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They all had, you see, a contest to define the void, and all of them gave their definitions. Finally, Mañjuśrī gave his, and Vimalakīrti was asked, then, for his definition, and he said nothing, and so he won the whole argument. The thunderous silence. |
One of the most surprising things that has happened to me in my study of Eastern philosophy over the years is to find that, as I thought I was studying something that at first seemed wholly foreign to the western world, at the same time I discovered all kinds of relatively new forms of thought and exploration of man’s ... |
In other words, if, in a given field of science—say, a certain department of physics—knowledge has advanced to a certain state, a certain level, and all the workers in this field are familiar with this knowledge through the journals and other sources of information, then, because they possess information in common, the... |
That is to say that, at the same time that the West became aware of Oriental culture, it of itself apparently developed forms of thought and forms of insight very closely paralleling things that had existed long before in the Asian world. And the interesting thing is that these were in many cases developed by people wh... |
The apparently anti-metaphysical and even anti-religious trends of what is called scientific comparison and sometimes logical positivism, especially as this movement is represented in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein—the work, say, that he did about 1914—contains some quite extraordinary parallels to developments ... |
You must keep clear the distinction, as Korzybski used to say, between the map and the territory. Well, that’s one development in the West strikingly parallel to ideas that have been strongly influential in the East. The parallel ways of thinking that exist between a Chinese Taoist and Neo-Confucian philosophy and the ... |
Joseph Needham has pointed this out, of course, in his remarkable History of Science and Civilisation in China. And incidentally, he is himself a biologist. Before he devoted himself to the study of the history of Chinese science, before even he was thirty years old, he had made some remarkable discoveries in biology. |
And he has pointed out that the Taoistic theory of nature and of man is non-mechanistic, non-theistic, but rather organismic in the same way as the biological theories of people like Kurt Goldstein, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Woodger in England, and also the man I mentioned a little while ago, the biophysicist L. L. W... |
So this is a very remarkable and apparently spontaneous occurrence within the Western world of types of thinking which are parallel to things which we find in Asia. The ones which I’ve mentioned are relatively well known. There are others which are less well known. |
And there is a kind of tradition existing in the West today—it’s not [a] very popular tradition, because in the nature of these things they’re not easily popularized because they’re not easily expressed in the terms and in the languages of our mass media. But there is a kind of work which I have come across in the last... |
I’ve often drawn attention to a curious distinction between Chinese and typically Western attitudes to human nature. We’re reared in the West with a rather fundamental mistrust of our own nature. To use a platonic analogy: we think of man as a sort of rider on a horse, a two-natured person who has a rational soul in an... |
And the animal body is regarded as something vital but stupid, in charge of the rational soul whose origins seem to be completely independent of those of the animal body. And so the whole problem and the task of human life is to subjugate the animal body to the rational will. And I, again, have often drawn attention to... |
That is to say, it does not admit of there being two quite separate worlds—the natural and the supernatural—but one world, at least ideally describable in one language: simply the world of nature. Although that has been admitted theoretically, in practice the naturalistic scientist tends to be a person who doesn’t trus... |
Now, of course, there were tendencies in this direction that arose in the 18th century and strengthened in the 19th century in what we call philosophy of nature, and later the romantic movement in literature. But these, say, were associated with the work of Rousseau, for example, with his philosophy of the noble savage... |
But nevertheless we are, I think, beginning to come to a point of view whereby we must recognize that, although human nature is not something which if, as it were, were not interfered with, would be entirely good—which is, I think, roughly the romantic point of view—but rather to say something like this: the human natu... |
Now then, on the basis of this sort of attitude to human nature there has been developed a kind of movement in the West—you would hardly call it a movement in any organized sense—which seems to have originated in Germany. Some years ago in Germany there was a woman called Elsa Gindler, and she happened to have a seriou... |
There was nothing further they could do for her, and that she may as well get ready for the end. She therefore betook herself, I think, to the Black Forest, and found herself a quiet little hut where she could live in the forest alone. And she said: if this disease came by itself, it can go by itself. |
