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And it’s always on the side; it’s something that you don’t really enjoy unless you feel it’s dirty. You’re doing something you’re not supposed to do—then, then it’s kind of fun. And so, there’s a perpetual hypocrisy play about the whole thing, and nobody ever… I mean, the most banned, the most reprehensible thing you c... |
That would be the most dangerous book imaginable because it’s alright so long as it’s dirty, it’s alright so long as it’s filth, but the moment it’s something that is really important and really reverent, then we’re afraid. And this is the test of the whole thing, this is the root of the matter. This shows where we are... |
Materia. So, as a result, we have a culture which—instead of being materialist—is abstractionist. Which, for example, confuses money with wealth. |
You know this situation: you go the supermarket and you fill your little cart with all sorts of goodies, and then you push it up to the counter and the girl goes clickety-clickety-clickety-click, and a long, long strip comes out and she says, “Please, $30.25.” “Uugh.” You feel depressed, and not, perhaps because you th... |
You know, not mentioning how much of it is fake, but it is—essentially—that is your food, that is the stuff you’re going to live on. And it’s in your cart and you’re going to go away with it, but you lost the money. So, in other words, the abstract thing—the amount of money, the figures, the status that you have—all th... |
So, likewise—going back to the subject of sexuality—the way things look: the way the girl is packaged is much more important than what she is underneath. She must look right, she must have a figure of a certain fashionable kind, hair done in such a fashionable way, put a wig on her so that she really looks like… of cou... |
A jet plane is a remarkable triumph, even though it abolishes distance, even though it makes every place the same as every other place, it is—in itself—a triumph of material competence. But in all the fundamental things of life—in clothing, in cooking, in housing, in raising children, in lovemaking—we are the biggest m... |
How it appears rather than how it tastes. And so I would think what I’m saying is that we need an education which brings us back to nature in the sense—not of the birds, the bees and the flowers, and all that sentimentality—but of being focused on the material present, and knowing that this is where you live, and this ... |
To know that’s the only place you live—you don’t live anywhere else—and to be able to live richly and fully in that situation instead of constantly preparing children for something else later altogether. I think this means the easing of the school burden, first of all, by throwing a lot of it back on the parents. A sch... |
But that, in turn, requires that parents be in a position to take care of their children. As it is, you see, they’re engaged in occupations which necessarily take them away from their children. What does that go back to in the line of cause and effect? |
It goes back to the fact that people are engaged in occupations which simply make money, and which they do not really enjoy, and which they do not really live with. And that is why—among young people today; under 25—there is, increasingly, unwillingness. Corporation job hunters—I mean, you know, people who are looking ... |
Because that completely takes them away from any form of work which will involve the participation of the woman they love and the children they love. So people are looking for ways of living whereby they don’t live this fragmented, abstract, work-life that is completely cut off from all the rest of their truly human as... |
And even though what they do may make very little money, it will at least have the satisfaction of being an actual relationship to the real world in which we live now. I don’t know the detailed answers to all that, but this is what is coming. It will be very disruptive of things as we know them, but better by far. |
Better by far to live in contact with the actual here-and-now than to live a life of perpetual suspense, waiting for a gorgeous thing that’s going to turn up—but never, never does. Welcome to my home. We’re aboard the ferryboat Vallejo, which is tied up at the north end of Sausalito—close to San Francisco—and this is w... |
And you may think this place is rather weird. But that’s because I’ve always loved weird things. I remember when I was a little boy, people used to say me, “Alan, you’re so weird! |
Why can’t you be like other people?” Well, I thought that was just plain dull, like having the same thing for dinner every day. And as is well said, variety is the spice of life. So you will, indeed, find this place rather strange. |
And some of the things that are weird are weird because they are just obvious, and nobody ever thinks of them. Some of the most fascinating scientific discoveries have been made by people who called ordinary common sense in question. Like anybody can see that the Earth is flat; people know it’s flat. |
And calling that fundamental assumption in question is really the beginning of geography. And when I think over the weirdest of all things I can think of, you know what it is? Nothing. |
The whole idea of nothing is something that has bugged people for centuries, especially in the West. Because we have a saying in Latin: ex nihilo nihil fit, which means that ‘out of nothing comes nothing.’ You can’t, in other words, get something out of nothing. And it’s occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremend... |
