating, seeing, feeling the actual world without putting names and labels on it—in other words, to see it directly rather than thinking about it—for, as I said, these separations are conceptual.
Now, I want to take this into a more practical dimension this afternoon. And that is to say that, hand in hand with this whole question of overcoming the hallucination of separateness, there goes also the formation of a new style of relationship to the material present. It’s very important, you see—first of all—to realize that all reality is present, that the present moment is where you have always lived and where you will always live.
There is no other time than now. Time past and time future are also abstractions. But in our culture, in particular, we have a very bad relationship to the material present, and not only to the present but also to that aspect of the same thing which is material.
And this comes out so strongly in the way in which we educate our children: we do not—in our schools—really have anything very much which relates people to the material present, and thus our achievements in regard to the handling of the material present are extremely shoddy. School prepares people for a kind of Brahmin’s existence, that is to say, for literary, verbal operations. It educates us to be bureaucrats, insurance salesmen, banker’s clerks, accountants, and lawyers, maybe doctors, and so on.
And a person who is going on—say, in high school, and is thought not fit for college—is encouraged to take reluctantly offered courses in trades and manual skills. And in England—where the state of affairs is much worse that it is here, even—they always make jokes about American universities where you can get a B. A. degree in basket-weaving.
Because that’s in for a dig; that is loss of face in an academic community: that there should be basket-weaving courses. Bad enough to have a degree in physical education. But the point of the matter is that we are so obsessed with the life of abstractions, with problems of status, with problems of the world as symbolized rather than the world to be symbolized, that most of us don’t relate to physical existence at all.
Now, I remember—and I mentioned this in one of those leaflets I sent out—but I remember very well in 1936, in London, at the World Congress of Faiths, when Suzuki Daisetsu was present—he’s the one who’s written all the essays on Zen Buddhism; the great scholar—and he had made a very, very significant contribution to the congress; various lectures and discussions he had held. And at the final meeting of the congress they took over the Queen’s Hall—great big auditorium—and they set as the subject matter for the evening: “The Supreme Spiritual Ideal,” upon which representatives of all the great religious traditions got up and delivered themselves of volumes of hot air. Finally, Suzuki was the last speaker.
And he got up and he said, approximately, “I am feeling very confused tonight. I am simple countryman from a faraway place, and I find myself in this assembly of so many people. I am asked to talk about supreme spiritual ideal.
Seems to me, I do not know what supreme spiritual ideal is, so I look up ‘spiritual’ in dictionary. I cannot understand.” He said, “You have, around here, very big city, and I walk along street, and very prosperous. But it’s not right.
You have spiritual over here, you have material world over here. And both are unreal.” And then he went on to give a description of his house and garden in Japan. And at the end of it, he had a standing ovation, for—somehow—he was real; he came across as somebody who’s lovable, intelligible and human, as distinct from a mere preacher.
And he made this intensely important point that if you understand the spiritual correctly, it is not different from the material. The material is the spiritual. But in order to see why that is so, one first has to make a clear difference between the material and the abstract and to understand that the abstract doesn’t mean the same thing as the spiritual.
The abstract world is a world of symbols, a world of words, a world of concepts which has the same relation to the physical universe as the menu to the dinner, or as money to wealth—I mean money in the sense of bookkeeping entries in a bank or dollar bills. One must be very careful, therefore, not to confuse the spiritual and the abstract. If by the spiritual we designate the domain of ultimate reality—the unified or, more strictly, non-dual energy of the universe that I was talking about this morning—that has nothing whatsoever, really, to do with abstractions.
What we call physical reality—the material world—is much closer to what would be meant by “spiritual” than anything abstract is. But the thing is that when we form in our minds—the average person who talks about the physical world, he has a concept of the physical world which is what really should be referred to as “materiality” when one uses that word in a put-down way. If, for example, we talk about—I could even say this to theologians and they would eventually understand me—if we talk about the evils of the flesh, the word “the flesh” doesn’t mean the body in the sense of this [Alan (presumably) indicates at his own body].
The flesh, as something evil, represents a conception of the body as something to be exploited in order to satisfy one’s spiritual emptiness. And thus, too, when we speak of materialism: we aren’t really talking about materialism, we’re talking about an abstract conception of the value of the material world. Real materialism would, of course, be the love of material, which is something quite different from materialism as one sees it in practice.
So it’s very important to realize that when we say “the physical world” and we talk about matter as something which is antithetical to the spiritual, you are not talking about this [Alan indicates at his body] because all this doesn’t have those kind of qualities that we would call materiality as against the spiritual. If you really get in touch with your senses, with the so-called physical world, you’re in for many surprises. First of all—if you go back to the point I made that there really is only the present—you will see that what we call this physical world is not something expanded in time, stretched out over time, and it is not material also in the sense of being composed of stuff.
You see, one of our problems in the West is we think about the relationship of the spiritual to the physical by analogy with form and matter, or rather, with clay as matter and the form as the pot made out of the clay. And therefore, we’ve never been able to put the two together because our conception of matter as something essentially like clay—a sort of primordial stuff—this has no intelligence, nor does it possess energy. Therefore, when you think of the world as a sort of cooperation—or a mixture of form and matter—you have, therefore, to invoke an external agency to inform matter and to bring it into shape, to order it, and to produce art.
