if you wipe out your competitor then you
have no reason to produce anything but a
lousy product and then you may make lots
of money because he wiped out your
competitors you’ve got the whole market
then you’ve got this money what you’re
gonna buy with it well if there’s
nothing to buy accept other people’s
lousy products
it’ll wiped out their competitors or who
cheated the public by packaging the
thing to look elegant but it was nothing
inside that’s all you’ve got to buy so
naturally if you’re a success in General
Motors you go and buy a Rolls Royce from
England or even buy a Mercedes from
Germany because they happen to be better
cars so you see the something always
self-defeating in these attempts to
succeed who say nothing fails like
success so for this reason then the
cautious allowed sir says as one who
crosses a river in spring that means
either the cause of the spring floods or
because the ice is still there and
you’re not quite sure how strong it is
cause it’s beginning to thaw so the what
the Daoist tries to develop is a
sensibility to the situation he tries to
feel out intuitively what kind of action
is required under these circumstances
because he feels that he can never
discover it analytically with his
conscious attention alone well now to
talk in modern Western terms about how
this is done we must realize of course
that we are equipped inside our heads
with an absolutely
fantastic thing called the brain with
its millions and millions of neuron
cells it is as it were the most amazing
computer ever devised but basic to the
Taoist attitude to life is that you have
that within you and you may if you don’t
know anything about brains very much
call it intuition or something of that
kind but you have within you the most
amazing logical analyser
that exists in the known world and the
point is to get it to work for you and
instead of trying with conscious
attention alone which can only think of
about three things at a time without
using a pencil that is to say keep three
variables in mind at once very few
people can do four without using a
pencil you can do four if you’re a
trained musician where you’ve got four
you’re playing four different lines of
the fugue say you’re keeping four
variables in mind at once with an
organist you can go from four to six
because you’ve got your two feet and
they’re playing true but that’s a
requires a high amount of training to be
able with conscious attention to keep
these many variables in mind but the
world around us has infinitely many
variables going in it and you can reason
out something with your conscious verbal
thinking say you want to make a contract
in business and you figure out how to
make it whether it will be a good
contract whether it will work etc etc
and you think of all these things and
write them down and you make the
contract you think that’s fine but one
of the variables that you couldn’t
possibly include in the contract was
that your partner would slip on a banana
all sorts of things I mean the contract
might make provisions in it if your
lawyers thoughtful for what was to be
done number the case of the disability
of any of the parties there – et cetera
but eventually there are so many
possibilities that can occur that you
cannot think of them all so then the
question arises is it within the power
of the human brain to comprehend because
of its immense complexity in a kind of
an or subconscious way what the surface
consciousness can never grasp and the
the Daoist would say certainly it can
but you’ve got to learn to use your
brain by allowing it to go to work on
your problems without interfering with
it and then it will deliver you a
decision and this is why when you get to
when you get to the real study of Taoist
and Zen Buddhist practice you get to the
point where you learn to act without
making decisions or rather to use a more
exact word without choosing Krishnamurti
talks a great deal about being
choicelessly aware and he says freedom
is precisely the state of not having to
choose now that sounds quite paradoxical
because we’re always talking about
freedom of choice but choice is not a
form of freedom in the sense of the word
what is choice in the sense of the word
choice is the act of hesitation that we
make before making a decision it is a
mental wobbling you know some people
when they take up a pen to write they
don’t just write but they jiggle the pen
around
and decisively like this and then
start writing our person comes into a
room and wonders who to talk to Italy is
in doubt you see in that moment he’s
choosing whereas the person who comes
into a room and decides who to approach
he doesn’t wait to choose we say he is
decisive but that’s a funny saying
because it means he doesn’t stop to
decide so in the training in Zen
Buddhism which is simply a Buddhist
extension of Taoism it all represent
Buddhism arose out of the marriage of
Buddhism and Taoism in the fifth century
AD and over the following centuries so
they have a way of training you so that
you always act without choosing for
example there was one day a leaky roof
and there were a couple of monks
attending the Zen master and he said the
roof is leaking one monk disappeared and
came back instantly with a sieve and put
it under the drips another monk after
some time came back with a bucket the
master praised the one who brought the
filth now the action wasn’t exactly
appropriate
I mean turned over to catching rain but
the point was that he was in the spirit
of the Zen discipline by acting without
choosing and you will notice this with
certain people certain people never
hesitate they always seem if something
needs to be done they seem somehow
simply to grab something and do it you
button so what happens is this that the
the the teacher of Zen constantly throws
curves with his students and puts them
in dilemma situations where they have to
act immediately one of the things that
cost that you mustn’t do is rush because
rush is a form of hesitation you rushing
when a person rushes to get a train he
starts to fall over his own feet see so
it really holds him up it’s like trying
to drive at high speed through the water
with a blunt nosed boat at rush but now
what he’s trying to get is a kind of a
smooth unhesitating flowing action but
is the response to the challenge and it
must be done in the what with what is
this is called Union in Chinese on one
end Japanese and this word nen is
composed of the character meaning now
and the character meaning mind heart
shin and so has the meaning of a thought
but especially for us it is well
translated by the psychological term
blocking your blocking you say to
someone when they hesitate when they
differ when they stop to choose so the
attitude of Moonen
or one Yin is the unblocked mind where
it doesn’t hesitate ever just as the
river doesn’t hesitate when it flows and
just when you trap your hands that sound
comes out without hesitation and when
the moon rises
water doesn’t wait to reflect it it
reflected instantly so that instant
reflection or it’s a kind of resonance
is what is looked for as a response of
the individual to his environment and he
does this to the degree that he knows
himself to be one with his environment
then his wrist Poppa his capacity for
response increases in according to the
way in which he feels that he is simply
all of a peace with it and not something
that is in it and was a barrier round
him through which messages have to get
and then their decisions have to be made
up and sent out so then you could say
that a kind of extremely subtle sensory
awareness has to be developed as between
the individual and his environment so
that he feels it out now today this sort
of talk is very unpopular because
scientifically minded people especially
academic scientists those who teach in
universities are exceedingly suspicious
of intuitive reactions I say Oh wah wah
wah wah you can get into all sorts of
trouble that way but the thing that they
neglected were to realize is that
everybody uses it even the most
meticulously careful analytical rigorous
sound scientist uses intuitive judgment
after a certain point
why because you may accumulate data
ever and you may decide that this is on
the whole taking all do things into
consideration and procedures having been
worked out that this is the right thing
to do why do you decide then mostly
because times up
and somebody’s pressing for a decision
or else you are bored to death with
bringing in data because you never know
much how much data you need to make a
certain decision and therefore you may
go on collecting data to all is blue but
in the last analysis you’ll work on
hunch and so much is actually in the end
decided by flipping coins and the pity
of flipping coins for making decisions
gives you only two choices
heads or tails one way or the other the
Chinese have a more subtle way of
flipping coins they have a method of a
64 sided coin to flip so that the
instead of just heads or tails there are
64 possibilities of coming to a decision
when you don’t know what to do this is
called the aging or the Book of Changes
where the symbols are Yang and Yin that
is to say for yang a straight line
undivided for Yin line a broken in the
middle there are 64 ways of combining
six of these lines in a hexagram and so
there is a complex method when you have
to make a very grave decision for a
tossing you do it by tossing sticks or
coins and it gives you one of these 64
figures now if you are very wise and
have studied the book of change for a
long time you don’t need to use the book
you just look at what the figure is and
you can tell what it means because you
see these
figures are made up of each sixth
hexagram figure how is made up of two
threefold components that has two
components of which this one is water
and this one is heaven so you’ll have
water over heaven and a person very
skilled in the interpretation will feel
