lauza puts it in this way the great dao flows everywhere both to the left and to

the right it loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them
and when merits are accomplished it lays no claim to them
the more therefore you relinquish power
trust others the more powerful
you become but in such a way
that instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything you do it
beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else and they carry it on for you
so you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning
you can even tell it i
want to wake up at six o'clock and it'll wake you up just like an alarm clock
this seems a sort of paradox to say this but the principle of unity
of coming to a sense of of oneness with the whole of the rest of the
universe is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe
that will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you
than ever the way to become one with the universe is to
trust it as another as you would another
and say let's see what you're going to do
but in doing that you see in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to
think is
not you you are also saying it to yourself
because finally as i pointed out you do not know where your decisions come from
they pop up like hiccups
and when you make a decision people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions
she's this guy who um farmer who ordered a help
man come in and uh found he was an extraordinarily efficient worker because the first day
he put him on sawing logs and he saw more logs than anybody had
ever saw it was fantastic but it was all done in one day so the next day putting on put him
onto
mending fences and there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm and in one day
he
had the whole thing done so he thought what am i going to do this guy
so he took him down into a basement and said look here all the potatoes that have come in
from this
harvest and i want you to sort them into three groups those that we sell
those that we use for seeding and those that we throw away
so he left him at that at the end of the day the laborer came back and said well that's
enough mister
i quit oh he said you can't quit i've never had such an excellent weapon i'll raise your
salary i'll do anything to keep you around it i said no it's all right mending fences and
chopping wood but
this potato business is decision after decision after decision
so when we decide we're always worrying did i
think this over long enough did i take enough data into consideration
and if you think it through you find you never could take enough data into consideration
the data for a decision in any given situation is infinite
so what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about
this and then when the time comes to act you make a snap judgment
i mean i'm speaking a little extremely uh making some fun of it and so on
because after all uh we we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right
decision on rational grounds but we fortunately forget
the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right
it's amazing how often it works but warriors are people
who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen
so then when you make a decision and it works out all right
i think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent
and control
but somehow or other you are able
to decide and control things more harmoniously
if you delegate authority that's why very great businessmen are
those who can delegate authority trust others to work for them
because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure
that is fundamental to a living organism delegation of authority
it loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them and you see
then what is happening is this the more
you let go of it and trust it
as if it were quite other than you
the more you realize
the inseparable identity of self and other
to go back if you try to find the identity of self and other
by subjecting other to self no go
if on the other hand you you find it through giving self that is control
over to other and trusting that you may make a mistake
you may make a bad gamble but in the long run you're acting on a principle
which has the backing of evolution this is the way biological evolution
goes on constant delegation of authority that's why obviously the democracy is
superior to the monarchy it was the talk phil who said that
democracy is always right but for the wrong reasons
because there is operating in a democracy the principle that buckminster fuller calls synergy
and synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system
the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members
because that goes back again to this point that
we're always entering a new environment we don't ever know fully what the new
environment is because the only environments we know the past ones there is always then
operating in uh the
development of cellular life on any level
a new way of organization higher than any existing form
and we're not aware of it until after it's happened
if you ever saw for example the film contiki
this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsa wood raft to sail from south
america to the
pacific islands but once he had set this in motion he discovered that all sorts of unexpected
factors cooperated with him that
when the wood got wet it expanded so that the ties bit into it and held it completely
secure he never expected that and he found that as he sailed along a
flying fish would simply a light flat on the deck every morning for breakfast