But this dualism of form and matter is really rather meaningless. Nobody ever saw an immaterial form or a formless material. There really is no such thing as “stuff” out of which the universe is made.
“Stuff” is actually a word for looking at the world with bad focus. When your focus on something is not clear, it is fuzzy. And this fuzziness, or indistinctness, is “stuff.” When your focus on the world is clear, you see pattern, you see details, you see structure.
Now, as you look more deeply into any structure it starts to get fuzzy again, and therefore you ask, “Of what stuff is this structure made?” “Stuff” meaning “fuzz.” But then again, when you turn up the level of magnification and it once again becomes bright and clear, you see within the great structures and the great patterns smaller ones. So, you always encounter the world as patterning, never as stuff. And so, our physical world that surrounds us is, in a way, immaterial.
It is a fantastic pulsation of vibrations which give an illusion of solidity in just the same way as if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark and rapidly revolve it, you get the illusion of a continuous circle of fire. So, the apparent motion of the present moment from the past to the future gives an illusion of continuity as if there were something extended in time. And in exactly the same way, the table—because it is vibrating with such tremendous energy—gives the illusion of solidity in exactly the same way as the blades of a propeller or an electric fan when they’re in rotation.
And in the same way as you’ll come to trouble if you try to put your finger through the fan, the only reason you can’t get your finger through the table: it’s going even faster than a fan, and it bounces your finger off. When you feel hardness your finger is being bounced off because of this tremendous energy that lies in and as the table. Likewise, it’s also in your finger.
So, what we’re actually confronted with, what is here and now—nowever—is certainly not a material world as we ordinarily conceive it, but is something intensely magical and strange. And the more—Spinoza once said, “The more you know of particular things, the more you know of God.” And then, put it in another way: if you want to find out what is the spiritual, what is Buddha-nature, what is Brahman, what is Tao, the best way is to go directly to the physical world and find out: the physical world as you are it, and as everything around you is it; the immediate experience. Now, to go back.
This, as I said, is something which our culture—which WASP culture in particular—neglects, because we are obsessed with abstract attainments. And this goes back to some curious factors in our history. To introduce this matter I have to refresh your minds about caste, strangely enough.
In ancient Hindu society, there are four castes, respectively: brahmins, who are priests, theologians, philosophers, and intellectuals; kṣatriya, who are warriors and rulers, politicians; vaishya, who are merchants; and shudra, who are laborers, blue-collar workers. These castes have something peculiar about them in the fact that they are eternal—let me say perennial. They still exist, even though we don’t admit it.
There are kṣatria people around and they are very different from brahmins. The typical fraternity American with his crew cut and his—uses alcohol, is agressive, likes football, and so on—he’s a kṣatria type. The professorial, quiet fellow is a brahmin.
The businessman is a vaishya, and our blue-collar people are shudras. They’re still there. And they’re all necessary to each other; they balance each other in a very fascinating way.
The brahmin cannot get on by himself, he needs the kṣatria, the vaishya, and the shudra. And likewise, every one of them needs the others. But there was a curious revolution in Europe at the time we call the Reformation.
When the vaishyas got the upper hand of the brahmins and the kṣatrias, the feudal aristocracy began to lose power in the face of, say, the great merchant bankers of Italy and the burghers of central Europe. The brahmins, who were the priests of the Roman Catholic church, began to lose power because their doctrine was criticized and fell under suspicion. For, you must see that the Protestant religion was the creation of the burgher cities of Europe, of places like Geneva, Frankfurt, and—one must add—London, Edinburgh.
And immediately, money values began to dominate Christian theology. For example, the number of holy days was very strictly cut down by on Protestant sects because those were holidays and the merchants didn’t want their apprentices taking all these holidays off an not busying themselves. And so, always connected with the Protestant ethic are the virtues of frugality, saving money, saving up for the future, and in such things are vaishya ideals running a bit wild.
And thus, you see, the common-sense ethic—that is to say, the basic conception of the good life as it is held in the United States—is very largely a creation of bourgeois Protestantism. We have a very bad relation to the material present. Because that’s one thing that the vaishya can’t maintain by himself anymore than the brahmin or the kṣatria or the shudra could maintain it by himself.
We have a whole world based on these two things: save up, there’s a good time coming—so, put your money aside, invest it—secondly, which is somewhat contradictory: happiness consists in the possession of things. A lot of people, when they feel inadequate, bored, unfulfilled, try to get rid of this sensation by going shopping. A lot of people spend all their daytime shopping.
That’s the thing to do. You go out and shop. There are women galore who go into San Francisco every day just to shop and come back loaded with all kinds of things.
But these things are not true material possessions—for at least two reasons. Number one: most of them aren’t well-made. Number two: you can’t use that many things.