out the meaning of water over heaven God
actually if you are not so skilled there
is the book and for each of these
hexagrams the book has an oracle and it
tells you in curiously vague and yet
curiously precise terms the meaning of
this hexagram and then you in the light
of your own situation make up your mind
what it’s saying to you in the light of
the problem that you’ve raised the
question that you’ve asked the decision
that you had to make you will find
invariably that these 64 choices are one
of them or indeed all of them but you
have to pick one of them because you are
after all tossing a coin but it has some
peculiarly appropriate thing to say to
you under your circumstances and it’s
just like having a conversation with a
very very wise old gentleman and you
must realize that it’s a day in Asia
this book is still widely used for
making business and political decisions
although people who are westernized
wouldn’t let on perhaps that they use it
and so anybody who does politics or does
business with Asia should be completely
versed in this book to know what sort of
thinking what sort of the approach might
be expected under any circumstances if
you would ever find out what exocrine I
had fallen when a certain
politician had made a decision it would
be immensely enlightening as to his
future course of action in the same way
for example in dealing with Hitler our
strategists I don’t know if they did
should have been students of astrology
because he was always consulting
astrologers and therefore astrology
would be much more easy to penetrate
than the aging because you can know
Hitler is looking all the time at his
own aura scope well we have access to
Hitler’s horoscope and so we know what
he’s thinking about but you don’t have
access to what hexagram mouths are dumb
through when he decided to do something
or other so it’s a little bit more
softly well then I’m making the point
then that our scientists are very
suspicious with the intuitive judgment
but nevertheless they all use it in the
end and so it has made this suspicion
that science has of intuitive judgment
has filtered down to the average person
in terms of a mistrust of his own
intuitions of the marvelous analytical
powers of his own brain and so we are
always in a dither of doubt as to
whether we are behaving the right way
doing the right thing and so on and so
forth and lack a certain kind of
self-confidence and if you see you lack
self-confidence you will make mistakes
through sheer tumbling if you do have
self-confidence you may carry get away
with doing entirely the wrong thing if
the British have an enormous degree of
self-confidence they know they’re right
and they don’t even question in there
there are certain kinds of British types
who are absolutely there a plumber’s
lievable and you can’t shake them that
wouldn’t really they’re not even
defending themselves they know they’re
so light and therefore they can allow
any kind of political revolution total
free speech all sorts of things can go
on which make Americans very nervous
because Americans don’t have the same
degree of aplomb they’re not quite sure
you see when you’re an aristocrat and
you’ve been brought up for generations
in the right schools and there’s never
any doubt whatsoever you don’t even have
to mention the fact that you’re an
aristocrat see I mean that’s why
aristocrats that know how to treat
servants but they never take it out on
their servants in the sense of having to
emphasize their own superiority because
they know they’re superior they don’t
even question it see well this is the
extraordinary kind of nerve that they
build up and so the only way you know
you can do this is first of all in in
Zen practice the thing that you have to
understand is this you have to regard
yourself as a cloud in the flesh because
you see clouds never make mistakes did
you ever see a cloud that was misshapen
you ever see a badly designed worry now
they always do the right thing
now so as a matter of fact – we because
we are natural beings just like clouds
and waves only we we that we have
complicated games which cause us to
doubt ourselves but if you will treat
yourself for a while
as a cloud or wave and realize that you
can’t make a mistake whatever you do
because even if you do something that
seems to be totally disastrous it all
this morning I want to talk about space
in relation to what is ordinal is called
reincarnation because this is one of the
most fascinating applications of the
sense that space constitutes something
significant now the subject of
reincarnation is one around which is
ringed an incredible amount of
hocus-pocus and yet there is something
in it and there seems to be something in
it not mainly because there is a lot of
alleged evidence for it in the form of
stories of children who remember their
former lives and so on I want to
approach the subject much in the way
that urban shredding and the physicist
does because he has a view of this that
does not involve any hocus-pocus at all
it is perfectly simple and all the
evidence for it is already before us so
it involves no claim too special inside
psychic knowledge the Meerut of grasping
a principle that is staring us in the
face and this principle is difficult to
understand not because there’s any
inherent intellectual complexity to it
but simply because it requires getting
there is
some sort of analogy which I’ve already
drawn your attention to between space
and unconsciousness between stars there
is darkness between stars there is not
the energy which constitutes a so-called
body in some modern physical theory that
is purely hypothetical not really tested
bodies in space are thought of as points
at which space is intensified but at any
rate there are these gaps these
intervals and obviously the unconscious
state must appear always through the
conscious state as a gap or interval so
when we go to sleep at night we wake up
in the morning almost instantly in other
words there appears to have happened
nothing except something quite vague
between going to sleep and waking unless
you had dreams and so you can conceive
or barely conceive going to sleep but
not waking up or the
verse of it waking up without ever
having gone to sleep which appears to be
the nearest we can imagine to death and
birth respectively to go to sleep and
never wake up when we die when we were
born to wake up but not to remember ever
having gone to sleep and of course this
bugs our imagination because it’s
inconceivable in terms of consciousness
people are afraid some people are afraid
of the possibility of eternal
annihilation and I suppose one of the
most eloquent expressions of that is
John betterments poem before the
anesthetic where he would prefer rather
even the dismal hell’s found that this I
should cease to be and other people
perhaps of a more rational bent say well
that’s no problem because if you simply
cease to be there’s nobody to be
disturbed by it you can’t experience not
being there forever and what most people
do is they project upon the prospect of
annihilation the imagination of being
shut up in a dark prison then as it were
a super sensory deprivation chamber
forever but of course there is no that
the the notion of eternal annihilation
it is an attempt to conceive nothingness
non-experience and so far as our
imaginations are concerned nature abhors
a vacuum we have to project something
into that because psychologically as
however you see just as we’ve been
discussing the notion that all creatures
whatsoever
not to mention all people feel
themselves in the middle they feel
central to their experience and being
central to experience is the nearest
thing I can conceive as a meaning for
the word I not an ego because that is a
social structure a social institution
which has been kind of implanted upon
our psychological behavior upon shall we
say experience because experience is the
thing that we are taught yeah we are
taught what we what to meet what
experiences are permissible and what are
not just in the same way as we are
taught what speech is permissible and
what is not and what gestures are
permissible what actions are permissible
and what are not
so our experience is trained and we are
but still underneath the implantation of
the ego experience there is this
sensation of centrality you may feel
that your Center is isolated as in the
ego thing or you may feel that your
Center is simply the center of a of a
being which is you which extends to the
ultimate limits but in every case there
is the sense of centrality in every
being that exists
and therefore every being is I just as
you are and there are always eyes in the
sense so long as the planet indoors and
there are living creatures on it this is
a planet which eyes and so long as there
is the possibility that anywhere in the
galaxies there should be such a planet
or creatures who have who focus the
sensuality feeling of the universe there
is I and that I is always you we know
that when people die other people are
born after them and that is all the
evidence we need for the notion of a
reincarnation all it could be explained
in various ways discussed in various
ways and elaborated but fundamentally
people died and then people are born and
that is only the simplest way of saying
it because people are born while others
the living and the whole collection of I
centers can sit around in a ring in this
room and I would explain according to my
feeling that we are all a cycle of
reincarnation sitting round here in a
circle because reincarnation is the
reincarnation of I if you want it to be
the reincarnation of a particular I then
you will have to do something else
altogether which we shall go on to talk
about but one thing seems to me to be
there was a time when your I woke up it
emerged from the biological continuum
and what the Sheridan calls the
biosphere of this planet and you don’t