that all kinds of natural factors it was just he he had touched a key where he was flowing
with the course of nature
and everything cooperated with him because he had touched the key he'd made the act of
faith
and he was just picking up in other words a practice which had been hundreds and
hundreds of years ago had been followed by others who had worked
it out by their great ecological awareness
so we do come out of this uh way of
of thinking to something which has i i would say the most enormously creative and
revolutionary social
consequences
that it has become not virtuous
not self-sacrificing and not anything like that it has become
the hardest practical politics
to let go control to others to give up trying to dominate the scene
also in a parallel way it has become at this time in our history
very much hard practical politics
to learn how to enjoy ourselves you can go to the protestant
people and with their protestant ethic who are against this kind of thing and now
say to them with great glee it is your solemn duty
to learn how to enjoy yourself why because in an age of
leisure people have really got to know how to enjoy themselves
because if they don't they'll smash the whole future of the human race
so a utopia has become not some a sort of a dream but an urgent necessity
we can't do without it because if we try to do without it
what's going to happen is that we are going to terminate our race in a mutual massacre of
scapegoats
and so the present paranoia in the united states that is going on
where everybody is thinking up a new scapegoat and how great it will be to demolish them
or get them out of power
all this kind of bickering and right and left politics has become
irrelevant because we now have the opportunity
of trusting our own intelligence our own technology
to take the risk of doing what we want
which will work to the extent that we realize that what i want basically what i really want is
what you want and i don't know what you want
surprise me
but that's my that's the kinship between iron valve
so when i ask i go right down to the question should we start with what do i want
the answer is i don't know when bodhi dharma was asked who are you
which is another form of the same question he said i don't know planting flowers to which
the butterflies come
bodhidharma says i know not i don't know what i want
but when you don't know what you want you've really reached the state of
desirelessness when you really don't know you see there's a there's a beginning
stage of not knowing and there's an ending stage of not knowing in the beginning stage you
don't know what you want because you haven't thought about
it or you've only thought superficially then when you somebody forces you to think about it
and go through and say
yeah i think i'd like this i think i like that i think i'd like the other that's the middle stage then
you get beyond that say is that
what i really want in the end you say no i don't think that's it
i might be satisfied with it for a while and i wouldn't turn my nose up at it but it's not really
what i want why
don't you really know what you want
two reasons that you don't really know what you want number one
you have it number two
you don't know yourself because you never can
the godhead is never an object of its own knowledge just as a knife doesn't cut itself fire
doesn't burn itself light doesn't illumine itself it's always an endless mystery to itself
i don't know and this i don't know uttered in the infinite
interior of the spirit
this i don't know is the same thing as i love
i let go i don't try to force or control
it's the same thing as humility
and so the upanishads say if you think that you understand brahman
you do not understand and have yet to be instructed further
if you know that you do not understand then you truly understand for the brahmana
is unknown to those who know it and known to those who know it not
and the principle is that any time you as it were
voluntarily let up control in other words cease to cling to yourself
you have an access of power because you're wasting energy all the
time in self-defense trying to manage things trying to force
things to conform to your will the moment you stop doing that that wasted energy is
available
therefore you are in that sense having that energy available you are one with the divine
principle you have the energy
when you're trying however to act as if you were god that is to say you don't
trust anybody and you're the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line you lose the
divine energy because what you're doing is simply
defending yourself so then the principle is the more you
give it away the more it comes back now you say i don't have the courage to
give it away i'm afraid
and you can only overcome that by realizing you better give it away because there's
nowhere holding on to it the meaning of the fact you see that
everything is dissolving constantly that we're all falling apart we're all in a process of
constant death
and that uh the world we hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers and like
snow upon the desert's
dusty face lighting a little hour to his dawn you know all that omar khan jazz
you know the cloud cat towers the gorgeous palaces the great globe itself i all which it
inherits shall dissolve
and like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind all falling apart
everything is that's the the great assistance to you see that that fact that everything is in
decay is your helper that is allowing you
that you don't have to let go because there's nothing to hold on to
