/author/Alan%20Watts

112 quotes by Alan Watts

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not selfish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps. But if high officers on both sides have any intelligence at all, they make a secret agreement to contain the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in 'unimportant' countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question 'Who or what am I?'—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure. This understanding is at first paralyzing. You are in a trap—in the worst of all double-binds—seeing that any direction you may take will imply, and so evoke, its opposite. Decide to be a Christ, and there will be a Judas to betray you and a mob to crucify you. Decide to be a devil, and men will unite against you in the closest brotherly love. Your first reaction may be simply, 'To hell with it!' The only course may seem to be to forget the whole effort and become absorbed in trivialities, or to check out of the game by suicide or psychosis, and spend the rest of your days blabbering in an asylum. But there is another possibility. Instead of checking out, let us ask what the trap means. What is implied in finding yourself paralyzed, unable to escape from a game in which all the rules are double-binds and all moves self-defeating? Surely this is a deep and intense experience of the same double-bind that was placed upon you in infancy, when the community told you that you must be free, responsible, and loving, and when you were helplessly defined as an independent agent. The sense of paralysis is therefore the dawning realization that this is nonsense and that your independent ego is a fiction. It simply isn't there, either to do anything or to be pushed around by external forces, to change things or to submit to change. The sense of 'I,' which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that universe. In the preceding chapter we saw that this unity of organism and environment is a physical fact. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences this from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety. One need not, then, fall into the trap which this experience holds for believers in an external, all-powerful God—the temptation to feel 'I am God' in that sense, and to expect to be worshipped and obeyed by all other organisms. Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious 'will,' except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one's ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is. This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various 'spiritual exercises' in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to 'get' some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps. But there is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to 'get culture' or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. If, then, you ask me how to get beyond the ego-feeling, I shall ask you why you want to get there. If you give me the honest answer, which is that your ego will feel better in the 'higher spiritual status' of self-transcendence, you will thus realize that you—as ego—are a fake. You will feel like an onion: skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge, is pulled off to find no kernel at the center. Which is the whole point: to find out that the ego is indeed a fake—a wall of defense around a wall of defense ... around nothing. You can't even want to get rid of it, nor yet want to want to. Understanding this, you will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn't. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with—perhaps—a touch of heredity thrown in. This may give you the temporary feeling of being a zombie or a puppet dancing irresponsibly on strings that lead away to unknown forces. At this point, the ego may reassert itself with the insidious 'I-can't-help-myself' play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim. 'See, I'm only a bundle of conditioned reflexes, so you mustn't get angry with me for acting just as I feel.' (To which the answer could be, 'Well, we're just zombies too, so you shouldn't complain if we get angry.') But who is it that mustn't get angry or shouldn't complain, as if there were still some choice in the matter? The ego is still surviving as the 'I' which must passively endure the automatic behavior of 'myself' and others—again, as if there were some choice which the witnessing self can make between putting up with things and attacking them violently. What has happened is that the frustrated ego has withdrawn into its last stronghold of independence, retaining its identity as a mere watcher, or sufferer, of all that goes on. Here it pities itself or consoles itself as a puppet of fate. But if this is seen as yet another subterfuge, we are close to the final showdown. A line of separation is now drawn between everything that happens to me, including my own feelings, on the one side, and on the other, I myself as the conscious witness. Isn't it easy to see that this line is imaginary, and that it, and the witness behind it, are the same old faking process automatically learned in childhood? The same old cleft between the knower and the known? The same old split between the organism/environment and the organism's feedback, or self-conscious mechanism? If, then, there is no choice in what happens to me, on one side of the line, there is equally no choice on the other, on the witnessing side, as to whether I should accept what happens or reject it. I accept, I reject, I witness just as automatically as things happen or as my emotions reflect my physiological chemistry. Yet in this moment when one seems about to become a really total zombie, the whole thing blows up. For there is not fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its 'parts,' are doing—that is, of its behavior—this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog. It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out 'how they are made.' This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitive and unreliable science of astrology—as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's, character or soul, he draws a horoscope—that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment—social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical—throughout every moment of his life.

Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or 'ground' of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, 'myth' is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, 'myth' is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet 'myth,' in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road. \n\nMyth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: 'Where did the world come from?' 'Why did God make the world?' 'Where was I before I was born?' 'Where do people go when they die?' Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this: \n\n>There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black. \n\n>In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place. \n\n>God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. \n\n>Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. \n\n>Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. \n\n>God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. \n\n>You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

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The people we are tempted to call clods and boors are just those who seem to find nothing fascinating in being human; their humanity is incomplete, for it has never astonished them. There is also something incomplete about those who find nothing fascinating in being. You may say that this is a philosopher's professional prejudice—that people are defective who lack a sense of the metaphysical. But anyone who thinks at all must be a philosopher—a good one or a bad one—because it is impossible to think without premises, without basic (and in this sense, metaphysical) assumptions about what is sensible, what is the good life, what is beauty, and what is pleasure. To hold such assumptions, consciously or unconsciously, is to philosophize. The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.

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JUST AS true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself. Other creatures may love and laugh, talk and think, but it seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous 'echo' to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.

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Obviously, it takes discipline to make any radical change in one's own behavior patterns, and psychotherapy can drag on for years and years. But this is not my suggestion. Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as 'Your Honor' or 'Mi Lud,' without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this. He plays the role of judge all the better for realizing that on the next turn of the Wheel of Fortune he may be the accused, and that if all the truth were known, he would be standing there now. If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.) Thus when the two poles, good and bad, forget their interdependence and try to obliterate each other, man becomes subhuman—the implacable crusader or the cold, sadistic thug. It is not for man to be either an angel or a devil, and the would-be angels should realize that, as their ambition succeeds, they evoke hordes of devils to keep the balance. This was the lesson of Prohibition, as of all other attempts to enforce purely angelic behavior, or to pluck out evil root and branch.