And it comes up as a kind of terror of nothing. A put-down on nothing, on everything to do with nothing, everything associated with nothing—such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine principle is often equated with the negative principle. Although women’s lib people don’t like that kind of thing, but when th... |
Because what has struck me is that nothing—the negative, the empty—is exceedingly powerful. I would say not ex nihilo nihil fit—‘out of nothing comes nothing’—I would say, “you can’t have something without nothing!” How do we basically begin to think about the difference between something and nothing? I can say there i... |
And so we get the idea of is here, and isn’t—or empty—here. But behind that, of course, lies the far more obvious contrast of solid and space. Now, we tend to think of space as nothing. |
When we talk about the conquest of space—there’s a little element, notice, of hostility in that phrase—but actually we’re talking about the conquest of distance. Space as such, that is to say, whatever it is that lies between the Earth and the Moon, and the Earth and the Sun, is considered—especially since the Michelso... |
To begin with, without space outside the solid, you wouldn’t know where the solid’s edges were. For example, you can see me on the camera because you see a background here and all around me, and that background shows up my outline. But if that wasn’t there, then you would notice only the beads and the microphone here, ... |
But you always have to have a background to see a figure. You just can’t do without it. So that means that the figure and the ground, the solid and the space in some way are inseparable and go together. |
Now, we find this very commonly in the phenomena of magnetism and electricity. A magnet has a north pole and a south pole, and a battery has a positive pole and a negative pole. There is no such thing as a magnet with one pole only. |
Let’s suppose we equate north with ‘is’ and south with ‘isn’t,’ then we see we can’t do without the two of them. You can chop the magnet in two—supposing it’s a bar magnet—and you’ll just get another north pole and south pole on the end of each piece. And so, in the same way, a current will not flow through an electric... |
Because the current does not wait in the wire, like water in a hose, and then begin to flow when you, as it were, connect it with the negative pole like turning on the nozzle. There won’t be any current in the wire at all until its end point, which is the negative, is established. So what this is trying to get into our... |
You know the famous words of Hamlet: “To be or not to be? That is the question.” It isn’t! To be or not to be is not the question because, as I think I’ve shown, you can’t have a solid without space. |
Therefore you can’t have an ‘is’ without an ‘isn’t,’ a ‘something’ without a ‘nothing,’ a figure without a background. And we can turn that right the other way around and say you can’t have space without solid. Because imagine nothing but space! |
Space, space, space, with nothing in it at all for ever. But there you are, imagining it! And you’re something in it. |
To have the whole idea of there being only space—and nothing else at all—is not only inconceivable, but perfectly meaningless. because we always know what we mean by ‘contrast.’ We know what we mean by white in comparison with black. We know life in comparison with death. |
We know pleasure in comparison with pain, up in comparison with down. But you will notice of all these things that they must come into being together. You don’t have first something, then nothing, or first nothing, then something. |
Something and nothing are two sides of the same coin and—as you know—if you take a coin and you file away the tails-side of it, and you file that side of it away completely, the head side will disappear as well. So, in this sense—the positive and the negative, the something and the nothing—are inseparable, they go toge... |
The stars not only occupy space, but have space between one point of the sphere, and the opposite point. So there’s space everywhere as absolutely basic to there being anything at all. Now, ordinarily we think that what is basic to the physical world is something we call matter. |
And then matter has various shapes. We think of tables as made of wood. We think of pots as made of clay. |
But, I ask you: is a tree made of wood, in the same way as a table is? No, that would be stupid—isn’t it? Because a tree is wood, it isn’t made of wood. |
‘Wood’ and ‘tree’ are two different names for the same thing. But there’s—in the back of our mind—the notion, as a root of common sense, that everything in the world is made of something; made of some kind of basic stuff. And physicists through the centuries have, of course, wanted to know what that was. |
And physics began as a quest to discover the basic ‘stuff’ out of which the world is made. And with all our advances in physics we’ve never found it. What we have found is not stuff, but form. |
We have found shapes, we have found structures. Because, when you turn up the microscope, and you look at things where you thought there was some sort of stuff, you find—instead—form, pattern, structure. You find the shapes of crystals, and you go in beyond the shapes of crystals and you find molecules, and you go in b... |