it's achieved for you in other words by the process of nature so once you see that uh you
just don't
have a prayer and it's all washed up and that you will banish and leave not a rack behind
and you really get with that suddenly you find you have the
power this enormous access of energy but it's not power
that came to you because you grabbed it came in entirely the opposite way
and power that comes to you in that opposite way is power
with which you can be trusted of course what we've been talking about
is not so much a set of ideas as an experience
or shall we say experiencing and uh
this kind of seminar in comparison with the encounter groups or workshops
of various kinds or experiments in sensory awareness
is now being called a conceptual seminar although
i'm not talking about concepts
but the crucial question arises that
an understanding a real feeling understanding of the polar relationship
between the individual and the world is something that operates
as we say in your bones and isn't
just a view that you hold or a belief that you hold
it's so curious that the emphasis of the western tradition in religion
is primarily upon right belief do you believe in the right dogmas and
the right doctrines and only secondarily
upon right action because what you believe
is in christianity at any rate far more important than what you do
because one is saved through faith not by works and early in its history
the christian church rejected the movement in the church which had
been known as gnosticism from the greek gnosis
which means knowledge and in a way there were some sound reasons for doing so
because the gnostics were what i would call anti-materialists
they divided human beings into three classes that were called respectively
pneumatic psychic and hylic
the last one being h y l i c from the greek
highly or they would call it now elay
meaning would so the people were spiritual
psychological and wooden
and uh that is to say the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality
and most closely identified with their bodies
and orthodox christianity rejected this sort of distinction
because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence
is not inconsistent with spirituality this is something which most christians
have forgotten but they do believe as the central
principle of christianity in what's called the incarnation that in uh the jesus of nazareth
almighty god did in fact become material become human
and by this process initiated a transformation
of the cosmos in the words of saint athanasius
god became man that man might become god and you don't hear that from the pulpit
very often the christian church therefore
emphasized pestis or faith as against gnosis or
knowledge because
they said you can never know god god could never become an object of knowledge
and in this funny roundabout way the christian theologians were saying
exactly the same thing as the hindus only the hindus
do call this knowledge of god through faith
they call it gnana which is the same as the greek word gnosis
but just to give you a little side light on how words get mixed up in their meanings
we now have a class of person called an agnostic
and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs
about the ultimate nature of things he just says he doesn't know
but the original word agnosia in greek
meant a special kind of knowledge it was called the dark knowledge of god
the knowledge of god in the cloud of unknowing to use the title of a mystical treatise
written by an
anonymous 14th century english monk this monk derived his ideas from a very
mysterious figure who wrote under the name of dionysus the areopagite
dionysius was a fifth or sixth century syrian monk
who had learned his mysticism who got it from plotinus
who was a neoplatonist and who probably got a great deal of
stimulation from the intellectual world of alexandria
and alexandria in the early years of the christian era was a tremendous
exchange place between east and west buddhist monks visited alexandria
it was one of the great centers of trade between rome and india
and as you may know all rome's gold eventually went to india
for the purchase of pepper and as a result of this the roman
economy collapsed they bought too much luxury from india
india in exchange got roman architecture and you'll see a lot of roman
architecture in indian temples
but alexandria was the great center for the gnostics and for christian
theology and some of the greatest theologians clement origen
athanasius saint cyril all worked out of alexandria
but now going back to this strange month dionysius
it was he who first put around the idea in christian circles that there was such a thing of
the knowledge as the knowledge of god by faith
by agnosia really by unknowing and he in a book which he wrote very
short book called the theologian mystica he wrote a treatise on
the higher knowledge of god which might be quoted directly from the
upanishads in certain parts of it the last section of it reads like the
manduk because it's a series of negations
it says what god is not and he goes very far because he says
that god is not one he says our idea of unity
falls far short of what god is so does our idea of trinity
so does our idea of spirit our idea of mind of justice of love
all these things are not really god
and he says in another place if anybody having seen god understood what he had seen what
he would have seen would not
have been god but some creature of god less than god some sort of angel or something like
that it's perfectly amazing
to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of dionysus
