... Likewise, in our day when Einstein propounded the theories of relativity, people said they couldn't understand it. It used to be something at a cocktail party to be introduced to somebody who understands Einstein. Now every young person understands Einstein and knows what it's about. You've got even one year of college, you know what relativity is. And you know it not only in an intellectual way, you know this as a feeling, just as you have a feeling of the roundness of the world, especially if you travel a lot on jet planes. So I feel that in just that way, within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe.
You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarity and what we do involuntarity, and we define all those things which we do involunarily as things which 'happen' to us, rather than things that we do. In other words, we don't assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape. You can say to a beautiful girl, 'Gee, you're gorgeous,' and she'd say 'How like a man, all you think about is bodies. My body was given to me by my parents, and I'm not responsible for it, and I'd like to be admired for my self and not for my chassis.' And so I'd tell her 'You poor little chauffeur. You've disowned your own being and identified yourself not being associated with your own body.' I agree that if she had a terrible body with a lousy figure, she might want to feel that way, but if she is a fine-looking human being, she should get with it and not disown herself. But this happens again and again.
So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator, here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature.
So your body knows that its energy system is one with and continuous with the whole energy system, and that if it's in any sense true to say that I am my body, and that I beat my heart, and that I think by growing a brain, where do you draw the line between what you think and the power to think? Do you think with your brain in the same way that you carve wood with a knife? Y'know, it's an instrument that you pick up and use. I don't think our bodies are just instrumental in that way. They're something we are doing, only we don't think about it, in the sense that we don't have to consider when we get up in the morning as an act of voluntary behavior how to connect all of the switches in our brain to get us ready for the day; they come on automatically. But this automatic or, I would rather call it, spontaneous functioning of the brain is what is called in Japanese 'shizen'(?), that is to say, the spontenaity of nature. It does all this, and what we perform consciously is simply a small fragment of our total activity, of which we happen to be aware in a special way. We are far more than that. And it isn't only, say, that the sun is light because we have eyes and optical nerves which translate the energy of the sun into an experience called 'light.' It is also that that very central fire of the sun is something that you are doing just as much as you are generating temperature in your body.
In other words, let's suppose that those cosmologists and astronomers are right who believe that this universe started out with an original big bang, which flung all those galaxies out into space. Well, you know what that would be like. It'd be like taking a bottle of ink and flinging it hard at a white wall, and it makes a great splash. And you know how the nature of a splash is--in the middle of it, it's dense, and as it gets to the outside of the splash, there's all kinds of curlicues. But it's a continuous energy system. In other words, the bang in the beginning cannot really be separated from the little curlicues at the end. So, supposing there was an original cosmic explosion which went FOOM, we sitting around in this room now are little curlicues on the end of it, you see? We are, actually, every one of us is incredibly ancient. The energy which is now manifested as your body is the same energy which was there in the beginning. If anything at all is old, this hand is as old as anything there is. Incredibly ancient. I mean, the energy keeps changing shapes, doing all sorts of things, but there it all is. It's one continuous SPAT.
Now, if you just want to define yourself as a little curlicue on the end of things and say 'That's all of me there is,' then you've got to be a puppet and say 'Well, I've been pushed around by this whole system.' Like a juvenile delinquent who knows a little Freud. 'Well I can't help what I'm doing, because it was my mother. She was terribly mixed up, and she didn't bring me up properly, and my father was a mess. He was an alcoholic and he never paid any attention to me. So I'm a juvenile delinquent.' So the social worker says 'Yes, I'm afraid that's so,' and eventually some journalist gets ahold of it and says 'We should punish the parents instead of the kids.' So they go around to the parents and the mother says 'Yes, I admit I'm a mess,' and the father says 'Of course I'm an alcoholic, but it was OUR parents who brought us up wrong, and we had all that trouble.' Well, they can't find them because they're dead. And so you can go passing the buck way back, and you get to some characters called Adam and Eve. And when THEY were told they were responsible, they passed it again to a snake. And when that snake was asked about it, he passed the buck back to God, and God said 'I disown you, because I don't let my right hand know what my left hand doeth.' And you know who the left hand of God is. The right hand is Jesus Christ, the left is the Devil. Only it mustn't be admitted. Not on your life.
