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 T F
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Selectied Lectures
·o f Ala,n W. Watts

, Eclited by
Ma1rk Watts

South E~end, Indiana

OUT OF THE TRA~P
Copyright C 1985 by Mlark Watts
All rights reserved. r~o part of this book may be
reproduced or tra~mit1ted in any form or by any means,
ela~onic or mecharlical, including photocopying,
recording or by any ir,formation storage and retrieval
syste~ without penrnission in writing from the
publisher.
and books
702 South Michigan, S<l1uth Bend, Indiana 46601
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 85-0084565
International Standard Book Number: 0-89708-147-1
567'89
Printed in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Alan 1Natls' Buddha, drawn with brush

and ink, circa 1965.

Additional copies avail,able:

the disbibutors
702 South Michigan
South Bend, IN 46601
Dedicated to Henry 'Sandy' Jacobs

•
 Other bot;iks in the series
LECTURE'S ~OF ALAN WATTS

PLA,~ TO LIVE
DIAMlOND WEB

A vtJrilable from:
the distributors
702: S. Michigan
South l!lend, IN 46618
 COl~TENTS

F•REFACE
(Page 9)

CHJ\.PTER ONE
Man's Place: In Nature (Page 11)

CHA~PTER TWO
Out Of 1'he Trap (Page
.
29)

. CHAl~l'ER THREE
Yoga 1Cara (Page 51)

CHA:PTER FOUR
Psychology of My:s tical Experience (Page 6g)

CRA~PTER FIVE
Historical 13uddhism (Page 83)

CHi'-PTER SIX
Philosophy •of Nature (Page 107)

CHAl~ER SEVEN
Tribute to <::arl Jung (Page 131)
 PEtEFACE

The following ~ires ha11e been selected from the Alan

Watts tape library, a coJ!lection of many hours of recordings
made by Alan Wans dur1ing the sixties and early seventies. As
the title Out Of The 'T rap implies, these selections are
excellent examples of Watts' s uncanny ability to point to ideas
which limit our horitons iand keep us perpetually bound with
the ego-self. Alan Watts ~~aw through the game and was prone
to laugh at the great hoax that we create for ourselt1es through
ignorance of our true ntiture. And our true nature is not a
'higher self to be discot1,ered, but rather the true dit1inity of
daily life as found-''in all the details.''
In this collection we find a more lJccurate description of
nature-not as somethir:tg separate from man, but in its
original sense, as the t11:rtues or characteristics of nature,
including the seemingly s~mseless expressions of mankind run
amuck with aimless tech\nology and its resulting inet1itable
alienation.
Drawing from the philosophies of the Easte, ,1 and
W este, ,1 tvOTld W acts lmings us a uniquely balanced way of
finding out who we reallj, are. Although it may be strange to

•
-IX-
 CONTENTS

say that a timeless philos<>Phy has come of age, I could not help
but think while preparirag this manuscript that my fat her's
tvords will find a more 't'eceptive audience today than in the
sixties when he was consaidered by some to be rather 'far out!'
Historical events and scientific advances of the seventies have
brought us to the realizattion that indeed man is capable of
anything, and now perhaips we are possibly better prepared to
listen to his warm and personal syntheses of the most important
aspects of religious philo,sophy and human psychology. -
In perparing this t,ext, gyeat effort has been made to
preserve the {latJOT and content of his original talks. For this
reason you may find the ;rollowing chapters to di{{er from his
written scyle, .but by readi1rig aloud, ,ou may recapture his play
of u.,'Of'ds and wisdom.
Mark Watts

Com.ments welcome
Post (){{ice Box 938
Point: Reyes Station
Calijromia - 94956

-x-
MAN'S PLACE
IN NA.TURE

•
•

~
J=
d
d
a
d
n
r4
h
h
n
Ii
 was talking to you tt~is morning about the basic
philosophy of nature that underlies Far Eastern
culture, and explaining w~1y it's so important for us in the
West to understand this, so that we can encourage the
Japanese people,to re-und,erstand it-because they are in
•
danger of following some:~ of our wildest excesses, and
doing things that will dest1roy our environment. You see,
a great deal of what we hav'e done by way of technological
development is based on the idea that man is at war with
nature, and that in turn i~; based on the idea, which is a
really a 19th century myth1, that intelligence, values, love,
humane feelings, etc. exist only within the borders of the
human skin. And that out:side those borders the world is
nothing but a howling w:1ste of blind energy, rampant
libido, and total stupidity·.