the areopagite he became identified you see with saint paul's first convert in athens
and legend has it that he was the first bishop of athens and was martyred in gaul
now where he's known as saint dennis but saint thomas aquinas looked upon the
writings of darn isis theory of ariata guide as having the highest authority and you could if all
the texts of
dionysus's work had been lost you could restore most of it from quotations in some thomas
he wrote really two very important books one was the one i said the theologian
mystica the other was called the divine names
and these two books presented the two phases of his theology the book called the divine
names was a
discussion on the nature of god in terms of what god is like
by analogy and this kind of knowledge of god he called
to say according to that is to say to speak by analogy
where he used though entirely negative language about god this sort of discourse was called
apophatic and the word apo meaning away from
to talk away from just as a sculptor when he makes an image
reveals the image by removing stone and so dionysus explained that one
attains the knowledge of god by discarding concepts
which is exactly what the hindus mean when they say uh of god one can only say
neti neti not this not this not any conception
thus in hindu a philosophy the highest state of consciousness in samadhi
is called nirvikalpa samadhi which means literally
non-conceptual the kalpa means a concept near is a negation so the non-conceptual
knowledge
now people have greatly misunderstood this they have imagined
that unknowing the state of the highest contemplation was the acquisition of a blank mind
from which you first discarded thought you went on to discard perception
you went on to discard any kind of sensory content
in awareness until you were so far as anyone could say aware of
nothing and they supposed that this kind of catatonic state
was mystical consciousness this is often believed in india
if you go to the vedanta society and ask what do you mean by nirvikalpa samadhi
they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever
of the sensory world that he's completely absorbed as you sometimes see hindu holy men
sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf
to everything going on around them
the founder of chinese zen known as huaynan
described people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood
he said is a very serious mistake indeed to confuse
sunyata the sanskrit word for the great void which is
both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof said it's a great mistake to confuse it
with nothingness it is rather to be thought of as space
or like space because space is not empty it contains the whole
universe and so in the same way the state of mind of a person who is truly enlightened
is not empty it contains everything
but like space it is not stained by what it contains
and it's often said in zen imagery you can't hammer a nail into space
you can't spit on the sky and soil it if you try the spit will just return and hit your own face
so they go on to say the consciousness in all of us your basic mind is like space
it is completely pure but of course by purity they don't mean
unsexual which is of course what purity generally means
in the western world blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god a person who's
pure in heart is
generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts
you know what naughty means means vain negative
empty a naughty person therefore is one who it doesn't amount to anything it's just
nothing that's the real meaning
but uh this misunderstanding of the nature of
contemplation existed not only in india
from which it was transmitted to china but also in the west
you read many treatises on western mysticism and there's still the feeling that getting into a
deep deep trance
sometimes called rapture again the word rapture
has undergone some transformations we talk about rapture as people being
beside themselves with pleasure but to be wrapped
means to be taken away from the body so also ecstasy we now interpret as
meaning in a state of high pleasure but it means to be outside yourself to
stand outside yourself your soul has left you it is with god as arabs say of all crazy people be
kind
to them they are not here their soul is with god
but actually if it can be true as buddhists say
that nirvana and samsara are one and if it can be true as christians say
that the spirit can be made flesh the word can be made flesh
then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting in a trance like a lump
on a log with a perfectly blank mind because if that were the highest state
of consciousness it would be an exclusive state of mind
a state of mind that shuts out life and in that sense it could not qualify
for being what the hindus call non-dualistic they always speak of the highest reality
as being not one because one excludes many not nothing because nothing excludes
something not being because being excludes non-being and vice versa
and so they use this word non-dual to mean that which doesn't exclude anything which as it
were has no outside
as we say space has no outside you can only have outsides inside space
you can't have any outsides outside space there is no outside space even though space may
be curved
and finite
so if you want to think incidentally of that uh curved space go and take a look
at uh photograph in the life a book on mathematics where there's a
picture of a klein bottle which is a three-dimensional mobius strip
there might be a strip you know is a piece of paper that is twisted once and then joined and
it has only one side and