remember having been here before at
least not in the ordinary way that is a
surprising and is inconceivable an event
as ceasing to be and without any
apparent prospect of being again but you
see after this event called life you if
you go back to unconsciousness you go
back to where you were before you
started and since there can’t be any
experience of non-experience obviously
any next I that comes up and all in fact
next eyes that come up are you only
since I is an experience of centrality
you don’t experience yourself as
multi-centered you experience yourself
as a particular Center because the
universe although it is multi-centered
each Center is experienced uniquely so
what you might roughly expect is this
that after you die the next thing you
know is that you are without the
slightest memory of what ever happened
before you repeat the same sort of
experiences that you had when you were
born was it somebody else being gone
there has to be someone around I’m
merely saying that the experience of
being I goes on
even if there’s an interval of several
billion years makes no difference
whatsoever in spelling it took was
buzzing the human race was wiped off the
planet
and it took that much time for it to
reappear or any living creature that
would make no difference to this
phenomenon so let me repeat since there
is no possibility of a non experience
there are always experiences coming up
and each one of them is you because
that’s it’s it’s I now I know there’s a
difficulty in this because it arises
from the fact that we identify I with
ego an ego aide part of ego is a memory
system you know who you are in the sense
that you remember who you are you
events that you remember and these are
like a strung out in a line
they’re like a certain tune and
therefore you identify yourself with
that tune so we repeat ourselves we have
consistent characters just in the same
way as a tune is always constructed to
repeat itself in a certain way with
variations so that we recognize the tune
and the name of the piece by hearing
even one part of it so here is a tune
see that is being played and it is
attached to a center called I only the
eye is much more than this particular
tune this particular series of memories
even though we are persuaded and kind of
hoaxed into identifying the whole eye
but you know supposing somebody play’s a
chopin etude and then he stops there
later on somebody else plays it is it
the same tune why in one sense EF in
another sense no so it is possible isn’t
it that even though your tune was wiped
out because the memory system goes with
death the same sort of tune can be
played again and either with its
characteristic themes and that will be
in another sense you in a more
particular sense than the you of
centrality in Maya and they liken the
process of rebirth to the motion of a
wave across the surface of water
actually the motion is illusory
water simply
is up and down and there is an optical
no wave moves and yet there is the
seeming of movement so the Buddhists
would say no soul reincarnates and yet
there is the illusion of reincarnation
Buddhists think of reincarnation as an
illusion
and yet believe in it
Westerners think of it something that my
be a fact and find it difficult to
believe
Westerners adopt the idea of
reincarnation as a comforting idea
Buddhists are trying to get out of being
reincarnated it’s very funny but at any
rate the Buddhist doctrine of
reincarnation says that what passes from
life to life is karma is the doing
action that’s what karma mean process
and that’s something like wave not soul
not entity that doesn’t pass but then it
can always well pool again somewhere
else so now what do we do if that’s
clear so far what do we do to give any
credence at all to the notion that there
is some connection between some lives of
a peculiar character that we could take
a a life lived between the years of 1500
and 1580
and look at that then see another life
lived between 1700 and 1792 and say ye
gods there’s no getting away from it but
that the latter is a continuation of the
former now how could you do that well
very simply let us consider that we are
looking at an enormous number of
biographies scattered over a very great
period of years but to visualize them
we’ve got to think of them as different
now as you look at this great mosaic you
see of spots of all sorts of different
colors you will very soon begin to pick
out patterns in it as you do with the
Rorschach blot and you will see
continuities running across and you will
therefore have projected a really even
personal reincarnation pattern running
between these different biographies it
is highly conceivable that one of these
blocks may at a certain point lead you
into us there may be a stream of blots
that you associate as being a stream and
then at a certain point they divide two
lines proceeded from it could very well
be you see that an individual could
reincarnate as to next time or any
number you want an eva fashion but you
will see these connections in your
blocks now then the question arises is
this just your idea or are these
connections real in order to answer that
one all we have to do is to look at of
some sort of pattern formation that we
find not in the situation that we find a
Rorschach blot but say we are examining
the structure of a muscle you’ve sliced
a muscle and are looking at it carefully
with microscopes and things what do we
find we find that muscle is an enormous
conglomeration of cells but that these
cells have patterns
or at any rate we notice
areas of their behavior where they seem
to constitute tubes but these what is
the difference between the pubes one
sees in the cross-section of muscle and
the pictures of forms one sees in a
Rorschach lot let’s get down to it what
is the dip you might say there would be
a large variation of individual opinion
as to the nature of the Rorschach blot
pattern and less division of opinion
about how one should interpret muscle
patterns but is that alone enough to
establish a significant difference
between the two situations especially
when you get down to the micro level
where more and more the molecules or
cells or whatever are distant from each
other you say isn’t it really remarkable
that at a certain level of magnification
we see this is a huge distribution of
rather formless things and we can only
see what form we make when we go down in
magnification and come back to
approaching the normal vision that we
see these vastly scattered blob blobs
and blobs and blob eul’s or whatever
takes shape and this this alteration of
magnification anything like a
psychological projection it’s very
difficult to draw a hard and fast line
between making out sensible patterns in
the physical world of everyday life on
the one hand and interpreting Rorschach
plots on the other seeing faces in
marvel seeing cities in the clouds
and so on so then what my
as lines of continuity between various
lives could be said to be there in the
sense that there are veins and lines
embedded in the cell structure of
muscles but there is always it’s quite
clear to us there is something about the
projections we make her faces into
marble that has a kind of illusion to it
quite so and what would its philosophy
wants to draw our attention to is that
the same kind of illusion is existing in
our attitude to the physical world we
are projecting but of course creatures
of like structure will make the same
projections just as we look around here
and see that we are more or less all the
same basic shape and therefore probably
have the same sort of brains inside our
heads we are projecting a more or less
similar structure upon the external
world and our agreement about that is
the same thing as saying well that’s the
way it is but you see how relative that
is it is in relation to having a brain
system of this particular kind so the
Western
be anxious that his idea about
reincarnation is something more than a
fantasy the oriental the Buddhist or the
Hindu very much hopes it is only a
fantasy in that case it can be overcome
he can be delivered from a cycle of
futility only you mustn’t understand
again you mustn’t understand that too
literally if you want to know what
Buddhists really teach on this matter
put in a very simple way you get a book
by Alexander a David Nail called the
secret oral teachings in difficult to
get hold of but somebody in this country
is going to publish it it is published
in India but I think Lawrence
Ferlinghetti is gonna publish it city
light San Francisco that book really
goes into this and I called it I call it
the i-told-you-so book because I’ve
often been accused of inventing my own
unique brand of Buddhism and boosting it
off on the public as being the real
thing I just have to fight them to this
token so you see Alexandre David Nail at
French d-a-v-i-d – n ee l David Nail
is that you will pick out the lines of
continuity between lives upon what basis
why just in the same way as you pick out
continuity between tones by the way they
interval to each other in which case the
death interval the off interval becomes
the significant connecting factor
between the on intervals that’s what you
do when you look at patterns and of
blobs on a wall you could play with
Roland halls paintings that way and see
all sorts of things in them and it
depends what intervals you’ll find
significant that connects what you call
the arm pieces see you always get off
pieces and arm pieces you’ve got a kind
of mosaic look into a press photograph
with a magnifying glass and you’ll find
a mosaic of black and white dots and so
you can again you can make the
significant connection and as you do you
come out with somebody’s face and so in
the in the world our nerves are very
much like the press photograph they when
something impinge is upon the retinal
backdrop of the eye its impinges on a