And she decided to make an experiment: that she would become as vividly aware as she could of all the subtle motions that were going on inside her body—all the subtle little feelings that she had—and she would respond to them. And so, in the quiet of the forest, she became silent and very, very responsive to everything... |
And this so fascinated her that she explored further the promptings of her own nature, and explored ways of teaching it to other people, and eventually developed a kind of system of instructing others in this art. But nobody was ever able to think up a kind of label, or name, for what this art is. Of course, a Chinese ... |
But, you see, in describing the way that Elsa Gindler went about this, you can see at once that noninterference is a highly difficult thing requiring a great deal of intelligence. Because you have to be patient, you have to be intelligent, you have to be sensitive in order to respond to these subtle promptings of the o... |
I think particularly, for example, of Charlotte Selver, who works in New York, who also was a student of Elsa Gindler. I’ve been looking at an article she wrote some time ago in the Bulletin of the General Semantics people in which she describes this kind of work. It’s so fascinating because a work of this kind escapes... |
See, everything in this world has to be classified. People want to label you. They want to say: oh, you’re a Catholic, or you’re a Republican, or you’re a Buddhist, or you’re a beatnik, or you’re a Zennist, or you’re a psychoanalyst, or whatever it may be. |
Because they feel that when they can put a label on you, they’ve sort of dismissed you. They know where you are. They know what pigeonhole you’re in and you can cause them any trouble. |
And therefore one can be deeply and creatively troubled by some kind of work—you can’t quite call it philosophy—which is impossible to pin down. I’ve been familiar with Charlotte Selver’s particular interpretation of Elsa Gindler’s idea for some years. And in being asked often to explain it I’ve been completely dumbfou... |
It isn’t physical education, it isn’t rhythmic studies, it isn’t dance, it isn’t relaxation, it isn’t body culture or anything of that kind. It’s a fascinating experiment in simply becoming ever more aware of one’s physical organism, and learning to trust it, and learning to become in accord consciously with what it wa... |
But still, it’s always been one of my particular attempts or efforts to describe the indescribable. Anybody who works with words—poet, author, and so on—is really trying to describe the indescribable. This is the whole lot of speech and literature. |
Perhaps I might introduce this by a story which Charlotte Selver once told me about herself and her study with Elsa Gindler. One of the things that Elsa Gindler tried sometimes to get her students to do was to make a drawing of the way in which one feels one’s own body. And when Charlotte first went to study with her, ... |
And when she was asked to draw how she feels, she made a grand drawing of everything about herself that she knew intellectually—you see, that she had all her bones and muscles, and everything was put there in the right position. There were several people in the class. And when all the drawings were put up along the wal... |
They were all kinds of funny lines and blushes and blobs. And indeed, one of them was simply a blank piece of paper with a small black spot on it. And she said that Elsa Gindler walked along the drawings, making various comments about them, and when she came to the one with a black spot she said, “Oh, I see you still h... |
But when she finally approached that drawing, she said nothing and passed right on. And that was a great moment. That was one of those moments of truth in life; those moments of conversion when one finds out the difference between what you think you feel and what you really feel. |
One of the things most strongly emphasized in this work is that we’re all brought up to try and conform ourselves to fixed patterns of what a human being ought to be. This happens in very many different ways, but one of the ways in which it happens is how we ought to move and hold ourselves physically. We talk about po... |
And of course it doesn’t strike us that all these things are very stylized. And if they don’t correspond in any way with what our physical organism actually wants to do, the adoption of these stylized postures is going to cause conflict between what we try to be and what we are. And since what we try to be has really n... |
And so, you see, it isn’t simply in—the social conditioning of the child is not simply a matter of training children in the fundamental conventions of moral behavior, which perhaps are artificial, but certainly are necessary for some sort of social cohesion and agreement. But the training of children in all kinds of we... |
Because, you see, in trying to come back to themselves—to come back to a unity and harmony with their own organisms—they still have the cast of mind, the tendency, to look to authority of some kind to tell them what they ought to be. And Charlotte Selver has often told me that people who come to work with her expect to... |
Or, in order to be exercised, they’re quite astonished at fast when they’re invited to become more restful, to give up the doing, so that they can listen better to what their body has to tell them. We need quiet for self experience. Quiet and awakeness. |