only one edge our klein bottle is a three-dimensional mobius strip and it only has one inside
it has no outside you can say it has an inside and no outside or it has an outside and no
inside it's a fabulous little little trick
but there's something like that would be the nature of space uh as that which does indeed
transcend
the opposites um
not quite now we'd have to do one extra move on a serpent to make it into a klein bottle
uh you'd have to tuck its head through the ins through the side of its skin
and make the aperture through the mouth continuous with the inside of the
serpent towards the tail you see that's more or less what a climb bottle
is so uh
what i'm getting to i'm giving you something out of the general history of religions
to show that what has been meant by the mystical state the state of
samadhi or awakening in certain traditions
is not this state of trance but a state of consciousness in which you can perfectly well carry
on your
daily affairs and of course what is meant by a bodhisattva
as the ideal type of buddhist person is that he is not wrapped
that he is actively engaged in the life of the world because he has gone beyond the illusion
that nirvana is to be found away from everyday life
so what is then the point of meditation why meditate why do you have to crawl up
into a hole or go to a zen monastery or retire and
be quiet when this is only a withdrawal
is there anything to be said for it
meditation is in there in that sense as a practice as a discipline is a very curious problem
because from one point of view it's a help and from another point of view a hindrance
and i think we have to understand first of all that meditation exercises are medicinal rather
than dietary
the same could be said of lsd a medicine not a
diet uh something that um is described in zen as when you want to open the door
or summon someone to open the door for you you pick up a brick and you knock on the
door but you don't carry the brick into the
house when you need a raft for crossing a stream you cross the stream on the raft
but you leave the raf on the bank at the other side you don't go carrying it around
but a lot of people when they get into meditation or they get into religion
or into any kind of exploration of this sort
turn the door into a revolving door and keep on going round and round and round and
never get through
they say what a gas it is to be in this revolving door so maybe a good definition of a parasite
is the person
who goes through a revolving door on someone else's push
so there are all sorts of people in the religious racket
who are uh going through revolving doors and they're very bitter about people who
walk right through and leave the door behind because they say well you haven't paid
enough respect
you must really understand religious one-upmanship it's a tremendously important thing
and don't be caught out by this because what happens is there's a little game going on
which i'm
going to initiate you into and it's played in zen
which is
it works like this if you go to a teacher and ask for spiritual
instruction or even if you come to a seminar like this
you are by doing that confusing yourself because you are
looking for what you're asking for outside as if someone else could give it to you as if you
didn't have it
so the teacher knows that as long as you do that you haven't understood
but he doesn't just tell you to go away or we may sometimes
just say go away i'm too busy and i mean in any case i can't tell you anything
well people won't take that for an answer they won't take no for an answer
and furthermore if he just said go away they would just find some other teacher
who would exploit them and uh maybe keep them as followers for years
and acquire a great deal of money by so doing what he does is another thing
he tries to give them the put down
as if to say you have a great long distance to go yet
your attainment is uh not at all perfect
and uh where uh they're always talking about other sects and other schools and saying well
they
haven't really got the point you see so that you keep losing faith in
yourself and uh feeling
my goodness i haven't yet attained this thing and that keeps you working
but all the time you're being talked out it's like someone who's a pickpocket and
he's stolen your own watch and is selling it to you
but just so long as you can be talked out of yourself you deserve to be
[Laughter]
now you become very aware of this if you ever do
momentarily slip into some sort of a mystical experience
uh you become aware of this tremendous gamesmanship going on
uh and you see it as sort of continuous with with all sorts of cosmic games that are going on
of uh creatures eating other creatures up and um
the creatures that get eaten of course transform themselves into the creatures that eat
them and then in turn uh eat
other creatures and uh you see the whole hide and seek game going on and then you realize
very clearly that the state of development that you are in now
is uh no better and no worse than anybody else's state
because it's like uh space again
which planet is an or which star is in the best position
well it's all equal they're all in the middle any one can be considered as the center
one any point on a sphere is the center of the surface of the sphere
so you know in the same way everybody in all his behavior whatever he's doing
whether we call him from a certain point of view sick or whether we call him healthy
whether we call him good or bad
neurotic normal psychotic sane all the manifestations are just like the
leaves on the trees and
in each uh being in a unique way is as christians would say