I have never yet met a saint or sage who did not have some human frailties. For so long as you manifest yourself in human or animal form, you must eat at the expense of other life and accept the limitations of your particular organism, which fire will still burn and wherein danger will still secrete adrenalin. The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the 'offensive other' is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out. This will give you the priceless ability of being able to contain conflicts so that they do not get out-of-hand, of being willing to compromise and adapt, of playing, yes, but playing it cool. This is what is called 'honor among thieves,' for the really dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are thieves— the unfortunates who play the role of the 'good guys' with such blind zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the 'bad guys' who support their status.

in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning 'play' and the second having the complex sense of illusion (from the Latin ludere, to play), magic, creative power, art, and measuring—as when one dances or draws a design to a certain measure. From this point of view the universe in general and playing in particular are, in a special sense, 'meaningless': that is, they do not—like words and symbols—signify or point to something beyond themselves, just as a Mozart sonata conveys no moral or social message and does not try to suggest the natural sounds of wind, thunder, or birdsong. When I make the sound 'water,' you know what I mean. But what does this whole situation mean—I making the sound and your understanding it? What is the meaning of a pelican, a sunflower, a seaurchin, a mottled stone, or a galaxy? Or of a + b = b + a? They are all patterns, dancing patterns of light and sound, water and fire, rhythm and vibration, electricity and spacetime, going like Thrummular, thrummular thrilp, Hum lipsible, lipsible lilp; Dim thricken mithrummy, Lumgumptulous hummy, Stormgurgle umbumdular bilp. Or, in the famous words of Sir Arthur Eddington about the nature of electrons: We see the atoms with their girdles of circulating electrons darting hither and thither, colliding and rebounding. Free electrons torn from the girdles hurry away a hundred times faster, curving sharply round the atoms with side-slips and hairbreadth escapes.... The spectacle is so fascinating that we have perhaps forgotten that there was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered.... Something unknown is doing we don't know what—that is what our theory amounts to.

When this new sensation of self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own, and you wonder whether you will lose it—as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold on to it. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities—to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead,of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it. You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use—which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing—for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound. Yet what would we think of a society which had no place for music, which did not allow for dancing, or for any activity not directly involved with the practical problems of survival? Obviously, such a society would be surviving to no purpose— unless it could somehow make a delight out of the 'essential tasks' of farming, building, soldiering, manufacturing, or cooking. But in that moment the goal of survival is forgotten. The tasks are being done for their own sake, whereupon farms begin to look like gardens, sensible living-boxes sprout interesting roofs and mysterious ornaments, arms are engraved with curious patterns, carpenters take time to 'finish' their work, and cooks become gourmets.

It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not selfish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps. But if high officers on both sides have any intelligence at all, they make a secret agreement to contain the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in 'unimportant' countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question 'Who or what am I?'—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

There are the practices of yoga meditation, dervish dancing, psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, Ignatian, Salesian, and Hesychast methods of 'prayer,' the use of consciousness-changing chemicals such as LSD and mescaline, psychodrama, group dynamics, sensory-awareness techniques, Quakerism, Gurdjieff exercises, relaxation therapies,the Alexander method, autogenic training, and self-hypnosis. The difficulty with every one of these disciplines is that the moment you are seriously involved, you find yourself boxed in some special in-group which defines itself, often with the most elegant subtlety, by the exclusion of an out-group. In this way, every religion or cult is self-defeating, and this is equally true of projects which define themselves as non-religions or universally inclusive religions, playing the game of 'I am less exclusive than you.

Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics, have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.) The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an 'I' for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.

Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World. Cambridge University Press, 1964.

the difficulty of understanding the organism/environment polarity is psychological. The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere 'creatures' who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the 'harmony of contained conflicts' in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving 'I' as a dis content ed and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone. We have attained a view of the world and a type of sanity which is dried-out like a rusty beer-can on the beach. It is a world of objects, of nothing-buts as ordinary as a formica table with chromium fittings. We find it immensely reassuring—except that it won't stay put, and must therefore be defended even at the cost of scouring the whole planet back to a nice clean rock. For life is, after all, a rather messy and gooey accident in our basically geological universe. 'If a man's son ask for bread, will he give him a stone?' The answer is probably, 'Yes.

Ecologists often speak of the 'evolution of environments' over and above the evolution of organisms. For man did not appear on earth until the earth itself, together with all its biological forms, had evolved to a certain degree of balance and complexity. At this point of evolution the earth 'implied' man, just as the existence of man implies that sort of a planet at that stage of evolution. The balance of nature, the 'harmony of contained conflicts,' in which man thrives is a network of mutually interdependent organisms of the most astounding subtlety and complexity. Teilhard de Chardin has called it the 'biosphere,' the film of living organisms which covers the original 'geosphere,' the mineral planet. Lack of knowledge about the evolution of the organic from the 'inorganic,' coupled with misleading myths about life coming 'into' this world from somewhere 'outside,' has made it difficult for us to see that the biosphere arises, or goeswith, a certain degree of geological and astronomical evolution. But, as Douglas E. Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell-infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as 'symptoms' of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy—in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.

In times past, recognition of the impermanence of the world usually led to withdrawal. On the one hand, ascetics, monks, and hermits tried to exorcise their desires so as to regard the world with benign resignation, or to draw back and back into the depths of consciousness to become one with the Self in its unmanifest state of eternal serenity. On the other hand, others felt that the world was a state of probation where material goods were to be used in a spirit of stewardship, as loans from the Almighty, and where the main work of life is loving devotion to God and to man. Yet both these responses are based on the initial supposition that the individual is the separate ego, and because this supposition is the work of a double-bind any task undertaken on this basis—including religion—will be self-defeating. Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all forms of life, the world would be static, rhythmless, undancing, mummified. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real 'I' is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

I live close to a harbor packed with sailing-boats and luxurious cruisers which are seldom used, because seamanship is a difficult though rewarding art which their owners have no time to practice. They bought the boats either as status symbols or as toys, but on discovering that they were not toys (as advertised) they lost interest. The same is true of the entire and astounding abundance of pleasure-goods that we buy. Foodstuffs are prolific, but few know how to cook. Building materials abound in both quantity and variety, yet most homes look as if they had been made by someone who had heard of a house but never seen one. Silks, linens, wools, and cottons are available in colors and patterns galore, and yet most men dress like divinity students or undertakers, while women are slaves to the fashion game with its basic rule, 'I have conformed sooner than you.' The market for artists and sculptors has thrived as never before in history, but the paintings look as if they had been made with excrement or scraps from billboards, and the sculptures like mangled typewriters or charred lumber from a burned-down outhouse. (2) We have untold stacks of recorded music from every age and culture, and the most superb means of playing it. But who actually listens? Maybe a few pot-smokers. This is perhaps a Henry Millerish exaggeration. Nevertheless, it strikes me more and more that America's reputation for materialism is unfounded—that is, if a materialist is a person who thoroughly enjoys the physical world and loves material things. In this sense, we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure— attractively packaged but inferior in content.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash! Let it be clear, furthermore, that the ego-fiction is in no way essential to the individual, to the total human organism, in fulfilling and expressing his individuality. For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.

Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen 'of themselves' like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead.