Whether they’re waves, or whether they’re particles, and so we call them ‘wavicles’—but they’re very tiny. And if you want to ask “what stuff are electrons made of,” we might be able to make a further analysis. But what we will come up with will never be stuff, it will always be a pattern—a moving pattern—which can be ... |
But we never get to any stuff, for the simple reason that there isn’t any. You see, what stuff is—actually—is when you see something unclearly, or out of focus, it becomes fuzzy. You know, we say “stuffing” in something—like kapok in a cushion, or stuff like clay—because when we look at it with the naked eye it looks j... |
We can’t make out any significant shape to it. But then, when you put it under a microscope, you suddenly see shapes. It comes into clear focus as shape. |
And you can go on, and on, and on, looking into the nature of the world, and you will never find anything except form. Because, think of stuff: why, you wouldn’t know how to talk about it, even if you found it. How would you describe what it was like? |
You couldn’t say anything about a structure in it, you couldn’t say anything about a pattern or a process in it because it’d be just absolute, primordial goo. Well, what else is there besides form in the world? Obviously, between the shape—the significant shapes of any form—there is space. |
And space and form, in that sense, go together as the fundamental things we’re dealing with in this universe. And that’s why there’s a Buddhist saying—really, the whole of Buddhism is based on this saying—which is: Let me illustrate this to you in an extremely simple way. When you use the word ‘clarity,’ what do you me... |
What’s the first thing you think of when I say “clarity?” Well, it might be a perfectly polished lens or mirror, or a clear day when there’s no smog and the air is perfectly transparent, like space. Now, what’s the next thing you think of? Clarity? |
The next thing you think of is form in clear focus. All the details, articulate and perfect. So the one word—clarity—suggests to you these two, apparently completely opposite, things. |
The clarity of the lens or of the mirror, and the clarity of articulate form. And it is in this sense, then, you see, that the Buddhists say form is void, void is form. Or we could put it in another way: instead of saying is, we could say implies, or the word that I invented: goeswith (spelled all in one). |
Like: a front goeswith a back, a male goeswith a female, and so on. So form always goeswith void. And there really isn’t—in this whole universe—any stuff. |
Form, indeed, is inseparable from the idea of energy. And frisky form, especially if it’s moving in a very circumscribed area, appears to us as solid. In the same way, for example, when you spin an electric fan, the empty spaces between the blades sort of disappear into a blur and you can’t push a pencil, much less you... |
So, in the same way, you can’t push your finger through the floor, because the floor is going too fast. But basically, what you have down there is nothing except nothing, and form in motion. I know there was a physicist at the University of Chicago (he was rather crazy, like some scientists), and this impressed him so ... |
But here it is: this common-sense notion that the world is made of some kind of ‘stuff’ is shown to be a nonsense idea in the back of our minds. It isn’t there at all. But instead, form and emptiness. |
Now, we all know that energy is always vibration, pulsation. Whether it be the energy of light or the energy of sound, it’s always on and off. And in the case of light—say, you get very fast light, very strong light; even, say, with alternating current—you don’t notice the discontinuity because your retina retains the ... |
And it’s exactly the same thing with sound. When you hear a high note that goes “Ooooooooooooo” it seems much more continuous. That’s because the vibrations are faster than a low note, as when I go “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh.” Now, in that you can hear a kind of graininess. |
And that graininess is because you are hearing the rapid alternations of on and off on a lower note. So that all wave motion, then, is this process. And it’s curious—isn’t it?—when we think of waves and talk about waves, we think about the crests. |
We think about this point, and we say that is waves. And that is because the crests stand out from the underlying, uniform bed of water, which is relatively solid in comparison with the space above, so that these crests are perceived as the things, the forms, the waves. But isn’t it obvious that you cannot have the ups... |
You could call—see, you get this dividing line here, between above and below. Now, isn’t it obvious—first of all: you cannot have the emphasis, called a crest—the concave—without the de-emphasis—or convex—called the trough. They necessarily gowith one another; so as to have anything standing out there must be, as it we... |
So, in this way we must realize that if you had this part alone, the up-part, that would not excite your senses in any way because there would be no contrast. In other words, when sound comes upon your ear, the eardrum vibrates. When the on-pulse of the sound comes, the eardrum is driven in a little. |
When the off succeeds, the eardrum comes out again. And so the eardrum wiggles. If you just pushed it in uniformly and left it there, you wouldn’t hear anything in the same way—if there is no sound, and the eardrum is not being pushed at all—you have silence. |