We need permissiveness, too: to all the subtle changes which may be needed. But we ask, therefore: what can one feel of one’s own organism? What of happenings within? |
Not what one knows of one’s body or what one thinks about it, or believe somebody else expects one to feel of it, but what one actually senses, no matter what comes to the fore. But this is difficult, of course, because we expect that we are supposed to conform to a pattern, and that there is somebody who knows what we... |
Isn’t it strange that, to fulfill this great ideal—this democratic, personalistic ideal of the Western world—it seems to be very necessary for us to learn from the East and from things like the East; to learn from the very great differences which exist between one individual physical organism and another. To trust what... |
Really, there is no monstrousness in nature like the monstrousness of man. We talk about the violent life of the ocean’s depth, of the way the fishes eat each other and live in perpetual conflict. At least the fishes stay in the ocean and don’t come up and attack the birds and the mammals and the people on the dry land... |
But nobody is safe from man. Radioactive fish in the Pacific. Birds bewildered by turmoil in the skies. |
Insects ravaged and upset in their balances. This is not a condemnation of human intelligence, but an appeal to human intelligence to be both intelligent and sensitive, to be (temporarily, at least) silent before the subtle movements of nature, to study them better, and to work with the grain of the world instead of ag... |
But it’s about space. And in most people’s minds space is just nothing unless it’s filled with air. But once you get outside the air, space may be in some way crossed by floating bodies, by various kinds of electrical vibrations—light waves, cosmic rays, et cetera. |
But since the Michelson-Morley experiment, which seemed to prove conclusively that there wasn’t any such thing as ether (some kind of attenuated fluid through which light was propagated), space just isn’t there. It’s the way we have, in other words, of talking about distances between bodies. In other words, when we say... |
But I suppose what we’re actually saying is that the two bodies we’re talking about increased the distance between themselves. They did it. But then you suddenly find that you’ve got distance as an object. |
They increased the distance—the distance now being the object of the verb, whereas before it was the subject. And so, at once one begins to see there’s something fishy about space. And, after all, it is the background against which we see everything. |
And even a blind person has a sense of space in that which does not obstruct motion. And yet, the funny thing about space is that, in a way, it doesn’t end where a solid begins. You can shift a solid around in space without apparently altering it in any way. |
And, after all, there is space between the two sides, shall we say—or ends—of the solid. We can think of that in terms of space and measure it in terms of space. But it is against space that we experience everything that we experience. |
And, by the way, also we experience everything not only in the dimension of space, but also in the dimension of time. Now, the fascination about space and time is that, while they are basic to all possible experiences that we have, you just can’t put your finger on them. Space seems to be completely immaterial. |
And when St. Augustine was asked, “What is time?” he said, “I know what it is, but when you ask me I don’t.” So these two basic dimensions of our physical world are uncommonly elusive. We could perhaps say that they are pure abstractions. There is no such thing as space and there is no such thing as time. |
They are merely our way of measuring and thinking about the behavior of the physical universe as a pattern; a system of energy patterns. And if you measure the movement of these patterns, the line along which you measure motion is called the timeline. If you measure their positions, the line along which you measure the... |
And these two lines would be as abstract as the equator in relation to longitude zero. These things don’t exist on the physical face of the world, they are imaginary lines and are only to be found on maps. Could you also say that the same thing was true of time and space? |
We think, for example, that there are three coordinates of space and one of time. The three coordinates of space being length, breadth, and depth. And through that runs one of time. |
But, come to think of it, it’s rather artificial. It is making us think of space as having a sort of grain to it, as if it were a crystalline substance. And however transparent the crystal, it does have a grain. |
And space has the grain of up, across, and through. Those are the three ways in which we think of space. And we can’t think of any more—not with our senses. |
We can mathematically conceive spaces with infinitely many dimensions. That is to say, you can write it down as if it were so. But you can’t conceive it in your imagination. |
You can draw—it’s great fun to draw—a four-dimensional cube having four spatial dimensions; it’s called a tesseract. And “tesseract” is a good word to apply to a person who is ultimately square. A four-dimensional square! |