But that's the whole thing, you see, in a nutshell. That once you define yourelf as the puppet, you say 'I'm just poor little me, and I got mixed up in this world. I didn't ask to be born. My father and mother gave me a body which is a system of tubes into which I got somehow mixed up, and it's a maze and a tunnel and I don't understand a way around it. It needs all these engineers and doctors and so on to fix it, educate it, tell it how to keep going, and I'm mixed up in it. Poor little me.' Well this is nonsense! You aren't mixed up in it, it's you, and everybody's being a blushing violet and saying 'I'm not responsible for this universe, I merely came into it.' And the whole function of every great guru is to kid you out of that, and look at you and say 'Don't give me that line of bull.' But you have to be tactful; you have to be effective. You can't just tell people this. You can't talk people out of an illusion. It's a curious thing.
There's a whole debate going on now, as you all know, about whether God exists, and they're going to do a cover story on God in 'Time' magazine, and they sent a reporter around to me - they sent reporters around to all sorts of prominent theologans and philosophers. I said 'I have a photograph of God which you must put on the cover.' It's a gorgeous photograph of a Mexican statue made by Dick Borst(?). Beautiful God-the-father with a crown like the Pope. Only they said they were going to use something by Tintoretto. This photograph is a lovely thing. You know, a real genuine Mexican Indian thing. Simple people think this is what God looks like; very handsome man. Anyway, they're going to do a cover story on God because the theologans are now arguing about a new kind of Christianity which says there's no God and Jesus Christ is his only son. But what these people want to do is they desperately want to keep the church in Christianity because it pays off, that's the minister's job, and although they feel very embarrassed about God, what they're doing is they want the Bible and Jesus to sort of keep this authority going. How you can do that, I don't know.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. In other words, underneath the surface of the consciousness that you have and the individual role that you play and are identifying yourself with, you are the works. Just as you ARE beating your heart, in the same way you're shining the sun, and you're responsible. But in our culture, you mayn't admit this, because if you come on that you're God, they'll put you in the nuthouse. Because our idea of God is based on Near Eastern politics, and so if you're God, then you're the ruler, the governor - 'Oh Lord our governor!' And so if you're the governor, you know all the answers if that's what you claim to be. So when anybody in our culture says 'I'm God,' we say 'Well, well, why don't you turn this shoe into a rabbit and show me that you're God.'
But of course in Oriental cultures, they don't think of God as an autocrat. God is the fundamental energy of the world which performs all this world without having to think about it. Just in the same way that you open and close your hand without being able to say in words how you do it. You do it. You say 'I can open and close my hand.' But how? You don't know. That only means, though, that you don't know in words. You do know in fact, because you do it. So in the same way, you know how to beat your heart, because you do it, but you can't explain it in words. You know how to shine the sun, because you do it, but you can't explain it in words, unless you're a very fancy physicist, and he's just finding out - what a physicist is doing is translating what he's been doing all along into a code called mathematics. Then he says he knows how it's done. He means he can put it into the code - and that's what the academic world is. It's translating what happened into certain codes called words, numbers, algorhythms, etc., and that helps us repair things when they go wrong.
So, the discovery of our inseparability from everything else is something that I don't think will have to come by the primitive methods of difficult yoga meditations, or even through the use of psychedelic chemicals. I think it's something that's within the reach of very many people's simple comprehension. Once you get the point. Just in the same way you can understand that the world is round and you experience it as such. You could call this a kind of guinana(?) yoga, in Hindu terms. But I don't think it's going to be necessary for our culture to get this point by staring at it's navel, or by spending hours practicing Za-Zen, not that I've got anything against it, because after all, to sit still can be an extraordinarily pleasant thing to do, and it's important for us to have more quiet. But I think this is essentially a matter of intuitive comprehension that will dawn upon us and suddenly hit us all in a heap, and you suddenly see that this is totally common sense, and that your present feeling of how you are is a hoax. You know how Henry Emerson Foster wrote a book called 'How to be a Real Person'? Translated into it's original terms, that means 'How to be a Genuine Fake.' Because the person is the mask, the 'persona' worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama. They put a mask on their face which had a megaphone-shaped mouth which projected the sound in an open- air theater. So the 'dramatis persona' at the beginning of a play is the list of masks, and the word 'person,' which means 'mask,' has come to mean the real you. 'How to be a Real Person.' Imagine.