But to have sound, you must have the alternation of sound-silence-sound-silence-sound-silence, and so you get that “Aaaaaaahhh,” which you can hear on a very deep note. Now, the same thing is true of all life together. We shouldn’t really contrast existence with nonexistence because, actually, existence is the alternat... |
So you could say existence is eternal if we are to consider existence as this alternation of now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it, now you don’t. It is that contrast that presents the sensation of there being anything at all. Now, in light and sound these waves are extraordinaril... |
But there are other circumstances in which the waves are extraordinarily slow, as in the alternation of day and night, light and darkness, and the much vaster alternations of life and death, of the great slow cycles of the world. But these alternations are just as necessary to the being of the universe as in the very f... |
In other words, we—as living organisms—are forms of the energy of the universe just as much as the stars and the galaxies, and through our sense organs this system of energy becomes aware of itself. But there’s a puzzle in this, which again relates back to our basic contrast between on and off, and something and nothin... |
You can’t kiss your own lips, you can’t bite your own teeth, you can’t observe yourself in the act of observing. All scientists, neurologists, physicists have wanted to do that, but they can’t do it. Just as you can’t touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger, no matter how hard you try. |
And that, therefore, creates—on the backside of all observation—a blank spot. Just, for example, as behind your eyes: from the point of view of your eyes, however you look around, there is blankness behind them. That’s the unknown. |
That’s the part of the universe, in other words, which does not see itself because it is seeing. And so we always get this division of experience into one half known, one half unknown. We would like—of course if would be fascinating if we could know the always-unknown. |
But if we, say, examine the brain and the structure of the nerves behind the eyes, we’re always looking at somebody else’s brain out there. We’re never looking at our own brain at the same time as we’re investigating somebody else’s brain. So there always remains this blank side of experience. |
Now what I’m suggesting to you is this: that the blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side as the off-principle of vibration has to the on-principle. Do you see that? There’s a fundamental division. |
The Chinese call them—the positive side—the yáng, and the negative side the yīn. That corresponds to the idea of ‘one’—in our language— and ‘zero.’ All numbers can be made of one and zero; that’s called binary arithmetic, which is used for computers. And so it’s all made up of off and on, and therefore, equally, of con... |
But the unconscious is, so to say, the part of experience which is doing consciousness, just as the trough manifests the wave, the space manifests the solid, the background manifests the figure. And so all that side of life which you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable is unconscious, and is unknown, and is impenet... |
So, in this sense, don’t be afraid of nothing! I could make a joke and say there’s nothing in nothing to be afraid of. But people in our culture are terrified of nothing. |
They’re terrified of death, they are uneasy about sleep—because they think it’s a waste of time—and they have a lurking fear in the back of their minds that all this universe is eventually going to run down and end in nothing, and it will all be forgotten, buried, and dead. But this is a completely unreasonable fear, b... |
Nothing is what brings something into focus, and this nothingness—symbolized by the crystal—is your own eyeball, your own consciousness, and the clear space in which all the stars have freedom to be seen. I suppose the most fascinating question in the whole world is: “Who am I?” or “What am I?” Because—as I’ve suggeste... |
We use the word ‘I.’ And I’ve always been tremendously interested in what people mean by the word ‘I,’ because it comes out in curious lapses of speech. Like, we don’t say “I am a body,” we say “I have a body.” And somehow we don’t seem to identify ourselves with all of ourselves. We say, sort of, my feet, my hands, my... |
And, as far as I can make out, most people feel that they are something or other about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes, inside the head, and from this center the rest of them sort of dangles. And that governing principle in there is what you call the ego, and that’s me. And I just can’t get ri... |
That’s not what you are at all, and it’s a very dangerous hallucination because it gives you the idea that you are a center of consciousness, of energy, and responsibility that stands over, against, and in opposition to, everything else. You’re a chauffeur inside your own body as if your body were an automobile and you... |
It gets sick, tired, hurts, and eventually wears out and dies—and you feel caught in the thing because you feel different from it. And you feel the world outside your body, furthermore, is an awful trap. It’s full of stupid people who are sometimes nice to you but mostly aren’t because they’re all out for themselves (l... |
And the rest of it, aside from people, is absolutely dumb! Animals, plants, mere vegetables, rocks, and finally—behind the whole thing—blazing centers of radioactivity called stars. And out there, where there’s no air, there’s no place for a person to live. |