In the first place, the child is taught that he is responsible, that he is a free agent, an independent origin of thoughts and actions—a sort of miniature First Cause. He accepts this make-believe for the very reason that it is not true. He can't help accepting it, just as he can't help accepting membership in the community where he was born. He has no way of resisting this kind of social indoctrination. It is constantly reinforced with rewards and punishments. It is built into the basic structure of the language he is learning. It is rubbed in repeatedly with such remarks as, 'It isn't like you to do a thing like that.' Or, 'Don't be a copy-cat; be yourself!' Or, when one child imitates the mannerisms of another child whom he admires, 'Johnny, that's not you. That's Peter!' The innocent victim of this indoctrination cannot understand the paradox. He is being told that he must be free. An irresistible pressure is being put on him to make him believe that no such pressure exists. The community of which he is necessarily a dependent member defines him as an independent member. In the second place, he is thereupon commanded, as a free agent, to do things which will be acceptable only if done voluntarily! 'You really ought to love us,' say parents, aunts, uncles, brother, and sisters. 'All nice children love their families, and do things for them without having to be asked.' In other words. 'We demand that you love us because you want to, and not because we say you ought to.' Part of this nonsense is due to the fact that we confuse the 'must' expressing a condition ('To be human you must have a head') with the 'must' expressing a command ('You must put away your toys'). No one makes an effort to have a head, and yet parents insist that, to be healthy, a child 'must' have regular bowel movements, or that he must try to go to sleep, or that he must make an effort to pay attention—as if these goals were simply to be achieved by muscular exertion. Children are in no position to see the contradictions in these demands, and even if some prodigy were to point them out, he would be told summarily not to 'answer back,' and that he lacked respect for his 'elders and betters.' Instead of giving our children clear and explicit explanations of the game-rules of the community, we befuddle them hopelessly because we—as adults—were once so befuddled, and, remaining so, do not understand the game we are playing.

The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviromnent. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.

Individual' is the Latin form of the Greek 'atom'—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent 'thing-events' which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.

If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its 'parts,' are doing—that is, of its behavior—this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog. It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out 'how they are made.' This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings.

The image of God as a personal Being, somehow 'outside' or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence, that the laws of nature are everywhere consistent in that they proceed from one ruler, and that we could let our imaginations go to the limit in conceiving the sublime qualities of this supreme and perfect Being. The image also gave everyone a sense of importance and meaning. For this God is directly aware of every tiniest fragment of dust and vibration of energy, since it is just his awareness of it that enables it to be. This awareness is also love and, for angels and men at least, he has planned an everlasting life of the purest bliss which is to begin at the end of mortal time. But of course there are strings attached to this reward, and those who purposely and relentlessly deny or disobey the divine will must spend eternity in agonies as intense as the bliss of good and faithful subjects. The problem of this image of God was that it became too much of a good thing. Children working at their desks in school are almost always put off when even a kindly and respected teacher watches over their shoulders. How much more disconcerting to realize that each single deed, thought, and feeling is watched by the Teacher of teachers, that nowhere on earth or in heaven is there any hiding-place from that Eye which sees all and judges all. To many people it was therefore an immense relief when Western thinkers began to question this image and to assert that the hypothesis of God was of no help in describing or predicting the course of nature. If everything, they said, was the creation and the operation of God, the statement had no more logic than 'Everything is up.' But, as, so often happens, when one tyrant is dethroned, a worse takes his place. The Crackpot Myth was retained without the Potter. The world was still understood as an artifact, but on the model of an automatic machine. The laws of nature were still there, but no lawmaker. According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters. In this fully Automatic Model of the universe shape and stuff survived as energy and matter. Human beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus they were possessed of intelligence and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms. But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the merely random processes of nature. It is most strongly emphasized in this myth that matter is brute and energy blind, that all nature outside human, and some animal, skins is a profoundly stupid and insensitive mechanism. Those who continued to believe in Someone-Up-There-Who-Cares were ridiculed as woolly-minded wishful thinkers, poor weaklings unable to face man's grim predicament in a heartless universe where survival is the sole privilege of the tough guys. If the all-too-intelligent God was disconcerting, relief in getting rid of him was short-lived. He was replaced by the Cosmic Idiot, and people began to feel more estranged from the universe than ever. This situation merely reinforced the illusion of the loneliness and separateness of the ego (now a 'mental mechanism') and people calling themselves naturalists began the biggest war on nature ever waged. In one form or another, the myth of the Fully Automatic Model has become extremely plausible, and in some scientific and academic disciplines it is as much a sacrosanct dogma as any theological doctrine of the past—despite contrary trends in physics and biology. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik— victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible. Nevertheless it remains a myth, with all the positive and negative features of myth as an image used for making sense of the world. It is doubtful whether Western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models.

If the world is basically 'mere stuff' like clay, it is hard to imagine that such inert dough can move and form itself. Energy, form, and intelligence must therefore come into the world from outside. The lump must be leavened. The world is therefore conceived as an artifact, like a jar, a statue, a table, or a bell, and if it is an artifact, someone must have made it, and someone must also have been responsible for the original stuff. That, too, must have been 'made.' In Genesis the primordial stuff 'without form, and void' is symbolized as water, and, as water does not wave without wind, nothing can happen until the Spirit of God moves upon its face. The forming and moving of matter is thus attributed to intelligent Spirit, to a conscious force of energy in form ing matter so that its various shapes come and go, live and die. Yet in the world as we know it, many things are clearly wrong, and one hesitates to attribute these to the astonishing Mind capable of making this world in the beginning. We are loath to believe that cruelty, pain, and malice come directly from the Root and Ground of Being, and hope fervently that God at least is the perfection of all that we can imagine as wisdom and justice. (We need not enter, here, into the fabulous and insoluble Problem of Evil which this model of the universe creates, save to note that it arises from the model itself.)

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together. So with 'form' and 'matter.' Because no one ever discovered a piece of formless matter, or an immaterial form, it should have been obvious that there was something wrong with the Ceramic Model. The world is no more formed out of matter than trees are 'made' of wood. The world is neither form nor matter, for these are two clumsy terms for the same process, known vaguely as 'the world' or 'existence.' Yet the illusion that every form consists of, or is made of, some kind of basic 'stuff' is deeply embedded in our common sense. We have quite forgotten that both 'matter' and 'meter' are alike derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, 'to measure,' and that the 'material' world means no more than the world as measured or measurable—by such abstract images as nets or matrices, inches, seconds, grams, and decibels. The term 'material' is often used as a synonym for the word 'physical,' from the Greek physis (nature), and the original Indo-European bheu (to become).

It is, then, as if the human race had hypnotized or talked itself into the hoax of egocentricity. There is no one to blame but ourselves. We are not victims of a conspiracy arranged by an external God or some secret society of manipulators.