whole lot of rods and cones that are
either on or off with the state of a
neuron you see is that it fires or it
doesn’t fire so we’ve got this press
photograph thing in it if you work with
LSD this comes very clear you get a
vision sometimes of the world which is
positively pointillist like the
paintings of Sarah somehow it seems as
if your nerve ends have been activated
individually and you become aware of a
this could be dismissed as the pure
hallucination but all hallucinations
have some basis in our neural structure
you see they may not be experiences that
are of what we call the objective world
but in any experiment that turns your
consciousness on your consciousness your
senses on your senses you will get
curious things happening just as you
might get oscillations in electric
circuitry so it would then be intervals
once again that could be the significant
connecting factors in a developmental
pattern of an individual through a
series of incarnations but those
intervals are illusions the the
connection is illusory but in a sense of
illusion to which we Westerners are not
really accustomed because Maya means
illusion in a very complex sense it
calculation in the sense of the calculus
that is difficult for us to understand
you see the notion that the world is
Maya why is it difficult for us to
understand that what is our feeling
about saying this is a dream a
projection what’s
the objection to that idea well I think
that that historically at the root of
our oppressed an objection to this idea
is that it’s discussed to God it as if
to say God did not really create the
world as it says in the Bible but that
only seemed to but you realize that this
is an absolute verbal hang-up it’s
really a question of its it’s also a
question of values now if the world is
real then I must take you seriously and
you must take me seriously
if the world is only a dream then we’d
have we it doesn’t matter it doesn’t
matter you see if you say it doesn’t
matter then you are saying it’s purely
spiritual like it’s immaterial baby and
and you see how we flip around in our
use of words we’ll say something
oh that’s mere matter haha so it doesn’t
matter
everybody gets completely confused in
the way they think about these things
because they’ve never really been
thought about clearly these questions of
is it real or is it not reform when an
oriental says for something that it’s
not real the first thing he means is
it’s not permanent and so the quality of
change of the smoke like and now if they
say the dream like because the dream
vanishes you see and so they say life is
like a dream
it keeps as you get older you’re more
and more aware of the speed at which
things change with the
it seems to be slow children easily get
bored as you get older
life is a school especially if you live
in California where you can’t keep a
steady mailing list come home two months
because every two months the corner of
the address is checked and you know the
bulldozers come in and they change the
shape of everything knock down all your
old buildings and up go new ones and
then they get knocked down well they’re
so jerry-built that they fall apart but
there it goes you see and so there is
this quality he means our dream like the
but he also means illusion in showing
the extent to which what is going on in
this flux is a creation of the
perceiving organism so that by illusion
the oriental also means relative as in
the relationship between the air
vibrations in the ear between the cloud
the Sun and the observer these things
produce rainbow sound and so on but
these are relative reality and so when
Buddhists used the word void Juniata in
sanskrit as designating the nature of
the world this should rather be
translated relativity than nothingness
the great scholars scherbotsky made this
very plain in his honor
it is relativity that we should think of
rather than our ideas of non-being so
from that point of view as also from the
standpoint of quantum mechanics and
modern physics the illusory nature of
the world it is very clear it was so
much so that one physicist was a little
down
used to go round in the most enormous
padded shoes the fear of dropping
through the atomic structure of the
floor so one gets this extraordinary
sense then of living in this incredibly
real seeming world which the more you
analyze it consists mostly of not of
space and you come to feel a shall I say
diaphanous quality about things that a
mountain is only a faster way than
longer-lasting rainbow and that as the
poet said the hills are shadows and they
flow from form to form and nothing
stands and you if you will experience
this this kind of creepy feeling you get
when you think that this is just that
and why do you say swallowed up see
people poets people who talked swallowed
by the grave swallowed into space
disappeared into nothing gone vanished
into thin thin air why is there an
objection to this well one’s been taught
to object because you’ve been taught to
identify with a solid side of the
picture and to dis identify with the
empty side of the picture but you’ve
been hoaxed and fooled because you when
you die are not as it were gulped up by
thin air you’re just as much the thin
air as anything else it’s all of a piece
it isn’t an it isn’t a fight going on
but everything is represented as a fight
the contest between this side and that
but this is this is really the whole
thing about illusion where the ordinary
person sees a battle the enlightened
person sees a cooperation between two
sides have you ever tried to play chess
with yourself and honestly take each
side as you play it’s move against the
other one or to get to you know those
swords they have in bars they stick into
olives in martinis you get two of these
swords and fence with yourself and see
if you really can stick it into one of
your hands than have the other one
defended this is the most fascinating
game and this is the game goddess
playing sitting yeah two hands you know
is good is evil yes Jesus Christ and he
is Lucifer and he call it a real
involved in this fight you see when he
finds out that if he makes the right
hand win all the time
there’s no point in the game yes we’ll
get into the left hand and but
in order for that to be a real fight he
mustn’t let the left hand know what the
right hand is doing vice versa he
explains all the stuff in the Bible but
really you see underneath they have the
two hands they join back here like a
kind of a horseshoe or like the snake or
rubber oz which is bizarre preserved and
an aspect of that not letting your left
hand know what your right hand is doing
is the way we identify ourselves as
what’s inside the skin and not with
what’s outside it we identify ourselves
with reality with the solid things that
we can see and all the rest of space and
that’s nothing you see we attack
characteristically take sides in a
situation where both sides are aspects
of the situation they would take this
side will you have this or that choose
thought the sage doesn’t choose because
he said for there’s no choice here he
might choose for the sake of going along
you know like somebody says well what
would you like to do today we can go
into town and do some marketing or we
can stay out here and go swimming you
don’t care what you do so you just say
one in order to satisfy your gas with
your host so then behind the explicit
Tweedledum and tweedle be agreed to have
a battle we agree to differ if we want
so cheer up you may well be so
conditioned just like to to feel the
fear of the unknown even though you know
much better if you have come through in
life to a point where say you have bad
teeth through ageing or hardening
eyeballs when you get awakened in you
get Satori or anything it won’t make any
difference to your teeth or your
eyeballs I’ve never heard of a case of
the spiritual healing of somebody’s
teeth so in rather a similar way there
will be certain emotional habits that
you have that will be practically
unchangeable and they settle in as you
get older and you have to live with them
they’re just like you have to live with
the color of your hair or whether you’ve
got a funny shaped mouth or something
like that it’s it’s all goes along it’s
part of the pattern that you’re in for
the time being and will live out but a
lot of people go around judging other
people and say well they think they’ve
had some wonderful experience but they
are still sick in some way as if that
was reprehensible or they’re still lose
their tempers a bit if one expects all
these things to change emotional habits
poof like that one must get rid of that
so but you know what does happen is
although you have fears anxiety
nevertheless you can get to a point
where deep is it’s like having a deep
Center which isn’t anxious and above all
because they okay so I get accurate and
somehow you can tolerate it you can
stand the tension it’s one of the most
fascinating things to learn to to hold
tension and not go when you get a
problem not go rushing off to solve it
immediately because most problems when
solved in a rush are solved in the wrong
way especially emotional problems
between people you have to stand for
example not being liked which is a
but what I’ve said here I think about
space and about rebirth and so on you
will notice one thing about it all it
doesn’t in it nothing that I’ve said or
understanding anything that I’ve said
doesn’t require any kind of what I would
call special knowledge with all out in
front of you it doesn’t require actually
it doesn’t require meditation exercises
or LSD or or anything it’s it’s all out
in the open
and the only really essential meditation
exercise is stopping thinking and being
able to perceive without conceptualizing
what you’re looking at and that’s the
interior silence without which well
there is really nothing to think about
or talk about except thinking and talking so let’s have an intermission