But the tesseract, you see—the minute you draw it, that obviously you can’t have more than the three right angular dimensions of space, or the coordinates, in any kind of solid figure that you know. And so you can think about it in terms of mathematics, but you can’t conceive more than these three coordinates sensuousl... |
But of course the question is: is this a structure of space, or is it a structure of the human nervous system, the human brain, and human thought, which is projected onto the external world as a tool for measuring it? This is one way of approaching the problem. But there’s another way altogether, which is to consider s... |
If space is basic to all that we experience—as time is—you might say, then, that space is as near as we can imagine to being the ground of the world, or what some people have called God. The texts of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists are full of ways in which the symbol of space is used to mean the ultimate reality. S... |
In Vedanta it is called ākāśa. And ākāśa is, for them, the fundamental element. There are five elements: earth, water, air, and fire—and ākāśa. |
And so space contains all the other elements. In Buddhist philosophy, where the ultimate reality is called śūnyatā: the void. The Chinese will translate the Sanskrit śūnyatā with their character that means “sky” or “space.” And the Taoists would say—quoting Lao Tzu—the usefulness of the window is not so much in the fra... |
The usefulness of a vase is is not so much in the sides made of clay as in the hollow inside into which something can be put. And, of course, that is a startling metaphor for a Westerner, because we think the other way around, you see. As I started out to say, we really think commonsensically that space is nothing at a... |
And we are much more sympathetic to the idea that it’s pure abstraction than to the Oriental idea that space has some kind of basic reality. It bothers us, too, when astronomers talk about curved space. How can nothing be curved? |
Or properties of space. Or expanding space. How can it do that? |
And then, when architects begin to talk about the functions of spaces, the commonsensical Westerner thinks: “Why don’t they talk about the functions of walls?” Of course, the walls enclose spaces, but the spaces of themselves have no function. And they’re bothered about this. Painters, also, are very aware of space bec... |
And therefore, in filling it in, you begin to realize that it has its own shape. It is the obverse of the foreground. And when you play with photographic negatives or anything that switches foreground to background, foreground to background, you begin to become aware of spaces as having a shape. |
The interval between all sorts of objects becomes new something significant, even though it’s constantly flowing and changing—as indeed are the objects within the space. So it is a bit of a shock to our common sense (which in most cases has not caught up with 20th century physics or astronomy) to hear space considered ... |
There are different kinds of space. Space is, basically—isn’t it?—an interval. There is an interval between each one of us sitting here. |
If we didn’t have that, we would suffocate being packed together like sardines. We need space in order to function of the human being. We need a kind of area in which to gesture and move and walk about and breathe and express ourselves. |
Now, you can have intervals not only in space, but in time. Pauses are intervals. You can also have intervals in sound: the intervals between tones or notes. |
And the interesting thing about the intervals between tones is that they are that upon which the hearing of melody depends. To hear melody is to hear intervals. Now, if you will simply visualize melody in terms of something graphic—supposing you represent a simple, say, introduction of a fugue or whatever, you know—you... |
And you will recognize a pattern. But you see at once that the pattern depends on the way the critical dots in it are spaced. And it doesn’t matter much whether the space is a big space or whether it’s a little one, because it will always be relative to the size of the dots. |
You can magnify it or minify it, but you will see it is the way they are spaced that makes the difference. And here, once again, we are using “spaced” as a transitive verb now. We’ve talked about spaces or distances increasing, or people increasing a distance. |
And now we can talk about space as a verb: to space, to be spaced. And so, once again, the language is either playing tricks on us or else expressing a profound intuition. Language does both, and you have to watch out for which it is. |
Of course it may be both. That is a possibility. But here, at once, you see—especially in that illustration of music—of it being necessary to hear intervals in order to hear melody. |
You see that the way things are spaced is really another way of talking about the way things are related. So you begin to realize that space is relationship. Go further now. |
There is another idea about space which is connected with all the Oriental uses of space. It is quite fundamental to Indian and a great deal of Chinese thinking that space equals consciousness. In other words, what actually we are experiencing as the all-inclusive space in which things happen is your mind. |
And your mind, of course, is not something inside your head—that is a great mistake to make. Your head is something in your mind. We can define a person’s mind in many ways. |
But beginning with something rather simple, mind is occupied with thinking. Most people think in words. And you didn’t get words out of your head. |