Although memory records are much more fluid and elusive than photographic film or magnetic tape, the accumulation of memories is an essential part of the ego-sensation. It gives the impression of oneself, the officer, as something that remains while life goes by—as if the conscious self were a stable mirror reflecting a passing procession. This further exaggerates the feeling of separateness, of oneself changing at a pace so much slower than outside events and inside thoughts that you seem to stand aside from them as an independent observer. But memories persist as the whirlpool persists. Conscious attention seems to scan them as computers scan their ever-cycling tapes or other storage mechanisms. Memory is an enduring pattern of motion, like the whirlpool, rather than an enduring substance, like a mirror, a wax tablet, or a sheet of paper. If memories are stored in neurons, there is no standing aside from the stream of events, for neurons flow along in the same stream as events outside the skull. After all, your neurons are part of my external world, and mine of yours! All our insides are outside, there in the physical world. But, conversely, the outside world has no color, shape, weight, heat, or motion without 'inside' brains. It has these qualities only in relation to brains, which are, in turn, members of itself.

I have long been interested in trying to find out how people experience, or sense, their own existence—for what specific sensations do they use the word 'I'? Few people seem to use the word for their whole physical organism. 'I have a body' is more common than 'I am a body.' We speak of 'my' legs as we speak of 'my' clothes, and 'I' seems to remain intact even if the legs are amputated. We say, 'I speak, I walk, I think, and (even) I breathe.' But we do not say, 'I shape my bones, I grow my nails, and I circulate my blood.' We seem to use 'I' for something in the body but not really of the body, for much of what goes on in the body seems to happen to 'I' in the same way as external events. 'I' is used as the center of voluntary behavior and conscious attention, but not consistently. Breathing is only partially voluntary, and we say 'I was sick' or 'I dreamed' or 'I fell asleep' as if the verbs were not passive but active. Nevertheless, 'I' usually refers to a center in the body, but different peoples feel it in different places. For some cultures, it is in the region of the solar plexus. The Chinese hsin, the heart-mind or soul, is found in the center of the chest. But most Westerners locate the ego in the head, from which center the rest of us dangles. The ego is somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears.

But the underlying problem of cybernetics, which makes it an endless success/failure, is to control the process of control itself. Power is not necessarily wisdom. I may have virtual omnipotence in the government of my body and my physical environment, but how am I to control myself so as to avoid folly and error in its use? Geneticists and neurologists may come to the point of being able to produce any type of human character to order, but how will they be able to know what types of character will be needed? The situation of a pioneer culture calls for tough and aggressive individualists, whereas urban-industrial culture requires sociable and cooperative team-workers. As social change increases in speed, how are geneticists to foresee the adaptations of taste, temperament, and motivation that will be necessary twenty or thirty years ahead? Furthermore, every act of interference with the course of nature changes it in unpredictable ways. A human organism which has absorbed antibiotics is not quite the same kind of organism that it was before, because the behavior of its microorganisms has been significantly altered. The more one interferes, the more one must analyze an ever-growing volume of detailed information about the results of interference on a world whose infinite details are inextricably interwoven.

Consider the astonishing means now being made for snooping, the devices already used in offices, factories, stores, and on various lines of communication such as the mail and the telephone. Through the transistor and miniaturization techniques, these devices become ever more invisible and ever more sensitive to faint electrical impulses. The trend of all this is towards the end of individual privacy, to an extent where it may even be impossible to conceal one's thoughts. At the end of the line, no one is left with a mind of his own: there is just a vast and complex community-mind, endowed, perhaps, with such fantastic powers of control and prediction that it will already know its own future for years and years to come. Yet the more surely and vividly you know the future, the more it makes sense to say that you've already had it. When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another. This is why many people object to having their fortunes told: not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions would be horrible, but simply that the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it.

Individual feelings about death are conditioned by social attitudes, and it is doubtful that there is any one natural and inborn emotion connected with dying.

We really feel that this world is indeed an assemblage of separate things that have somehow come together or, perhaps, fallen apart, and that we are each only one of them. We see them all alone—born alone, dying alone—maybe as bits and fragments of a universal whole, or expendable parts of a big machine. Rarely do we see all so-called things and events 'going together,' like the head and tail of the cat, or as the tones and inflections—rising and falling, coming and going—of a single singing voice. In other words, we do not play the Game of Black-and-White—the universal game of up/down, on/off, solid/space, and each/all. Instead, we play the game of Black-versus-White or, more usually, White-versus-Black. For, especially when rates of vibration are slow as with day and night or life and death, we are forced to be aware of the black or negative aspect of the world. Then, not realizing the inseparability of the positive and negative poles of the rhythm, we are afraid that Black may win the game. But the game 'White must win' is no longer a game. It is a fight—a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.

It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of symbols— words, numbers, signs, simple images (like squares and triangles), musical notes, letters, ideographs (as in Chinese), and scales for dividing and distinguishing variations of color or of tones. Such symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are the labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label. Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail. What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description.

We believe that every thing and every event must have a cause, that is, some other thing (s) or event (s), and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects. So how does a cause lead to an effect? To make it much worse, if all that I think or do is a set of effects, there must be causes for all of them going back into an indefinite past. If so, I can't help what I do. I am simply a puppet pulled by strings that go back into times far beyond my vision. Again, this is a problem which comes from asking the wrong question. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat.

Another Hindu myth says that as time goes on, life in the world gets worse and worse, until at last the destructive aspect of the Self, the god Shiva, dances a terrible dance which consumes everything in fire. There follow, says the myth, 4,320,000 years of total peace during which the Self is just itself and does not play hide. And then the game begins again, starting off as a universe of perfect splendor which begins to deteriorate only after 1,728,000 years, and every round of the game is so designed that the forces of darkness present themselves for only one third of the time, enjoying at the end a brief but quite illusory triumph. Today we calculate the life of this planet alone in much vaster periods, but of all ancient civilizations the Hindus had the most imaginative vision of cosmic time. Yet remember, this story of the cycles of the world's appearance and disappearance is myth, not science, parable rather than prophecy. It is a way of illustrating the idea that the universe is like the game of hide-and-seek.

You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality. It may well be as the squares said of Jesus, 'Look at him! A glutton and a drinker, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!' Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg's way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self.

I believe,' said Tertullian of Christianity, 'because it is absurd.' People who think for themselves do not accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it: The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way 'up there.' We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom. We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. But, he continues— Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts... 'the Ultimate Ground of Being,' he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction. (2) 'The Ultimate Ground of Being' is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for 'God' and would also do for 'the Self of the world' as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or 'pretending' to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT! Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.

Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or 'ground' of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, 'myth' is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, 'myth' is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet 'myth,' in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.

The sensation of 'I' as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence 'I' am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

The speed and efficiency of transportation by superhighway and air in many ways restricts freedom of travel. It is increasingly difficult to take a walk, except in such 'reservations for wanderers' as state parks. But the nearest state park to my home has, at its entrance, a fence plastered with a long line of placards saying: NO FIRES. NO DOGS. NO HUNTING. NO CAMPING. SMOKING PROHIBITED. NO HORSE-RIDING. NO SWIMMING. NO WASHING. (I never did get that one.) PICNICS RESTRICTED TO DESIGNATED AREAS. Miles of what used to be free-and-easy beaches are now state parks which close at 6 P.M., so that one can no longer camp there for a moonlight feast. Nor can one swim outside a hundred-yard span watched by a guard, nor venture more than a few hundred feet into the water. All in the cause of 'safety first' and foolproof living. Just try taking a stroll after dark in a nice American residential area. If you can penetrate the wire fences along the highways, and then wander along a pleasant lane, you may well be challenged from a police car: 'Where are you going?' Aimless strolling is suspicious and irrational. You are probably a vagrant or burglar. You are not even walking the dog! 'How much money are you carrying?' Surely, you could have afforded to take the bus and if you have little or no cash, you are clearly a bum and a nuisance. Any competent housebreaker would approach his quarry in a Cadillac. Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wanderings, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home. As already suggested, fast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point. Waikiki Beach is just a mongrelized version of Atlantic City, Brighton, and Miami.

When we are children, our other selves, our families, friends, and teachers, do everything possible to confirm us in the illusion of separateness—to help us to be genuine fakes, which is precisely what is meant by 'being a real person.' For the person, from the Latin persona, was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through ( per) which the sound ( sonus) came. In death we doff the persona, as actors take off their masks and costumes in the green room behind the scenes.

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that 'I' and all other 'things' now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them—to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over—fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all.

This Is It

Author:

Publisher: Vintage (1973)

It seems that those who go deeply into almost any of the great spiritual traditions come to the same place and find themselves talking the same language.

If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that - at a time not too distant - each one of us will simply cease to be. It won't be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won't be anyone for whom it never happened. Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist - and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are. We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all. Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can't form the slight idea of it is that it's yourself. But not the self you thought you were.

To 'realize Buddha in this body' is to realize that you yourself are in fact the universe. You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve-ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity. Few dare admit this because it would amount to believing that you are God, and God in our culture is the cosmic Boss, so that anyone imagining himself to be be God is deemed either blasphemous or insane. But for Buddhists this is no problem because they do not have this particular idea of God, and so also are not troubled by the notion of sin and everlasting damnation. Their picture of the universe is not political, not a kingdom ruled by a monarch, but rather an organism in which every part is a 'doing' of the whole, so that everything that happens to you is understood as your own karma, or 'doing.' Thus when things go wrong you have no one but yourself to blame. You are not a sinner but a fool, so try another way.

I can have the feeling 'self' only in relation to, and by contrast with, the feeling 'other.' In the same way, I am what I am only in relation to what everything else is. The Japanese call this ji-ji-mu-ge, which means that between every thing-event (ji) and every other thing-event there is no (mu) barrier (ge). Each implies all, and all implies each.

The heart of Zen is not an idea but an experience, and when that experience happens (and 'happens' is just the right word) you are set free from ideas altogether. Certainly, you can still use them, but you no longer take them seriously.

Every human being is a metaphysician just as every philosopher has appetites and emotions - and by this I mean that we all have certain basic assumptions about the good life and the nature of reality. Even the typical businessman who asserts that he is a practical fellow unconcerned with higher things declares thereby that he is a pragmatist or a positivist, and not a very thoughtful one at that.

The uninstructed adventurer with psychedelics, as with Zen or yoga or any other mystical discipline, is an easy victim of what Jung calls 'inflation,' of the messianic megalomania that comes from misunderstanding the experience of union with God.

My retrospective attitude to LSD is that when one has received the message, one hangs up the phone.

The enlightened one sees the world that others see, but does not conceive it in the way others do, as a collection of separate things other than himself. For when we get the actual sense of depth from a drawing in perspective, the concept is overruling the eyes, as Adelbert Ames had constructed a whole series of experiments demonstrating that we see what we believe rather than believe what we see.

When we get heavily serious about either sex or religion there follow crimes of passion, suicides, bitter divorces, inquisitions and holy wars - all of which are signs of imbecility rather than sincere conviction.

As in music, the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development, and in a world where there is neither self nor other, the only identity is just This - which is all, which is energy, which is God by no name.

The industrial system offers few jobs that any self-respecting person wants to do, and the intelligent young are sick to death of a way of life that wastes and squanders material for the production of baubles and bombs.

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection;\nThe water has no mind to retain their image.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence...but man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix. It is as when, by triangulation, a distant point is ascertained by sighting it from two different points. Our grasp on reality is better when we look at it from the standpoints of different cultures, and the comparison brings to light aspects of one's own point of view so basic as to have been ignored.

You would immediately feel one with all nature, and with the universe itself, if you could understand that there is no 'you' as the hardcore thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings, and senser of sensations, and that because your body is something in the physical world, that world is not 'external' to you. Thus when you listen, you do not hear anyone listening. This has nothing to do with making an effort or not making an effort; it is simply a matter of intelligence. To find this out seems to me almost more important than understanding that the world is round, that Africans are people, and that persons with opinions other than your own will not fry forever in hell. Fully to understand that the universe is ourselves must put an end to the frantic panic about death and to our hostile exploitation of the planet Earth.

Someone has told the story of meeting, on a train, a weird gentleman who took a bag down from the rack, opened it, extracted from his pocket a cabbage on the end of a string, and began to dangle it into the bag. Consumed with curiosity, the traveler asked what was in the bag and was told that it was a mongoose. 'Well, why do you carry a mongoose?' 'Alas,' said the gentleman, 'I am an alcoholic and suffer from delirium tremens, so that I need this mongoose to keep away the snakes.' 'But surely you realize that those snakes are only imaginary?' 'Yes, indeed,' he answered, 'but so is the mongoose.

But then - [the 1950's] - it was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to human beings with normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable. Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat.