have no reason to produce anything but a
lousy product and then you may make lots
of money because he wiped out your
competitors you’ve got the whole market
then you’ve got this money what you’re
gonna buy with it well if there’s
nothing to buy accept other people’s
lousy products
it’ll wiped out their competitors or who
cheated the public by packaging the
thing to look elegant but it was nothing
inside that’s all you’ve got to buy so
naturally if you’re a success in General
Motors you go and buy a Rolls Royce from
England or even buy a Mercedes from
Germany because they happen to be better
cars so you see the something always
self-defeating in these attempts to
succeed who say nothing fails like
success so for this reason then the
cautious allowed sir says as one who
crosses a river in spring that means
either the cause of the spring floods or
because the ice is still there and
you’re not quite sure how strong it is
cause it’s beginning to thaw so the what
the Daoist tries to develop is a
sensibility to the situation he tries to
feel out intuitively what kind of action
is required under these circumstances
because he feels that he can never
discover it analytically with his
conscious attention alone well now to
talk in modern Western terms about how
this is done we must realize of course
that we are equipped inside our heads
with an absolutely
fantastic thing called the brain with
its millions and millions of neuron
cells it is as it were the most amazing
computer ever devised but basic to the
Taoist attitude to life is that you have
that within you and you may if you don’t
know anything about brains very much
call it intuition or something of that
kind but you have within you the most
amazing logical analyser
that exists in the known world and the
point is to get it to work for you and
instead of trying with conscious
attention alone which can only think of
about three things at a time without
using a pencil that is to say keep three
variables in mind at once very few
people can do four without using a
pencil you can do four if you’re a
trained musician where you’ve got four
you’re playing four different lines of
the fugue say you’re keeping four
variables in mind at once with an
organist you can go from four to six
because you’ve got your two feet and
they’re playing true but that’s a
requires a high amount of training to be
able with conscious attention to keep
these many variables in mind but the
world around us has infinitely many
variables going in it and you can reason
out something with your conscious verbal
thinking say you want to make a contract
in business and you figure out how to
make it whether it will be a good
contract whether it will work etc etc
and you think of all these things and
write them down and you make the
contract you think that’s fine but one
of the variables that you couldn’t
possibly include in the contract was
that your partner would slip on a banana
all sorts of things I mean the contract
might make provisions in it if your
lawyers thoughtful for what was to be
done number the case of the disability
of any of the parties there – et cetera
but eventually there are so many
possibilities that can occur that you
cannot think of them all so then the
question arises is it within the power
of the human brain to comprehend because
of its immense complexity in a kind of
an or subconscious way what the surface
consciousness can never grasp and the
the Daoist would say certainly it can
but you’ve got to learn to use your
brain by allowing it to go to work on
your problems without interfering with
it and then it will deliver you a
decision and this is why when you get to
when you get to the real study of Taoist
and Zen Buddhist practice you get to the
point where you learn to act without
making decisions or rather to use a more
exact word without choosing Krishnamurti
talks a great deal about being
choicelessly aware and he says freedom
is precisely the state of not having to
choose now that sounds quite paradoxical
because we’re always talking about
freedom of choice but choice is not a
form of freedom in the sense of the word
what is choice in the sense of the word
choice is the act of hesitation that we
make before making a decision it is a
mental wobbling you know some people
when they take up a pen to write they
don’t just write but they jiggle the pen
around
and decisively like this and then
start writing our person comes into a
room and wonders who to talk to Italy is
in doubt you see in that moment he’s
choosing whereas the person who comes
into a room and decides who to approach
he doesn’t wait to choose we say he is
decisive but that’s a funny saying
because it means he doesn’t stop to
decide so in the training in Zen
Buddhism which is simply a Buddhist
extension of Taoism it all represent
Buddhism arose out of the marriage of
Buddhism and Taoism in the fifth century
AD and over the following centuries so
they have a way of training you so that
you always act without choosing for
example there was one day a leaky roof
and there were a couple of monks
attending the Zen master and he said the
roof is leaking one monk disappeared and
came back instantly with a sieve and put
it under the drips another monk after
some time came back with a bucket the
master praised the one who brought the
filth now the action wasn’t exactly
appropriate
I mean turned over to catching rain but
the point was that he was in the spirit
of the Zen discipline by acting without
choosing and you will notice this with
certain people certain people never
hesitate they always seem if something
needs to be done they seem somehow
simply to grab something and do it you
button so what happens is this that the
the the teacher of Zen constantly throws
curves with his students and puts them
in dilemma situations where they have to
act immediately one of the things that
cost that you mustn’t do is rush because
rush is a form of hesitation you rushing
when a person rushes to get a train he
starts to fall over his own feet see so
it really holds him up it’s like trying
to drive at high speed through the water
with a blunt nosed boat at rush but now
what he’s trying to get is a kind of a
smooth unhesitating flowing action but
is the response to the challenge and it
must be done in the what with what is
this is called Union in Chinese on one
end Japanese and this word nen is
composed of the character meaning now
and the character meaning mind heart
shin and so has the meaning of a thought
but especially for us it is well
translated by the psychological term
blocking your blocking you say to
someone when they hesitate when they
differ when they stop to choose so the
attitude of Moonen
or one Yin is the unblocked mind where
it doesn’t hesitate ever just as the
river doesn’t hesitate when it flows and
just when you trap your hands that sound
comes out without hesitation and when
the moon rises
water doesn’t wait to reflect it it
reflected instantly so that instant
reflection or it’s a kind of resonance
is what is looked for as a response of
the individual to his environment and he
does this to the degree that he knows
himself to be one with his environment
then his wrist Poppa his capacity for
response increases in according to the
way in which he feels that he is simply
all of a peace with it and not something
that is in it and was a barrier round
him through which messages have to get
and then their decisions have to be made
up and sent out so then you could say
that a kind of extremely subtle sensory
awareness has to be developed as between
the individual and his environment so
that he feels it out now today this sort
of talk is very unpopular because
scientifically minded people especially
academic scientists those who teach in
universities are exceedingly suspicious
of intuitive reactions I say Oh wah wah
wah wah you can get into all sorts of
trouble that way but the thing that they
neglected were to realize is that
everybody uses it even the most
meticulously careful analytical rigorous
sound scientist uses intuitive judgment
after a certain point
why because you may accumulate data
ever and you may decide that this is on
the whole taking all do things into
consideration and procedures having been
worked out that this is the right thing
to do why do you decide then mostly
because times up
and somebody’s pressing for a decision
or else you are bored to death with
bringing in data because you never know
much how much data you need to make a
certain decision and therefore you may
go on collecting data to all is blue but
in the last analysis you’ll work on
hunch and so much is actually in the end
decided by flipping coins and the pity
of flipping coins for making decisions
gives you only two choices
heads or tails one way or the other the
Chinese have a more subtle way of
flipping coins they have a method of a
64 sided coin to flip so that the
instead of just heads or tails there are
64 possibilities of coming to a decision
when you don’t know what to do this is
called the aging or the Book of Changes
where the symbols are Yang and Yin that
is to say for yang a straight line
undivided for Yin line a broken in the
middle there are 64 ways of combining
six of these lines in a hexagram and so
there is a complex method when you have
to make a very grave decision for a
tossing you do it by tossing sticks or
coins and it gives you one of these 64
figures now if you are very wise and
have studied the book of change for a
long time you don’t need to use the book
you just look at what the figure is and
you can tell what it means because you
see these
figures are made up of each sixth
hexagram figure how is made up of two
threefold components that has two
components of which this one is water
and this one is heaven so you’ll have
water over heaven and a person very
skilled in the interpretation will feel
out the meaning of water over heaven God