manifesting the will of god
so they're really from that point of view you see
there is nothing to do to attain buddhahood
nothing at all but you see that's very difficult to understand
because a lot of people when they hear that there's nothing to do try to do nothing
[Laughter]
and you can't because you are karma and karma means
action you can't do nothing
but uh the thing you're looking for or think you're looking for
is what you're doing is what's called you
only of course as we all know uh we've got ourselves into the idea
that oneself is so difficult to see
because it's like as i've often said trying to bite your own teeth or look into your own eyes
and you can't find it
it's always behind it's like your head is from the optical point of view
a blank space neither light nor dark it's right in the middle of everything
and so one of the great tricks of gurus is to set people looking for their heads
there's a famous story of a king in india in ancient times called yajna datta
and one morning he woke up and reached out for his mirror and brought it over
no head he was looking in the wrong side of the mirror
and you know he was kind of blurry-eyed and had a hangover so he summoned
servants and said you gods i've lost my head find it and uh they said but your majesty it's
there on your shoulders he said it is not i can't see it in the mirror nobody can show me my
head so they were rushing
all over the place looking for the head now the trick to that is of course
that uh you are perfectly well aware of your head only not in a form in which you expect to
be aware of it
you expect to be aware of your own head in the same way as you're aware of other people's
heads
but that wouldn't be true of you because you've got an inside view on your head
you have an outside view on about the people's heads because of course you're taking an
inside point of view
but the way in which you are aware of your head is in terms of what you were seeing and
hearing because all sights and all sounds are what the nerves inside your head are
doing that's how to be aware of one's head you are aware therefore of yourself the
mysterious self that you have in terms of experience
because there isn't really any difference
but that always escapes people you see so perpetually so long as you don't
understand that you can be talked into going on to all kinds of weird excursions
and just so long as you believe it you're a sucker you're hooked
and it takes a tremendous inner confidence and nerve
finally to say don't pull that stunt on me anymore
i i see through your game
and because gurus are very clever
at putting you down but they're just trying to see how strong you are
testing you out see if they can hoodwink you so long as they can you see they're
going to go on doing it because they're going to get you to the point where they can't do it
to you anymore then they're graduate
and so uh
one of rinzai's students after he saw through it said well it
wasn't much in rinzai's buddhism after all of course there wasn't
he said boldly and straight out my teaching is just like using an empty fist to
deceive a child you know when you play games with a child and pretend you've got
something
here the child goes into all kinds of um tizzy to get you to open your hand and show what it
is and then there's nothing
fooled so you so you can be fooled
as long as you can be fooled when you can't be fooled you don't ask the question anymore
because it's all become clear it's all become clear that there is no puzzle about this universe
what makes you think there are puzzles about this universe very simple reason you're trying
to explain it
and when you explain things what you would what do you mean by explanation
there are several meanings of explanation there's really one basic meaning but first of all to
be able to
translate what is happening into terms of words or numbers
in other words to describe but a real explanation is not just a
description it's a description which enables us to control
what we're describing but didn't we see in the last session
that to control the world is not really what we want to do
so that if all explanations have as their function enabling us to control things
then maybe an explanation isn't what we wanted
and furthermore you can very simply see that what makes things complicated is
explaining when somebody explains to you how a flower works and he's a great botanist
and analyzes all the images of the flower and shows the channels the fibers the processes of
reproduction and so on
that go on in it everybody stands fascinated how complicated that is how clever god
must have been to create that flower to have all that complexity going it isn't complicated at
all
it's only complicated when you start thinking about it because
the vehicle of words is a very clumsy one
and when you try to talk about the processes of nature what is complicated is not the
processes of nature but
trying to put them into words that's as complicated as trying to drink up the ocean with a
fork
takes forever and so this intense complexity that we see in everything
is created by our attempt to analyze it all
and so what we do is you see when we analyze we use our eyes and ears as
scalpels and we dissect everything and we have to put a label on every
piece we chop off and so we scalpelize and we get it right down to
atoms getting finer and finer we suddenly thought well we've got to the end of it because
the word atom means what is not
cuttable atomos but then he found he could cut the atom
and lo and behold big fleas had little fleas upon their backs to buy them and it goes on
forever