I am therefore ill at ease with people who earnestly abstain from such things as smoking, drinking, and sex, to the point of making them squeamishnessly militant. Obviously, there are forms and degrees in which these pleasures can be unhygienic, as also can be driving cars, climbing mountains, and nursing the sick. There are points of view from which almost everything can be see as bad for one's health, and Jung once remarked in jest that life itself is a disease with a very bad prognosis: it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death. And in this connection I might also quote Freud, writing to Dr. Fleisch: 'As to your injunction to give up smoking, I have decided not to comply. Do you think it such a good thing to live a long and miserable life?

If Christ is really God's search for man, God, to have effectively 'come down to Earth,' must be discoverable here in this very place and moment. But the emulation of the 'Jesus of history' obscures the truth. It concerns itself so much with what happened two thousand years ago that it misses the point, confusing the pointing finger with the truth. 'Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.' The disciples sought him at the tomb; we seek him in the tradition of the Church or the record of the Bible - or in the future, which is merely the past projected ahead. They are all tombs, and 'he is not here.

My vision is not infallible, but we may both have the joy of knowing that, if I am right and you are wrong, or vice versa, neither of us can dim the glory of God, save by being untrue to the light as we see it. And even then it shines in spite of our darkness.

The best Christian thought has always seen that only Pharisaism comes through trying to be good. For sanctity is less in wanting to be moral than in loving God and other men. But the moralism which condemns a man for not loving is simply adding strength to that sense of fear and insecurity which prevents him from loving.

The word 'God' is more of an exclamation than a proper name. It expresses astonishment, reverence, and even love for our reality. If you want to put a human face on it, that will do - if you do not take it literally - since we know nothing higher or more mysterious than people, and an energy field which peoples can hardly be less intelligent than people. Certainly events happen in the field which seem absolutely horrible, but faith is the gamble that there is some way of understanding or at least accepting them.

A flower goeswith a plant which goeswith a natural environment, and I see people as flowerings of their environments and not as separate objects...Thus if a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field - moreover a field as discussed in physics, an integrated pattern of energy, a field which would not only be flowering, but also earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming, and beeing. A sensitive flower would, through its roots and membranes, feel out into this entire pattern and so discover itself as a particular exultation of the whole field.

There must be some connection between the commercialization of life and the separation of religion from mysticism and magic.

Conscience: that ambivalent faculty which is sometimes the voice of sanity but mostly the echo of parental qualms and social conditioning.

The more we know of particular things, the more we know of God.

At any point on the Earth, there is as much west of you as there is east. I have discovered along the way that at every position in the whole hierarchy of beings there is as much above as below, and thus that there are standpoints from which every position is as much a failure as it is a success.

Going by a system is often, though not necessarily, an elaborate and subtle ego-trip in which people inflate their egos by trying to destroy them, stressing the superhuman difficulty of the task. It can so easily be mere postponement of realization to the tomorrow which never comes, with the mock humility of, 'I'm not ready yet. I don't deserve it. Perhaps, if I work as hard as the great sages of old, I can get it in twenty years or in my next incarnation.' But what if this is just self-punishment and spiritual masochism - lying as it were, on a bed of nails to assure oneself of 'authentic' existence? Mortification of the ego is an attempt to get rid of what doesn't exist, or - which comes to the same thing - of the feeling that it exists...My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which all these systems strive is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now or never.

Zen is to realize that life is simply nonsense, without meaning other than itself or future purpose beyond itself. The trick is to dig the nonsense, for - as Tibetans say - you can tell the true yogi by his laugh.

The area of Ching-shih in the state of Sung grows fine catalpas, cypresses, and mulberries. But those of more than one or two spans in girth are cut down for monkey-perches; those of three or four for ridgepoles, and those of seven or eight for the solid sides of coffins for the wealthy. Thus they do not attain the normal term of their lives, and fall in mid-career to the axe. This is the danger of being useful.\r\n \r\nThen there was a hunchback named Su. His chin touched his navel. His shoulders were above his head. His pigtail pointed to the sky. His innards were upside-down, and his thighs were against his ribs. By tailoring and laundering he made enough to live, and by winnowing grain he produced enough to feed ten. But when the authorities conscripted soldiers he stood in the crowd waving them off, and when a work-party was pressed into service he was passed up as an invalid. Yet when they doled out grain for the needy, he got three full measures as well as ten bundles of firewood. If a weird body helps a man live out his full term, how much greater would be the use of a weird character!

For Zen, as Suzuki exemplified it, was spontaneously intelligent living, without calculation, and without rigid conceptual distinctions between self and other, knower and known.

Why - and again why - do you want to know whether there is a God, whether there is a life after death, or what method you should follow to become enlightened, liberated, or realized? Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories? That therefore you are not alive and aware in the eternal present, and thus worry interminably about your future? Furthermore, don't you realized that when you accept someone as a spiritual teacher, you do so by your own authority and choice? You yourself license the Bible, the Koran, or the Gita as infallible. Wake up!...and, without putting it into words, watch what is, now. You thus realize that there is no 'feeler' apart from feelings, and no granular, billiard-ball 'self' confronting the universe.

If we knew how to greet each moment as the manifestation of the divine will, we would find in it all the heart could desire...The present moment is always filled with infinite treasures: it contains more than you are capable of receiving...The divine will is an abyss, of which the present moment is the entrance; plunge fearlessly therein and you will find it more boundless than your desire.

To be inevitably compelled by God is to be one with God, and in this way, determinism becomes freedom.

I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is. From one point of view the present is shorter than a microsecond. From another, it embraces all eternity.

A baby is put in a play pen to keep it from getting at the matches or falling downstairs, and though the intention of the pen is to keep the baby closed in, parents are naturally proud when the child grows strong enough to climb out. Likewise, a man can perform actions which are truly moral only when he is no longer motivated by the fear of hell, that is, when he grows into union with the Good that is beyond good and evil, which, in other words, does not act from the love of rewards or the fear of punishment.

The world is love to him who treats it as such, even when it torments and destroys him.

To become the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. For it implies that experience is not something in which one is trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one must fight. The conventional duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity: the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a single event which happens, not to me or from me, but of itself. The experiencer and the experience become a single, ever-changing, self-forming process, complete and fulfilled at every moment of its unfolding, and of infinite complexity and subtlety. It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling arabesque of smoke patterens in the air, or of ink dropped in water, or of a dancing snake which seems to move from every part of its body at once. This is to say that all our actions and experiences arise mutually from the organism and from the environment at the same time.

Some of the chemicals known as psychedelics provide opportunities for mystical insight in much the same way that well-prepared paints and brushes provide opportunities for fine painting, or a beautifully constructed piano for great music. They make it easier, but they do not accomplish the work all by themselves.