actually if you are not so skilled there
is the book and for each of these
hexagrams the book has an oracle and it
tells you in curiously vague and yet
curiously precise terms the meaning of
this hexagram and then you in the light
of your own situation make up your mind
what it’s saying to you in the light of
the problem that you’ve raised the
question that you’ve asked the decision
that you had to make you will find
invariably that these 64 choices are one
of them or indeed all of them but you
have to pick one of them because you are
after all tossing a coin but it has some
peculiarly appropriate thing to say to
you under your circumstances and it’s
just like having a conversation with a
very very wise old gentleman and you
must realize that it’s a day in Asia
this book is still widely used for
making business and political decisions
although people who are westernized
wouldn’t let on perhaps that they use it
and so anybody who does politics or does
business with Asia should be completely
versed in this book to know what sort of
thinking what sort of the approach might
be expected under any circumstances if
you would ever find out what exocrine I
had fallen when a certain
politician had made a decision it would
be immensely enlightening as to his
future course of action in the same way
for example in dealing with Hitler our
strategists I don’t know if they did
should have been students of astrology
because he was always consulting
astrologers and therefore astrology
would be much more easy to penetrate
than the aging because you can know
Hitler is looking all the time at his
own aura scope well we have access to
Hitler’s horoscope and so we know what
he’s thinking about but you don’t have
access to what hexagram mouths are dumb
through when he decided to do something
or other so it’s a little bit more
softly well then I’m making the point
then that our scientists are very
suspicious with the intuitive judgment
but nevertheless they all use it in the
end and so it has made this suspicion
that science has of intuitive judgment
has filtered down to the average person
in terms of a mistrust of his own
intuitions of the marvelous analytical
powers of his own brain and so we are
always in a dither of doubt as to
whether we are behaving the right way
doing the right thing and so on and so
forth and lack a certain kind of
self-confidence and if you see you lack
self-confidence you will make mistakes
through sheer tumbling if you do have
self-confidence you may carry get away
with doing entirely the wrong thing if
the British have an enormous degree of
self-confidence they know they’re right
and they don’t even question in there
there are certain kinds of British types
who are absolutely there a plumber’s
lievable and you can’t shake them that
wouldn’t really they’re not even
defending themselves they know they’re
so light and therefore they can allow
any kind of political revolution total
free speech all sorts of things can go
on which make Americans very nervous
because Americans don’t have the same
degree of aplomb they’re not quite sure
you see when you’re an aristocrat and
you’ve been brought up for generations
in the right schools and there’s never
any doubt whatsoever you don’t even have
to mention the fact that you’re an
aristocrat see I mean that’s why
aristocrats that know how to treat
servants but they never take it out on
their servants in the sense of having to
emphasize their own superiority because
they know they’re superior they don’t
even question it see well this is the
extraordinary kind of nerve that they
build up and so the only way you know
you can do this is first of all in in
Zen practice the thing that you have to
understand is this you have to regard
yourself as a cloud in the flesh because
you see clouds never make mistakes did
you ever see a cloud that was misshapen
you ever see a badly designed worry now
they always do the right thing
now so as a matter of fact – we because
we are natural beings just like clouds
and waves only we we that we have
complicated games which cause us to
doubt ourselves but if you will treat
yourself for a while
as a cloud or wave and realize that you
can’t make a mistake whatever you do
because even if you do something that
seems to be totally disastrous it all
this morning I want to talk about space
in relation to what is ordinal is called
reincarnation because this is one of the
most fascinating applications of the
sense that space constitutes something
significant now the subject of
reincarnation is one around which is
ringed an incredible amount of
hocus-pocus and yet there is something
in it and there seems to be something in
it not mainly because there is a lot of
alleged evidence for it in the form of
stories of children who remember their
former lives and so on I want to
approach the subject much in the way
that urban shredding and the physicist
does because he has a view of this that
does not involve any hocus-pocus at all
it is perfectly simple and all the
evidence for it is already before us so
it involves no claim too special inside
psychic knowledge the Meerut of grasping
a principle that is staring us in the
face and this principle is difficult to
understand not because there’s any
inherent intellectual complexity to it
but simply because it requires getting
there is
some sort of analogy which I’ve already
drawn your attention to between space
and unconsciousness between stars there
is darkness between stars there is not
the energy which constitutes a so-called
body in some modern physical theory that
is purely hypothetical not really tested
bodies in space are thought of as points
at which space is intensified but at any
rate there are these gaps these
intervals and obviously the unconscious
state must appear always through the
conscious state as a gap or interval so
when we go to sleep at night we wake up
in the morning almost instantly in other
words there appears to have happened
nothing except something quite vague
between going to sleep and waking unless
you had dreams and so you can conceive
or barely conceive going to sleep but
not waking up or the
verse of it waking up without ever
having gone to sleep which appears to be
the nearest we can imagine to death and
birth respectively to go to sleep and
never wake up when we die when we were
born to wake up but not to remember ever
having gone to sleep and of course this
bugs our imagination because it’s
inconceivable in terms of consciousness
people are afraid some people are afraid
of the possibility of eternal
annihilation and I suppose one of the
most eloquent expressions of that is
John betterments poem before the
anesthetic where he would prefer rather
even the dismal hell’s found that this I
should cease to be and other people
perhaps of a more rational bent say well
that’s no problem because if you simply
cease to be there’s nobody to be
disturbed by it you can’t experience not
being there forever and what most people
do is they project upon the prospect of
annihilation the imagination of being
shut up in a dark prison then as it were
a super sensory deprivation chamber
forever but of course there is no that
the the notion of eternal annihilation
it is an attempt to conceive nothingness
non-experience and so far as our
imaginations are concerned nature abhors
a vacuum we have to project something
into that because psychologically as
however you see just as we’ve been
discussing the notion that all creatures
whatsoever
not to mention all people feel
themselves in the middle they feel
central to their experience and being
central to experience is the nearest
thing I can conceive as a meaning for
the word I not an ego because that is a
social structure a social institution
which has been kind of implanted upon
our psychological behavior upon shall we
say experience because experience is the
thing that we are taught yeah we are
taught what we what to meet what
experiences are permissible and what are
not just in the same way as we are
taught what speech is permissible and
what is not and what gestures are
permissible what actions are permissible
and what are not
so our experience is trained and we are
but still underneath the implantation of
the ego experience there is this
sensation of centrality you may feel
that your Center is isolated as in the
ego thing or you may feel that your
Center is simply the center of a of a
being which is you which extends to the
ultimate limits but in every case there
is the sense of centrality in every
being that exists
and therefore every being is I just as
you are and there are always eyes in the
sense so long as the planet indoors and
there are living creatures on it this is
a planet which eyes and so long as there
is the possibility that anywhere in the
galaxies there should be such a planet
or creatures who have who focus the
sensuality feeling of the universe there
is I and that I is always you we know
that when people die other people are
born after them and that is all the
evidence we need for the notion of a
reincarnation all it could be explained
in various ways discussed in various
ways and elaborated but fundamentally
people died and then people are born and
that is only the simplest way of saying
it because people are born while others
the living and the whole collection of I
centers can sit around in a ring in this
room and I would explain according to my
feeling that we are all a cycle of
reincarnation sitting round here in a
circle because reincarnation is the
reincarnation of I if you want it to be
the reincarnation of a particular I then
you will have to do something else
altogether which we shall go on to talk
about but one thing seems to me to be
there was a time when your I woke up it
emerged from the biological continuum
and what the Sheridan calls the
biosphere of this planet and you don’t
remember having been here before at