You got them from the community in which you live and were brought up. So when you think in a language which your community gave you, you are not really thinking your own thoughts. It is very difficult indeed to have private thoughts. |
Because when the very materials with which you think are public property, it shows what a vast influence the public has on you in the deepest recesses of your mind. It’s therefore very difficult, also, to think freely—independently—because we are pushed around with the symbolic systems of words or of numbers in which w... |
A network of relationships. You think only in the context of an environment of people and of natural processes. So that you could say that your mind is, at the very least, a most complex network of present and past relationships stretching out to the very limits of the universe. |
And this, as I’ve often said, explains such truth as there may be in astrology. That, when you want to draw a map of a person’s soul, you draw a map of the universe as it was when he was born. We say that is your chart. |
That expresses you in a special way. Now, the astrologer’s maps are very crude. They’re based on a rather primitive view of the universe. |
But the truth of it is there, you see. That, who you really are—your soul, your mind—is the total universe as focused upon you. And this connects with what in Mahayana Buddhism is called the doctrine of mutual interpenetration: namely, that every thing-event in the world; anything—in other words, supposing the whole wo... |
It’s very difficult to determine how much of a wiggle makes one wiggle. But by a sort of calculus in which we chew the thing up we say all this wiggly world consists of so many wiggles, and each individual wiggle is a thing-event. What is called in Japanese ji means a thing-event. |
And so the doctrine of mutual interpenetration is that every thing-event in the universe implies all the others. It goes with it. Doesn’t matter how long it lasts or how short it lasts. |
The fact that it is, or the fact that it was, implies the existence of everything else. To put it in another way, the fact that there is a moth flying around me—it’s very small and it will soon run into a candle and extinguish itself. That little incident would not be possible at all except in the context of all these ... |
Because their existence goeswith the possibility of there being such a minute little life flattering around. What is not so easy to see is the picture in the opposite direction: that, in the same measure, all these galaxies depend upon and gowith this little moth. As the poet Henry Suso once said—no, it wasn’t Suso. |
Someone like him; lived about the same time. I’ll think of it a minute. Anyway, he said, “I know that, without me, God could not live for one moment.” And this is the other aspect of it. |
And this is the difficult one to understand. And we shall be able to approach this in the course of this seminar. In fact, if you realize that, then you’ve really got it. |
You’ve got the point of your own existence. But to get the reverse picture you have first of all to get, clearly, its opposite one: namely, that the existence of any one minute little thing is intimately related to everything. And then what happens—when you clearly understand that and you’ve really got that—your mind d... |
Bwllpp, like that. You know, it’s like when you squeeze the air in a sausage balloon, and you get all the air squeezed up (you think) into one end of the balloon, and suddenly it goes bwwlllpp, and it comes out the other end, you see? Well, it’s sort of like that. |
And you have to be very careful at that point not to go crazy. Because, you see, when you find out that all this universe depends on you—some people get frightened, others get cocky, and from both things disasters can follow. You have to discover that and then be natural. |
Act as if nothing happened. So then, this Mahayana Buddhist idea of mutual interpenetration is expressed by the great simile of the net of jewels in which you have a multidimensional spider’s web in the morning dew, and on inspecting one dewdrop you see the reflections of all the others. And in each reflection, in turn... |
And again, and again, and again. And so, of course, one discovers this to be no mere philosophical fancy, no mere metaphor. When you start working with laser beams, and finding out that you can reconstruct a whole photograph from a tiny snippet out of the negative. |
Because the crystalline structure of the whole photographic field—the chemicals spread over the acetate, or whatever—when it’s exposed to light, all those crystals change in harmony with each other. See, supposing we all touch each other, and then somebody says, “Boo!” We’ll all jump a little bit together. And if you e... |
And by seeing exactly what one of them did you could reconstruct what all of them were doing. Only usually, we don’t bother to think about things like that because it takes too long. And this is one of our great difficulties as human beings: that the mode of thinking upon which we largely rely for our practical calcula... |
And that doesn’t get you anywhere. That’s, in a way, why a great deal of scientific work is apt to be trivial. They are all very well if I had all that time to think it out. |
But I don’t. I have to make practical decisions in a hurry. And… no time. |
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