The man of deep spiritual wisdom is irrelevant to this society. This has not just recently come to be so; it has been so for centuries, because - for centuries - society has consisted precisely of those human beings who are so deluded by the conventions of words and ideas as to believe that there is a real choice between the opposites of life - between pleasure and pain, good and evil, God and Lucifer, spirit and nature. But what is separable in terms, in words, is not separable in reality, in the solid relationship between the terms. Whoever sees that there is no ultimate choice between these opposites is irrelevant because he cannot really participate in the politician's and the ad-man's illusion that there can be better and better without worse and worse, and that matter can yield indefinitely to the desires of mind without becoming utterly undesirable.

To say that man is both god and devil is not to say that spiritually minded people should spend some of their time robbing banks and torturing children. Such violent excesses of passion are bred from the frustration of pursuing either aspect of our nature to the exclusion of the other. They arise when the ruthless idealism of the spirit is dehumanized by the weakness of the flesh, or when the blind desire of the flesh is unenlightened by the wisdom of the spirit.

But are God and nature, spirit and flesh - like individual persons, mutually exclusive? 'He that is unmarried,' said St. Paul, 'careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.' Yet this is to say that the divine cannot be loved in and through the things of the this world, and to deny the saying that 'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.' If the love of God and the love of the world are mutually exclusive, then, on the very premises of theology, God is a finite thing among things - for only finite things exclude one another. God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world, becoming an object instead of the continuum in which we 'live and move and have our being.

Psychologists with a slant towards materialism therefore argue that mysticism is nothing but sublimated sexuality and frustrated fleshliness, whereas the spiritists maintain that the love-imagery (of the Song of Songs) is nothing but allegory and symbolism never to be taken in its gross animal sense. But is it not possible that both parties are right and wrong, and that the love of nature and the love of spirit are paths upon a circle which meet at their extremes? Perhaps the meeting is discovered only by those who follow both at once. Such a course seems impossible and inconsistent only if it can be held that love is a matter of choosing between alternatives, if, in other words, love is an exclusive attitude of mind which cleaves to one object and rejects all others. If so, it must be quite other than what is said to be God's own love, 'who maketh his sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sendeth his rain upon the just and the unjust.' Love is surely a disposition of the heart which radiates on all sides like light.

Is it really any scandal, any deplorable inconsistency, for a human being to be both angel and animal with equal devotion. Is it not possible, in other words, to be mystic and sensualist without actual contradiction?

Any statement about Zen, or about spiritual experience of any kind, will always leave some aspect, some subtlety, unexpressed. No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

The 'beat' mentality is a younger generation's non-participation in 'the American Way of Life,' a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective achievement.

The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything. God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad, and thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the wrong therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt - a state of eternal damnation - utterly disproportionate to the crime.

At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature which is peculiarly foreign to those brought up with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures. Yet it was always obvious to the Chinese that a man who mistrusts himself cannot even trust his mistrust, and must therefore be hopelessly confused.

People who feel a profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao Tzu, who, centuries before, had said, 'Those who justify themselves do not convince.' For the urge to make or prove oneself right has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous, since as both Confucians and Taoists - however different these philosophies in other ways - they have invariably appreciated the man who can 'come off it.' To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted than righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, it was obvious that one could not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back and front. As Chuang Tzu said, 'Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative wrong do not understand the principles of the universe.

When the dualism of thinker and thought disappears so does that of subject and object. The individual no more feels himself to be standing back from his sensations of the external world, just as he is no longer a thinker standing back from his thoughts. He therefore has a vivid sense of himself as identical with what he sees and hears, so that his subjective impression comes into accord with the physical fact that man is not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship.

Now it is of great interest that we cannot effectively think about self-control without making a separation between the controller and the controlled, even when - as the word 'self-control' implies - the two are one and the same. This lies behind the widespread conception of man as a double or divided being composed of a higher self and a lower, of reason and instinct, mind and body, spirit and matter, voluntary and involuntary, angel and animal. So conceived , man is never actually self-controlling...The problem is well illustrated in the Christian theory of virtue, which for centuries has put an immense double-bind on Western man. The greatest commandment is that 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God' - and, note the addition - 'with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind.' How can such a commandment be obeyed? The addition implies that it is not enough to think and act as if I loved God. I am not asked to pretend that I love. I am asked really to mean it, to be completely sincere. Jesus' whole condemnation of the Pharisees was that they obeyed with their lips and hands, but not with their hearts.

The problem is this: man is a self-conscious and therefore self-controlling organism, but how is he to control the aspect of himself which does the controlling? All attempts to solve this problem seem to end in a snarl, whether at the individual level or at the social. At the individual level the snarl manifest itself in what we call acute self-consciousness, as when a public speaker frustrates himself by his very effort to speak well. At the social level it manifests itself as a loss in freedom of movement increasing with every attempt to regulate action by law. In other words, there is a point beyond which self-control becomes a form of paralysis - as if I wanted simultaneously to throw a ball and hold it to its course with my hand.

There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma (the struggle of choosing good vs evil). One is to stop being too keenly intelligent and too acutely conscious of the facts of one's inner life, and to fall back upon an inflexibly formal, traditional, and authoritarian pattern of thought and action - as if to say, 'Just do the right thing, and don't be sophisticatedly psychological about your motives. Just obey, and don't ask questions.' This is called sacrificing the pride of the intellect. But here we find ourselves in another dilemma, for the religion of simple obedience soon totters toward empty formalism and moral legalism with no heart in it, the very Pharisaism against which Christ railed. The other escape is into a romanticism of the instincts, a glorification of mere impulse ignoring the equally natural gift of will and reason. This is actually a modern form of the old practice of selling one's soul to the Devil - always a possible release from anxiety and conflict because damnation could at least be certain.

Christianity, even as it is understood by quite thoughtful Christians, is certainly no remedy for anxiety. In Christianity it matters not just very much but absolutely that one choose good rather than evil, for one's eternal destiny depends upon the decision. Yet to be certain that one is saved is the sin of presumption and to be certain that one is damned is the sin of despair.

Western civilization has acquired by far the greatest measure of skill in controlling the course of events by organized intelligence. Yet this appears to have intensified rather than abated our anxiety. For to the extent that we have analyzed the natural world and the human world more thoroughly, to that extent it appears to us to be more complicated. The scope of our detailed information about the world is so vast that every individual, every responsible source of action, finds it too great to master - without depending upon the collaboration of other who are, however beyond his control. Collaborations requires faith, but faith is an instinctual attitude; speaking quite strictly, it is not intelligent to trust what you have not analyzed.