But I think we'll get over it, and discover the thing that we simply don't let our children in on, that we don't let ourselves in on. Let me emphasize this point again. It is not at the moment common sense, not plausible, because of our condition, but we can very simply come to see that YOU are not some kind of accident that pops up for a while and then vanishes - but that deep inwards, you are what there is and all that there is, which is eternal, and that which there is no whicher. That's you. Now, you don't have to remember that all the time, as you don't have to remember how to beat your heart. You could die and forget everything you ever knew in this lifetime, because it's not necessary to remember it. You're going to pop up as somebody else later on, just as you did before, without knowing who you were. It's as simple as that. You were born once, you can get born again. If there was a cosmic explosion once that blew everything into existence and is going to fizzle out, if it happened once, it can happen again, and it goes on..
It's a kind of undulating system of vibrations. Everything's a system of vibrations. Everything is on/off ...
It's all based on this--that in order to talk about the world and think about it, we had to chop it up into bits, and we called those bits things and events. In the same way, if you want to eat chicken, you can't swallow a whole chicken unless you've got a huge mouth. So you cut it up into pieces, or you get a cut-up fryer from the store, but you don't get a cut-up fryer from an egg. Chicken comes whole out of the egg. So in the same way, the universe of nature doesn't come in bits or bites. It comes all in one piece. But to digest it, to absorb it into your mind, you've got to cut it into bits and take it in, as we say, one thing at a time. But that chopping of the world into these separate bits is like chopping up the chicken or carving the slices off the beef, or taking water out, cupful by cupful. You can handle it that way, but that's not the way it is.
So you have to see that the whole notion of there being particular, separate events, and particular, separate things, is nothing more than a calculus. A calculus. Calculus means 'pebbles.' Pebbles used for counting. So when we measure curves, we pretend as if they were a series of points, and the position of these points can be expressed in an arithmatical way, say by tracing a curve across a piece of finely calibrated graph paper. That's the basis of the calculus. So that a curve swings so many points across, so many down, etc., and so you feel you have control of the curve that way, you measure it, you know where it really goes. But where it really goes, you have set up this 'really' in terms of your other criss- cross system, and you said 'That's for real.' All it means is you've meshed two different systems, one on top of the other, and you're saying 'What I mean by reality is the systems of measurements that I've invented. The system of weights and measures. This thing is REALLY,' and you feel a great sense of confidence, 'exactly two pounds.' Now simply because you've made the two pounds of apples correspond with the weighing machine, which is a constant. Two pounds of apples, two pounds of grapes, different number of apples, different number of grapes, but you say 'That's really two pounds.'
But so, in just the same way, we say 'There are really different people. There are really different events.' But actually there aren't. I'm not saying that if we were to see the world in its truth, all of you different people would disappear, that your outlines would suddenly become vague, and you would turn into a solid lump of gelatinous goo. A lot of people think that's the way mystics see things. That's not at all what would happen. The thing I'm saying is this: we are all different, but we are as interrelated and indispensable to each other as the different organs in our body - stomach, heart, glands, bones, etc. Now you can argue that the stomach is fundamental--eating is the big thing, and therefore we grew brains as extensions of the stomach to get it more food. So that you say 'The brain is the servant of the stomach.' But you can argue equally that the brain is primary, and it has all these thinking games to play, and it needs a stomach as an appendage to supply it with energy. Or you can argue that the sex organs are primary and they need the brain and the stomach to keep that ecstasy going. But the brain and the stomach can equally argue that they wouldn't find it worthwhile going on unless they had the sex organ appendange to give them solace. The truth of the matter is that nobody comes first. No one pushes the other around. You don't find brains without stomachs and sex organs. They all go together - and this is the fallacy of Freud, in saying that the sexual apparatus are primary. It just goes along with the others.