You can store them, you can put them away, you can show your friends that you’ve got this and that, but you can’t live in six houses at once, you can’t ride more than two horses at a time—unless you’re doing some sort of a circus act, you know? You can’t drive more than one car at a time. So we tend to become absolutely overloaded with possessions and have the greatest difficulty, therefore, in moving ourselves around.
Because every time we move, we have to carry all the stuff with us. Let’s take the comparison between a Japanese living room and a British, American, or German living room. You see, the Japanese living room: you have a table, and some cushions, and the floor.
And you don’t have any beds because you sleep in a futon, in a quilt, and that’s delightful. You don’t, therefore, have to haul beds around, you don’t have overstuffed chairs which stand in most rooms like gun emplacements—you know, these huge things, vast things that have to be pushed around, very heavy. We, in other words, are absolutely cluttered with enormously heavy objects.
And it doesn’t redound to our true material comfort because we’re always using our muscles to lug them around. They have to be taken care of, they have to be cleaned, the moths have to be kept out of them. They’re a perfect pest!
So we don’t really understand furniture. Now, I would think furniture, and a house, and a shelter over you is one of the most important things in life. Shelter is fundamental.
But when you see what shelter most people in the United States have provided for themselves, you’re aghast. Clapboard boxes—miles and miles and miles of them—that you wouldn’t want a dog to live in. Have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood’s home?
The absolutely uninspired junk. It has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. It isn’t good design, it isn’t fun, it’s just nowhere.
What’s something else of material importance that, really, after all, we ought to know something about? Clothes. Well, by and large, we are shockingly clothed as compared with many other people.
Men go around looking like funeral directors in the most uncomfortable survivals of military uniforms. Women wear frocks and dresses, and things to cover up amazing systems of pulleys and blocks and tackles. And, you know, it’s sleazy and they have no real joyous color.
Occasionally—I mean, we all know exceptions—but I’m talking about the generality of the culture. The clothes don’t look as if anybody really enjoyed wearing them. They’re worn because one has to be dressed and covered up, and decent.
And therefore, they’re worn rather apologetically. To get, furthermore, they wear out in nothing flat. And to buy good clothes you have to go outside the country.
There are, of course—if you want to dress in a rather traditional way, you go and get British tweeds from the Hebrides. But if you want to dress colorfully and beautifully you have to go to Mexico and get gorgeous materials. Or to India, and get silk for saris.
Or to Java, and get batiks for sarongs. And these things will last forever. They are beautifully made by people who had a real enthusiasm about making them.
Because in the life of the people who make such things, they don’t make a differentiation between working and playing. But in a culture where you work, and play is different—you work in order to make money to play—this is insane! Because you spend most of the time working, and then if all you carry… if you don’t really value the work—I mean, you’re lucky if you’ve got work that you really enjoy doing—but if you don’t really value the work, all you get out of it is money.
Then you come home with that and you’re supposed to play. Well, you’re pretty tired, to begin with, and we just don’t play. That’s all there is to it.
You might play Saturday, or something, when there’s a day off. But in the evening very few people actually play. They sit and passively watch television.
And they got all the money in the world—I mean, compared with Hindus and African and so on, we live like princes. But we don’t enjoy it. Not really.
There’s no gusto for it. You would think that people would come home and have orgies, and banquets, and… with all that money, and they don’t! It’s just a—sort of—constant disappointment.
Well, going back to clothes: I can illustrate another way in which our clothes are made without regard for material values. Most clothes are made of cloth, and when you weave cloth, cloth has a certain nature. It comes out in a long, wide strip which is rectangular.
We take this material, woven this way, and we try to fit it to the contours of the body by shaping it, by doing things with rectangular material that rectangular material just doesn’t want to do. To fit the sleeves of a man’s jacket—it doesn’t want to do that. And therefore, our jackets don’t fold up properly.
Whenever you take them out of a suitcase they have to go to the dry cleaner’s to be pressed, or your wife has to iron it. Our shirts—a man’s shirt is the most ridiculous construction. It will not fold unless you’re an expert laundress.
There’s nothing you can do about it. And it always comes out of a suitcase ruffled. And it requires all kinds of care to get the thing ready to be wearable.
And it’s white and gets filthy, and nothing flat. There’s no rationale to it whatsoever. Nor to the necktie, which has to be worn with it; sort of noose to strangle you with.
But if I may point out: a Japanese kimono is quite different. It follows the nature of cloth. The rectangular forms of the cloth, if you stretch it out like that, it hangs in a rectangle right here from your sleeve, and it falls over you.
It hasn’t been forced to fit you, and therefore, it fits you comfortably. The cloth conforms itself to you by its nature, and therefore, gives you a certain dignity. I once a saw a Tibetan woolen garment.
It was a cloak. And it was prepared by their method, which is: they have a method of pounding wool rather than weaving it. And they make it into a great big—again, it’s a rectangle.
And it’s a double rectangle: the front one and the back one. The front one is split down the center, and at the sides there’s a place for the sleeves to go through, and beyond that, it’s stitched. So you just got this sort of—if you put it out like that, it’s like a sort of sandwich board.

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