there is no end to the minuteness which you can unveil through physical investigation
for the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into pieces
and the sharper you can sharpen your knife the finer you can cut it
and the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed and the sophisticated instruments that
we can now make well there's probably no limit to it
but in a way all that is vain knowledge
in a way because you see it what it does is it gives you the illusion that you've
solved your problems when you have control certain things and you have solved certain
problems
practical problems you say fine more of that please let's go on solving problems
and then you do you create a world of people as we are today
far more comfortable than people who lived in the 19th century
just remember the the troubles of going to a dentist when you were children or some of you
when you were children
of [Music] medicine of badly heated homes
of uh all sorts of things that we don't put up with anymore but the problem is we keep
running into
this thing that all constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious
and when we take it as a matter of course to have certain comforts then we switch the level
on which we
worry when you solve a whole set of problems
people find new ones to worry about and after a while you begin to get that
haven't we been here before feeling aren't we just going around on a cycle
and doing the same old thing over and over and over again because we don't realize
that we're chasing our own tales
by an eternally recurrent process
of not knowing who you are that is the hide and seek that is the
nature of what the hindus call the manvantara
the period of the manvantara in which the worlds are manifested and the period of the
prelia in which the worlds are
withdrawn from manifestation in and out in and out
ever more came out by the same door as in i went the thing is to get to the point where
you can see that you are doing that in every moment of your existence
with every tiny little atom of your body
you now at this minute you see are the whole
the whole system of eating and outing
in other words you often think perhaps um maybe a long long time ahead i shall reach the
point
where i wake up from manifestation and overcome the world illusion and
discover that i am the supreme reality behind all this diversification
my friends there is no diversification
in other words what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the
thing
and then you say it is made of pieces because you forget that you cut it
so when you see the world is complicated and that there are life problems and that uh you
might one day succeed
see hundreds and hundreds of people are running like mad after something that they call
that is success and they have
no idea what it is so in exactly the same way the guru
is keeping you running and running after spiritual attainment you don't know what you want
see where krishnamurti is so clever
because he says if you ask me for enlightenment how can you ask me for enlightenment if
you
don't know what it is how do you know you want it is it any concept you have of it
will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the
situation you're already in if you think you know what you're going
out for all you're doing is you're seeking the past what you already know what you've
already experienced therefore that's not it is it because you say you're looking for
something quite new but what do you mean new
what's your conception of something new well you figure i can only think about it in terms
of something old
something i once had so he doesn't say anything
he doesn't indicate anything positively everybody says why are you so negative why don't
you give us something to hang
on to well if the simple answer is it would be spurious you don't need anything to hang on to
you're it you don't need a religion
but then you say well uh well what is all this religious stuff
about them why don't we just forget it
you can try by all means just go away
don't go to gurus don't go to church don't enter philosophical discussions forget
it but then you'll realize
that by having consented to forget it you're still seeking
what a trap what can you do you see if you stay here and listen to me
or to anyone else who comes around here you're fooling yourself
but if you go away you're fooling yourself too
because you still think that's going to improve your situation
it won't and therefore when you discover that it doesn't you think well maybe it was a
mistake to go away and you come back to the guru and he looks at you and says
you are very undisciplined very very inferior student
and uh you you need to apply yourself
well as i explained i explained what he's doing
but it comes down in a way to a sort of contest with a guru you see
will you call his bluff you're afraid to because you might discover that if you
do call his bluff he's no better than you are well that's what you're supposed to find out
but without being cynical about it he's as divine as you are
but you've got to call the bluff there's going to be a showdown
and it's a double bind the whole situation is a double bond
because it doesn't do any good to stay here and it doesn't do you any good to go away
either to do something about it or to do nothing about it
now then there's something else when you understand that and when you realize that um
there's nothing to realize well it's all here then what are you going to do
[Laughter] well of course this is the sense of zen
poem supernatural activity and marvelous power
drawing water carrying fuel you know do whatever one does as a human being