The gains of action by intelligence are bought at a price which at times seems so heavy that we might ask whether they are worth it. For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase - oddly enough - to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

The point is simply that, if there is to be any life and movement at all, the attitude of faith must be basic - the final and fundamental attitude - and the attitude of doubt secondary and subordinate. This is another way of saying that toward the vast and all-encompassing background of human life, with which the philosopher as artist is concerned, there must be total affirmation and acceptance. Otherwise there is no basis at all for caution and control with respect to details in the foreground. But it is all too easy to become so absorbed in these details that all sense of proportion is lost, and for man to make himself mad by trying to bring everything under his control. We become insane, unsound, and without foundation when we lose consciousness of and faith in the uncontrolled and ungraspable background world which is ultimately what we ourselves are. And there is a very slight distinction, if any, between complete, conscious faith and love.

No energy system can be completely self-controlling without ceasing to move. Control is restraint upon movement, and because complete control would be complete restraint, control must always be subordinate to motion if there is to be motion at all. In human terms, total restraint of movement is the equivalent of total doubt, of refusal to trust one's senses or feelings in any respect, and perhaps its embodiment is the extreme catatonic who refuses every motion or communication. On the other hand, movement and the release of restraint are the equivalent of faith, of committing oneself to the uncontrolled and unknown.

There are no such things as truths by themselves: a truth is always in relations to a point of view. Fire is hot in relation to skin.

If it becomes clear that our use of the lines and surfaces of nature to divide the world into units is only a matter of convenience, then all that I have called myself is actually inseparable from everything. It is not that the outlines and shapes which we call things and use to delineate things disappear into some sort of luminous void. It simply becomes obvious that though they may be used as divisions they do not really divide. However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.

In other words, was the effect of the LSD in my nervous system the addition to my senses of some chemical screen which distorted all that I saw to preternatural loveliness? Or was its effect rather to remove certain habitual and normal inhibitions of the mind and senses, enabling us to see things as they would appear to us if we were not so chronically repressed? If [the latter is true], it is possible that the art forms of other cultures appear exotic - that is, unfamiliarly enchanting - because we are seeing the world through the eyes of artists whose repressions are not the same as ours.

In My Own Way

Author:

Publisher: New World Library (2007)

I see this disaster in the larger context of American prohibitionism which has done more than anything else to corrupt the police and foster disrespect for law, and which our economic pressure has, in the special problem of drug abuse, spread to the rest of the world. Although my views on this matter may be considered extreme, I feel that in any society where the powers of Church and State are separate, the State is without either right or wisdom in enforcing sumptuary laws against crimes which have no complaining victims. When the police are asked to be armed clergymen enforcing ecclesiastical codes of morality, all the proscribed sins of the flesh, of lust and luxury, become - since we are legislating against human nature - exceedingly profitable ventures for criminal organizations which can pay both the police and the politicians to stay out of trouble. Those who cannot pay constitute about one-third of the population of our overcrowded and hopelessly managed prisons, and the business of their trial by due process delays and overtaxes the courts beyond all reason.

Leo [Johnson], impressed upon me the important idea that the ego was neither a spiritual, psychological, or biological reality but a social institution of the same order as the monogamous family, the calendar, the clock, the metric system, and the agreement to drive on the right or left side of the road. He pointed out that at times such social institutions became obsolete, as in the case of Roman numerals, Ptolemaic astronomy, and the Hindu caste system, and that the 'Christian ego' was now plainly inappropriate to the ecological situations into which we were moving.

The natural event of a man and a woman living in constant companionship, with or without children, is an admirable arrangement which works to the degree one does not insist it must work, and does not treat one's partner as property. Another being regarded as property is automatically a doll. Whenever I perform a ceremony of marriage for personal friends, I give some such discourse as this:\r\n \r\n>What I am about to say may at first sound depressing and even cynical, but I think you will not find it so in practice. There are three things I would have you bear in mind. The first is that as you now behold one another, you are probably seeing each other at your best. All things disintegrate in time, and as the years go by you will tend to get worse rather than better. Do not, therefore, go into marriage with projects for improving each other. Growth may happen, but it cannot be forced. The second has to do with emotional honesty. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. For the same reason, do not require love from your partner as a duty, for love given in this spirit doesn't ring true, and gives no pleasure to the other. The third is that you do not cling to one another as to commit mutual strangulation. You are not each other's chattels, and you must so trust your partner as to allow full freedom to be the being that he and she is. If you observe these things your marriage will have surer ground than can be afforded by any formal contract or promise, however solemn and legally binding.

Making money just for the sake of making money is a game, like bridge, in which people can find extreme pleasure and which can occupy almost all their waking hours. But one of the rules of the game is that you must pretend not to enjoy it. It must most definitely be classified as work; as that which you have to do as a duty to your family and community, and which therefore affords many businessmen the best possible excuse for staying away from home and from their wives. The nemesis of this attitude is that it flows over into the so-called leisure or nonwork areas of life in such a way that playing with children, giving attention to one's wife, exercising on the golf course, and purchasing certain luxuries (which are largely symbolic) also become duties. Survival itself becomes a duty and a even a drag, for the pretense of not enjoying the game gets under the skin and tightens the muscles which repress joyous and sensuous emotion.

It is not so much the girl herself as what goes with her, and you must always be careful to discover a person's religion. For everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life.

Looking back, then, I would have arranged for myself to be taught survival techniques for both natural and urban wilderness. I would want to have been instructed in self-hypnosis, aikido, in elementary medicine, sexual hygiene, vegetable gardening, in astronomy, navigation, and sailing; in cookery and clothesmaking, in metalwork and carpentry, in drawing and painting, in printing and typography, in botany and biology, in optics and acoustics, in semantics and psychology, in mysticism and yoga, in electronics and mathematical fantasy, in drama and dancing, in singing and in playing an instrument by ear; in wandering and advanced daydreaming, in prestidigitation, in techniques of escape from bondage, in disguise, in conversation with birds and beasts, in ventriloquism, in French and German conversation, in planetary history, in morphology, and in classical Chinese.

William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury) told us a story about Sir Walford Davies, who was then Master of the King's Music. He had been present on an occasion when Sir Walford was instructing an untrained choral group in hymn-singing. He started them out with some familiar hymn which they bellowed forth with gusto to impress the Archbishop, and the musical effect was terrible. But there was also present a small professional choir, and Sir Walford asked them to go through several verses of a completely unfamiliar hymn so that everyone could memorize the tune. 'Now,' he said, 'we're all going to sing this new hymn. But one thing is absolutely important: you must not try to sing it. Just think of the tune and let it sing itself.' The result was such a marked improvement that he turned to the Archbishop and said, 'Isn't that also good theology?