And so we have come to feel ourselves as centers of very, very tender, sensitive, vulnerable consciousness confronted with a world that doesn’t give a damn about us. And that, therefore, we have to pick a fight with this external world and beat it into submission to our wills. So we talk about the conquest of nature. |
We conquer everything. We talk about the conquest of mountains— like Everest, the conquest of space, the conquest of cancer, et cetera, et cetera. We’re at war, because inside we feel ourselves to be these lonely ego-principles trapped in, somehow inextricably bound up with, a world that doesn’t go our way—unless, some... |
Well now, as I have said, I feel that this sensation of ourselves as an ego is a hallucination. And I feel—let me say, as against this completely false conception of ourselves as an ego inside a bag of skins—that what we really are is, first of all, we are the whole of our body. Beyond that, however, the body—although ... |
Although, is this part here outside or inside? It gets a little tricky there, doesn’t it? But my body cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. |
Obviously, it requires air, and that air must be at a certain temperature. It requires nutrition. It requires, therefore, that it be on a certain kind of planet, near a certain kind of warm star, spinning regularly around it in a harmonious and rhythmical way so that life can go on. |
And all that arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as its own internal organs; as, say, my heart, my brain, my lungs, and so forth. So there really is no way of separating myself, as a physical body, from the natural environment in which I live. Now, that means that I—as a body—gowith my natural ... |
Bees look very different from flowers. The flower grows out of the ground, colors and perfumes the air. The bee is independent, and buzzes around, and flies. |
But where there are no bees, there are no flowers. And where there are no flowers, there are no bees. They go together. |
And in that sense, they make up a single system. Substitute for the word ‘system’ the word ‘organism:’ a single life-form, a single individual. Bees and flowers, however different they look. |
Now naturally, my feet look very different from my head. Of course, there’s strings joining them, and therefore we say, “well, it’s all one, obviously.” But yet they are very different, but they’re both me. And the feet and the head, though different, are like the bees and the flowers. |
They gowith each other. So therefore, if I’m to define myself in a scientific way, I will find that if I am to make a clear description of my body, my organism, my behavior, and say what it’s doing, I find that I cannot describe what my body is doing unless I also describe the surroundings, the environment in which it ... |
Because if I didn’t describe the ground, my description of walking would simply be of a person swinging his legs like this in the middle of empty space—that wouldn’t be walking. I have to describe the ground in which I walk. So what I am is a transaction, or an interaction, between this organism and its surrounding env... |
You know, put it all together. That’s what I am from a purely physical-scientific point of view. It may involve many more things than that, but so far is enough. |
I am an organism-environment. But! That’s not what my ego feels like. |
That’s not the average, commonsensical conception of ‘I.’ Because ‘I’ is associated with the organism and not with the environment—it is opposing the environment—and furthermore, it is not associated with all of the organism. Because, as I said, the ego tends to regard the rest of the organism as the chauffeur to the a... |
Number one is our image, or our idea, of ourselves. This is made up, mostly, of things that other people have told us about ourselves, or by looking at ourselves in a mirror, or by listening to ourselves played back on a tape recorder or television, and we get an image of ourselves. When I was a little boy I remember I... |
Sometimes I came home and I imitated Peter’s behavior. And my mother said to me, “Alan, that’s not you! That’s Peter!” Because, you see, she was giving me an image of myself. |
And when I did anything terrible she said, “Alan, it’s just not like you to do that!” See, she was busy building in me an image, an idea, of the kind of act I was supposed to put on, the kind of person I was supposed to be, and you know the word ‘person’ comes from the Latin persona, which means ‘that through which’—pe... |
And you know there are a certain number of acceptable roles you can play. So first of all, then, your sense of ‘I’ is your sense of who you are, whether you are tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, whether you’re a clown type, a strong, silent man type, a clinging-vine feminine type, ... |
It’s quite complicated, but nevertheless, there’s a certain way acting with which you identify yourself and which constitutes your image. Now that image of yourself that you have is a social institution in the same way, for example, as it is a social institution to divide the day into 24 hours, or to divide the foot in... |
But there are no lines of latitude and longitude over the Earth, they are imaginary. You cannot, for example, use the Equator to tie up a package because it’s an abstract, imaginary line. And so, in just the same way, your image of yourself as ego is an imaginary concept that is not this organism and is, furthermore, n... |
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