but there's a little element of philistinism in that it's like when a child is pestering
father or mother with all sorts of questions they finally get down to the deepest
metaphysical problems they say oh shut
up and eat your donut [Laughter]
and um i wouldn't say that you see at this point
because uh life as one looks at it you see is in fact a
celebration of itself
when you look out at night at the stars and you really wonder good god what is all that
about
well it's a firework display and it's celebrating high holy day
whoopi and the whole world is whoopee
it's a kind of exuberance and therefore the proper function of religion
is digging this it's not seeking
it's not seeking anything but is in a way thanksgiving
that's why of course the christians were right and calling the mass the the eucharist the
thanksgiving
only they had such a complicated way of thinking about it and nobody could understand it
so they're in in religion all religious exercises whether they are
meditative or whether they are ritualistic are whoopi
they are not something you do in order to attain anything they are like art forms
like dancing they are expressive of attainment of the attainless attainment
so here's another hang up for you when you go to mr suzuki who runs the zen center he's a
good
disciple of dogen who brought then a certain school of zen to japan
in the uh 13th century
dogen said you can't sit and meditate unless you're already a buddha
in which case why meditate well meditation is just the way a buddha sits
and he called this sitting just to sit not to attain enlightenment the minute you do that you
see you're not
meditating
so you only become a good meditator if you're not looking for anything
and therefore you realize what a great thing it is to be able to sit
and what a great thing it is not to dissect the world with your analytical intellect
to be able to look out at the water or the trees or the floor and the light on it in front of you
without calling it
light or floor or trees or thinking that it has parts or thinking that
it's complicated it isn't so when you can sit without thinking
not with an empty mind mind you i'm going back to that point not with an empty mind but
just um
an un a non-analytic mind a non-probing mind uh where you're not creating problems
all the time by trying to control it by trying to control your mind by trying to control your
experience what you see
and hear you then just simply discover that there is no way of controlling what
you're experiencing because what you're experiencing is you
and to try and really fundamentally control that this is going around the circle
so if i would say to you now what you have to learn is to let it happen that's wrong too
there's no one to let it
happen if i say to you accept your experience um
be calm and open to things that again perpetuates the illusion that you're something
different from it
so we go round and round but if there are some people
who want to get together and like we would get together to play poker or to um
have a walk go fishing or sail a boat if there are some people who want to get together to
meditate
and have rituals and to chant uh great it's an art form
and you can only use it and make it a good art form if you're not using it to get something
and this is what really is the bane of temples all over the world
you go into buddhist temples where they theoretically don't believe in any god
but there are the people praying and they are all doing it
in order that we get a male child next time around
or that the horse recover from a disease or that mama gets cured of the dropsy
and all these petitions are going on and on and on people always coming to the temple to
ask for something
low brow people for low brow things high brow people for eyebrow things and they're all
the vendors sit outside
and sell souvenirs and magic and charms and all the people go in and do this and all these
serious priests sitting
there really having to keep up face and say yes sir we can provide these services
on the other hand if you go in to one of these temples along with all the faithful followers
and have a ball buy a buy a bee buy a candle buy this fire buy some incense go in and dig
this
great thing going on salute the buddhas or the chris still the altars or the crucifixes or what
you will but don't
take it seriously and this is one of the great important
transformations of today in our
consciousness is that a great many people are finding out that religion is not supposed to be
taken seriously this is a shocking thing to many people
uh there used to be an old saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh across the
altars
that's true in one sense when the priests know that they've got a racket going and they
don't believe one
word of it and they're laughing across the altar because of all these suckers around uh doing
it then it's true
uh the religion is dead but when the priests laugh at the orders
because they're having such fun because this whole scene is so beautiful
well it's the difference between some stuffy old buddhist priest
humming a sutra and alan ginsberg chanting a sutra uh that's a thing to hear
because these people going you know they're gone for interminable
movement it's a ball they're sick of it but they get paid for it this is magical
but when adam ginsberg chant the future everybody gets in the circle and he gets these
little bells and they get going
it's just like it's like a um a jam session where everybody is absolutely delighted
well that's the way to do it and if you can't do it that way forget it
you