least not in the ordinary way that is a
surprising and is inconceivable an event
as ceasing to be and without any
apparent prospect of being again but you
see after this event called life you if
you go back to unconsciousness you go
back to where you were before you
started and since there can’t be any
experience of non-experience obviously
any next I that comes up and all in fact
next eyes that come up are you only
since I is an experience of centrality
you don’t experience yourself as
multi-centered you experience yourself
as a particular Center because the
universe although it is multi-centered
each Center is experienced uniquely so
what you might roughly expect is this
that after you die the next thing you
know is that you are without the
slightest memory of what ever happened
before you repeat the same sort of
experiences that you had when you were
born was it somebody else being gone
there has to be someone around I’m
merely saying that the experience of
being I goes on
even if there’s an interval of several
billion years makes no difference
whatsoever in spelling it took was
buzzing the human race was wiped off the
planet
and it took that much time for it to
reappear or any living creature that
would make no difference to this
phenomenon so let me repeat since there
is no possibility of a non experience
there are always experiences coming up
and each one of them is you because
that’s it’s it’s I now I know there’s a
difficulty in this because it arises
from the fact that we identify I with
ego an ego aide part of ego is a memory
system you know who you are in the sense
that you remember who you are you
events that you remember and these are
like a strung out in a line
they’re like a certain tune and
therefore you identify yourself with
that tune so we repeat ourselves we have
consistent characters just in the same
way as a tune is always constructed to
repeat itself in a certain way with
variations so that we recognize the tune
and the name of the piece by hearing
even one part of it so here is a tune
see that is being played and it is
attached to a center called I only the
eye is much more than this particular
tune this particular series of memories
even though we are persuaded and kind of
hoaxed into identifying the whole eye
but you know supposing somebody play’s a
chopin etude and then he stops there
later on somebody else plays it is it
the same tune why in one sense EF in
another sense no so it is possible isn’t
it that even though your tune was wiped
out because the memory system goes with
death the same sort of tune can be
played again and either with its
characteristic themes and that will be
in another sense you in a more
particular sense than the you of
centrality in Maya and they liken the
process of rebirth to the motion of a
wave across the surface of water
actually the motion is illusory
water simply
is up and down and there is an optical
no wave moves and yet there is the
seeming of movement so the Buddhists
would say no soul reincarnates and yet
there is the illusion of reincarnation
Buddhists think of reincarnation as an
illusion
and yet believe in it
Westerners think of it something that my
be a fact and find it difficult to
believe
Westerners adopt the idea of
reincarnation as a comforting idea
Buddhists are trying to get out of being
reincarnated it’s very funny but at any
rate the Buddhist doctrine of
reincarnation says that what passes from
life to life is karma is the doing
action that’s what karma mean process
and that’s something like wave not soul
not entity that doesn’t pass but then it
can always well pool again somewhere
else so now what do we do if that’s
clear so far what do we do to give any
credence at all to the notion that there
is some connection between some lives of
a peculiar character that we could take
a a life lived between the years of 1500
and 1580
and look at that then see another life
lived between 1700 and 1792 and say ye
gods there’s no getting away from it but
that the latter is a continuation of the
former now how could you do that well
very simply let us consider that we are
looking at an enormous number of
biographies scattered over a very great
period of years but to visualize them
we’ve got to think of them as different
now as you look at this great mosaic you
see of spots of all sorts of different
colors you will very soon begin to pick
out patterns in it as you do with the
Rorschach blot and you will see
continuities running across and you will
therefore have projected a really even
personal reincarnation pattern running
between these different biographies it
is highly conceivable that one of these
blocks may at a certain point lead you
into us there may be a stream of blots
that you associate as being a stream and
then at a certain point they divide two
lines proceeded from it could very well
be you see that an individual could
reincarnate as to next time or any
number you want an eva fashion but you
will see these connections in your
blocks now then the question arises is
this just your idea or are these
connections real in order to answer that
one all we have to do is to look at of
some sort of pattern formation that we
find not in the situation that we find a
Rorschach blot but say we are examining
the structure of a muscle you’ve sliced
a muscle and are looking at it carefully
with microscopes and things what do we
find we find that muscle is an enormous
conglomeration of cells but that these
cells have patterns
or at any rate we notice
areas of their behavior where they seem
to constitute tubes but these what is
the difference between the pubes one
sees in the cross-section of muscle and
the pictures of forms one sees in a
Rorschach lot let’s get down to it what
is the dip you might say there would be
a large variation of individual opinion
as to the nature of the Rorschach blot
pattern and less division of opinion
about how one should interpret muscle
patterns but is that alone enough to
establish a significant difference
between the two situations especially
when you get down to the micro level
where more and more the molecules or
cells or whatever are distant from each
other you say isn’t it really remarkable
that at a certain level of magnification
we see this is a huge distribution of
rather formless things and we can only
see what form we make when we go down in
magnification and come back to
approaching the normal vision that we
see these vastly scattered blob blobs
and blobs and blob eul’s or whatever
takes shape and this this alteration of
magnification anything like a
psychological projection it’s very
difficult to draw a hard and fast line
between making out sensible patterns in
the physical world of everyday life on
the one hand and interpreting Rorschach
plots on the other seeing faces in
marvel seeing cities in the clouds
and so on so then what my
as lines of continuity between various
lives could be said to be there in the
sense that there are veins and lines
embedded in the cell structure of
muscles but there is always it’s quite
clear to us there is something about the
projections we make her faces into
marble that has a kind of illusion to it
quite so and what would its philosophy
wants to draw our attention to is that
the same kind of illusion is existing in
our attitude to the physical world we
are projecting but of course creatures
of like structure will make the same
projections just as we look around here
and see that we are more or less all the
same basic shape and therefore probably
have the same sort of brains inside our
heads we are projecting a more or less
similar structure upon the external
world and our agreement about that is
the same thing as saying well that’s the
way it is but you see how relative that
is it is in relation to having a brain
system of this particular kind so the
Western
be anxious that his idea about
reincarnation is something more than a
fantasy the oriental the Buddhist or the
Hindu very much hopes it is only a
fantasy in that case it can be overcome
he can be delivered from a cycle of
futility only you mustn’t understand
again you mustn’t understand that too
literally if you want to know what
Buddhists really teach on this matter
put in a very simple way you get a book
by Alexander a David Nail called the
secret oral teachings in difficult to
get hold of but somebody in this country
is going to publish it it is published
in India but I think Lawrence
Ferlinghetti is gonna publish it city
light San Francisco that book really
goes into this and I called it I call it
the i-told-you-so book because I’ve
often been accused of inventing my own
unique brand of Buddhism and boosting it
off on the public as being the real
thing I just have to fight them to this
token so you see Alexandre David Nail at
French d-a-v-i-d – n ee l David Nail
is that you will pick out the lines of
continuity between lives upon what basis
why just in the same way as you pick out
continuity between tones by the way they
interval to each other in which case the
death interval the off interval becomes
the significant connecting factor
between the on intervals that’s what you
do when you look at patterns and of
blobs on a wall you could play with
Roland halls paintings that way and see
all sorts of things in them and it
depends what intervals you’ll find
significant that connects what you call
the arm pieces see you always get off
pieces and arm pieces you’ve got a kind
of mosaic look into a press photograph
with a magnifying glass and you’ll find
a mosaic of black and white dots and so
you can again you can make the
significant connection and as you do you
come out with somebody’s face and so in
the in the world our nerves are very
much like the press photograph they when
something impinge is upon the retinal
backdrop of the eye its impinges on a
whole lot of rods and cones that are
either on or off with the state of a