So you don't have a universe in which a series or a collection of separate events or things are banging each other around like an enormous mass of billiard balls. You have a situation which is quite different from that, where what have hitherto been called 'causally related events,' to say that certain events are causally related is a very clumsy way of saying that these certain specific events which you have isolated as being causally related, were in fact really all parts of the same event.
And so that's the secret to understanding funny stories in Zen, that it's the same thing that - It's polarity. All these paradoxes are polarity thinking. Because what makes the difference between a person who has this type of cosmic or mystical consciousness - I don't like these words, but we haven't got a good word for this state of mind. Well, we'll have to put our heads together and invent something better. In academic circles, I call it 'ecological awareness,' because mysticism is a dirty word around the academy. So 'ecological awareness' does fairly well, except again, you always have to explain to people what ecology is; they don't know yet. Ecology is the science which deals with the relationships between organisms and their environments. Just as economics, in Greek, 'ecos,' is the 'home.' So economics, 'ecosnomos,' is the law of the home, and 'ecologos' is the logic of the home, and so the 'ecos,' the home of man, is the world. So ecology is man's relationship to the world, or a plant's relationship to its environment. All that kind of relationship, the study of the bee and flower bit, is ecology.
The thing that is so characteristic, then, of this new or different kind of consciousness, is that it starts from or has its foundation in awareness of relationship, of 'go withness,' that the inside of a situation goes with the outside, and although you may think from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, that they work independantly from each other; in this state of consciousness you see that they don't. In other words, it's slowly beginning to penetrate our ordinary consciousness. That what any individual does, and we ascribe to him as his behavior and praise him for it or blame him for it, everything that he does goes with what happens outside him. The behavior of the environment, and the behavior of that organism within that environment, is one behavior, and you mustn't think of this deterministically. That is to say, as if the organism were something merely subservient to the environment. Nor must you think the opposite way, that the environment is something that can be pushed around by the organism. When an organism starts looking as if it were pushing its environment around, it simply means that the environment/organism, the total field, is changing itself.
... this incapacity for--well, we could call it an incapacity for pleasure, and this tremendous preoccupation with time and with rush and with getting there, is a result of overspecialization in linear consciousness. Now, linear consciousness is indeed remarkable, but it is something in a way aggresive. Just as the sword, the cutting edge, is an aggresive instrument, as distinct from the total skin. With the total skin, you can feel all over, and in this way you embrace life. When you get into a hot tub, it goes all over your skin, and it's a type of diffused thing, what Freud called polymorphus erotic feeling, all over. Whereas conscious awareness is like the point of a pencil: it jabs, and it writes down precisely what. And so those people who are all conscious attention are sort of intellectual porcupines. They're all prickles into things, and that gives them an essentially hostile attitude toward life, because of course conscious attention is a troubleshooter. It's the radar in the human organism to watch out for changes in the environment, just as the radar of a ship is watching out for icebergs, and an airplane's radar is watching out for thunderclouds. So in the same way, our thing is going around like this, and it's serving a very valuable function. But if you identify yourself all entire with that part function, then you define yourself as being in trouble, and looking for trouble, and you become unaware of your generalized relationship with the external world.
So then, you don't see that other things are important, besides those things which are 'practical.' Nobody takes time off to look at these things, and Nan-sen, the Zen master, said 'most people look at these flowers as if they were in a dream.' That is to say, they were not awake, not looking at it at all. And people think, 'Well, they're pretty; they decorate the room; they have green leaves, and that's nice.' And once you get them to draw what they think it looks like, it doesn't look anything like it. You know, you draw a leaf, you make an outline like this, and you fill it up with green paint. But these aren't green. They're every color of the rainbow. If you look at any single leaf of this plant, and you look deeply enough, you will see the reflection of every color in the room in it. And you will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.
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