neuron you see is that it fires or it
doesn’t fire so we’ve got this press
photograph thing in it if you work with
LSD this comes very clear you get a
vision sometimes of the world which is
positively pointillist like the
paintings of Sarah somehow it seems as
if your nerve ends have been activated
individually and you become aware of a
this could be dismissed as the pure
hallucination but all hallucinations
have some basis in our neural structure
you see they may not be experiences that
are of what we call the objective world
but in any experiment that turns your
consciousness on your consciousness your
senses on your senses you will get
curious things happening just as you
might get oscillations in electric
circuitry so it would then be intervals
once again that could be the significant
connecting factors in a developmental
pattern of an individual through a
series of incarnations but those
intervals are illusions the the
connection is illusory but in a sense of
illusion to which we Westerners are not
really accustomed because Maya means
illusion in a very complex sense it
calculation in the sense of the calculus
that is difficult for us to understand
you see the notion that the world is
Maya why is it difficult for us to
understand that what is our feeling
about saying this is a dream a
projection what’s
the objection to that idea well I think
that that historically at the root of
our oppressed an objection to this idea
is that it’s discussed to God it as if
to say God did not really create the
world as it says in the Bible but that
only seemed to but you realize that this
is an absolute verbal hang-up it’s
really a question of its it’s also a
question of values now if the world is
real then I must take you seriously and
you must take me seriously
if the world is only a dream then we’d
have we it doesn’t matter it doesn’t
matter you see if you say it doesn’t
matter then you are saying it’s purely
spiritual like it’s immaterial baby and
and you see how we flip around in our
use of words we’ll say something
oh that’s mere matter haha so it doesn’t
matter
everybody gets completely confused in
the way they think about these things
because they’ve never really been
thought about clearly these questions of
is it real or is it not reform when an
oriental says for something that it’s
not real the first thing he means is
it’s not permanent and so the quality of
change of the smoke like and now if they
say the dream like because the dream
vanishes you see and so they say life is
like a dream
it keeps as you get older you’re more
and more aware of the speed at which
things change with the
it seems to be slow children easily get
bored as you get older
life is a school especially if you live
in California where you can’t keep a
steady mailing list come home two months
because every two months the corner of
the address is checked and you know the
bulldozers come in and they change the
shape of everything knock down all your
old buildings and up go new ones and
then they get knocked down well they’re
so jerry-built that they fall apart but
there it goes you see and so there is
this quality he means our dream like the
but he also means illusion in showing
the extent to which what is going on in
this flux is a creation of the
perceiving organism so that by illusion
the oriental also means relative as in
the relationship between the air
vibrations in the ear between the cloud
the Sun and the observer these things
produce rainbow sound and so on but
these are relative reality and so when
Buddhists used the word void Juniata in
sanskrit as designating the nature of
the world this should rather be
translated relativity than nothingness
the great scholars scherbotsky made this
very plain in his honor
it is relativity that we should think of
rather than our ideas of non-being so
from that point of view as also from the
standpoint of quantum mechanics and
modern physics the illusory nature of
the world it is very clear it was so
much so that one physicist was a little
down
used to go round in the most enormous
padded shoes the fear of dropping
through the atomic structure of the
floor so one gets this extraordinary
sense then of living in this incredibly
real seeming world which the more you
analyze it consists mostly of not of
space and you come to feel a shall I say
diaphanous quality about things that a
mountain is only a faster way than
longer-lasting rainbow and that as the
poet said the hills are shadows and they
flow from form to form and nothing
stands and you if you will experience
this this kind of creepy feeling you get
when you think that this is just that
and why do you say swallowed up see
people poets people who talked swallowed
by the grave swallowed into space
disappeared into nothing gone vanished
into thin thin air why is there an
objection to this well one’s been taught
to object because you’ve been taught to
identify with a solid side of the
picture and to dis identify with the
empty side of the picture but you’ve
been hoaxed and fooled because you when
you die are not as it were gulped up by
thin air you’re just as much the thin
air as anything else it’s all of a piece
it isn’t an it isn’t a fight going on
but everything is represented as a fight
the contest between this side and that
but this is this is really the whole
thing about illusion where the ordinary
person sees a battle the enlightened
person sees a cooperation between two
sides have you ever tried to play chess
with yourself and honestly take each
side as you play it’s move against the
other one or to get to you know those
swords they have in bars they stick into
olives in martinis you get two of these
swords and fence with yourself and see
if you really can stick it into one of
your hands than have the other one
defended this is the most fascinating
game and this is the game goddess
playing sitting yeah two hands you know
is good is evil yes Jesus Christ and he
is Lucifer and he call it a real
involved in this fight you see when he
finds out that if he makes the right
hand win all the time
there’s no point in the game yes we’ll
get into the left hand and but
in order for that to be a real fight he
mustn’t let the left hand know what the
right hand is doing vice versa he
explains all the stuff in the Bible but
really you see underneath they have the
two hands they join back here like a
kind of a horseshoe or like the snake or
rubber oz which is bizarre preserved and
an aspect of that not letting your left
hand know what your right hand is doing
is the way we identify ourselves as
what’s inside the skin and not with
what’s outside it we identify ourselves
with reality with the solid things that
we can see and all the rest of space and
that’s nothing you see we attack
characteristically take sides in a
situation where both sides are aspects
of the situation they would take this
side will you have this or that choose
thought the sage doesn’t choose because
he said for there’s no choice here he
might choose for the sake of going along
you know like somebody says well what
would you like to do today we can go
into town and do some marketing or we
can stay out here and go swimming you
don’t care what you do so you just say
one in order to satisfy your gas with
your host so then behind the explicit
Tweedledum and tweedle be agreed to have
a battle we agree to differ if we want
so cheer up you may well be so
conditioned just like to to feel the
fear of the unknown even though you know
much better if you have come through in
life to a point where say you have bad
teeth through ageing or hardening
eyeballs when you get awakened in you
get Satori or anything it won’t make any
difference to your teeth or your
eyeballs I’ve never heard of a case of
the spiritual healing of somebody’s
teeth so in rather a similar way there
will be certain emotional habits that
you have that will be practically
unchangeable and they settle in as you
get older and you have to live with them
they’re just like you have to live with
the color of your hair or whether you’ve
got a funny shaped mouth or something
like that it’s it’s all goes along it’s
part of the pattern that you’re in for
the time being and will live out but a
lot of people go around judging other
people and say well they think they’ve
had some wonderful experience but they
are still sick in some way as if that
was reprehensible or they’re still lose
their tempers a bit if one expects all
these things to change emotional habits
poof like that one must get rid of that
so but you know what does happen is
although you have fears anxiety
nevertheless you can get to a point
where deep is it’s like having a deep
Center which isn’t anxious and above all
because they okay so I get accurate and
somehow you can tolerate it you can
stand the tension it’s one of the most
fascinating things to learn to to hold
tension and not go when you get a
problem not go rushing off to solve it
immediately because most problems when
solved in a rush are solved in the wrong
way especially emotional problems
between people you have to stand for
example not being liked which is a
but what I’ve said here I think about
space and about rebirth and so on you
will notice one thing about it all it
doesn’t in it nothing that I’ve said or
understanding anything that I’ve said
doesn’t require any kind of what I would
call special knowledge with all out in
front of you it doesn’t require actually
it doesn’t require meditation exercises
or LSD or or anything it’s it’s all out
in the open
and the only really essential meditation
exercise is stopping thinking and being
able to perceive without conceptualizing
what you’re looking at and that’s the
interior silence without which well
there is really nothing to think about
or talk about except thinking and talking so let’s have an intermission
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