--13-
 -
MAN'S PLi"CE IN NATURE
-

This you see. is tlhe extreme accentuation of the

platonic Christian feelir1g as man as not belonging in this it 1
world, of being a spirit: imprisoned in matter. And it's al
reflected in our popular phraseology. ''I came into this b1
world." ''l face facts;.'' ''I encounter reality.'' It's in
something that goes ''b,o om'' right against you like that! SC

But all this is contrary to the facts. We didn't come e,

into this world-we grE!W out of it, in the same way that cc
apples grow out of ar, apple tree. And if apples are se
symptomatic of an applle tree, I'm sure that after all, this SC

tree apples-when you find a world upon which human

beings are growing, ther\ this world is humane, because it
humans.
Only we seek to dE~ny our Mother, and to renounce
•
our origins, as if somehlow we were lonely specimens in m
this world, who don't really belong here, and who are
aliens in an environmen.t of consisting mostly of rock and
fire, and mechanical ele,:tronic phenomena, which has no W4

interest in us whatsoeve~r, except maybe a little bit in us as fa:

a whole, as a species. You've heard all these phrases, de
''Nature cares nothing for the individual, but only for the
species.'' ''Nature as in tooth and claw.'' ''Nature is dog... A1
eat-dog,'' or as the Hin,dus call it Matsyanaya the Law of le1
the Sharks. And so; als,o a very popular idea of the 19th
century running over in.to the common sense of the 20th, it
is that we belong as hu1man beings on some very small, Q4
•
unimportant spec of dt1st, on the outer fringes of a very 101

small galaxy, in the middle of millions and millions of

much more important galaxies. And all this thinking is
pure mythology.
-14-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

Let me go in a little biit to the history of it, because

it's important for us as Westerners to know something
about the history of the ev olution of our own ideas that
1

brought this state of mind aibout. We grew up as a culture

in a very different idea, w:h ere the universe was seen as
something in which the c~arth was at the center, and
everything was arranged a1round us, in a way that we of
course as living organisms naturally see the world. We
see it from the center, and -~verything surrounds us. And
so, this geocentric picture c>f the world was however, one
in which every human bein,g was fantastically important,
because you were a child oif God, and you were watched
day in, day out, by your loving and judging father in
Heaven. And you, because~ you have an eternal life, are
infinitely important in the eyes of this God.
I have a friend wl1o's a convert to Roman
Catholicism, and is a vc~ry sophisticated and witty
woman. And in her bathro,om she had one of those old-
fashioned toilets with a pull-tank on the top, and a pipe
down to the toilet seat. Ar11d fastened on this pipe there
was a little plaque which •,ad on it nothing but an eye.
And underneath was writte:n in Old English Gothic style
letters: ''Thou God sees me.'' So everywhere is that
watching eye, that examine:s you, and at the same time as
it knows you, it causes yo\nr existence. By knowing you,
God creates you, because ,~ou are an act of His creative
imagination. A.n d so you ~llre desperately important.

-15-
 -
MAN'S PL.ACE IN NATURE
-

But Western people got this feeling that this became thi
too embarrassing. You lcnow how it was as a child, when sh1
you were working in !.chool, and the teacher walked rat
around behind your b2lck, and looked over while you na·
were working, and you1 always felt put off. While the OU
teacher is watching you, you are non-plussed. You want rat
to finish the work and th,en show it to the teacher. There is
a problem. Never show anything unfinished to children be:
or to fools. And children feel this very strongly about ag4
their teachers. They wariLt to finish it before it's looked at. we
So in exactly the same way, it's embarrassing to feel ph
that your inmost thouights and your every decision is COl
constantly being watche:d by a critic, however beneficent COi
and however loving t~aat critic may be, that you are w~
always under judgemen1t. To put this to a person is to bug
him totally. Indeed, it's 1one of the techniques used in Zen cli:
for putting people into ;l very strange state of mind. Ydu un
are always under watch1. lif1
It was a great relief' for the Western world when we thi
could decide that there ·was no-one watching us. Better a pe4
universe that is comple~tely stupid than one that is too the
intelligent. And so, it was necessary for our peace of the
mind, and for our reli•~f that during the 19th century er~
particularly, we got rid of God, and found then that the we
universe surrounding ,1s was supremely unintelligent, bei
and was indeed a univ·erse in which we, as intelligent ha1
beings, were nothing rtaore than an accident. But then, WC
having discovered this to be so, we had to take every WO
conceivable step, and m.u ster all possible energy to make be.

-16-
 OUT OF ·rHE TRAP

this accident continue, an1d to make it dominate the

show! The price that we paid for getting rid of God was
rather terrible. It was the p1rice of feeling ourselves to be
natural flukes, in the middlle of cosmos quite other than
ourselves-cold, alien, andl utterly stupid, going along
rather mechanically, on rat:her rigid laws, but heartless.
This attitude provoked in Western man a fury to
beat nature into submissio1,. And so, we talk about war
against nature. When we climb a mountain like Everest,
we have conquered Everest. When we get out enormous
phallic rockets and boom them out into space, we're
conquering space. And all the symbols we use for our
conquest of nature are hostile: rockets, bulldozers ... this
whole attitude of dominating it, and mastering it.
Whereas a Chinese person might say, when you
climb a high mountain, ••:You conquer it? Why this
unfriendly feeling? Aren't ,,ou glad the mountain could
lift you up so high in the air, so as to enjoy the view?'' So
this technology that we ha,,e developed, in the hands of
people who feel hostile to 11ature is very dangerous. But
the same technology in the ]hands of people who felt that
they belong in this u,niv erse could be enormously
1

creative. I'm not talking so1me kind of primitivism, as if

we should really get rid of all technology, and go back to
being a kind of primitive p,eople, but rather that, in the
hands of people who really know that they belong in this
world, and are not strangers in it, technology could be a
wonderful thing. For one Sf!es, in the art forms that have
been developed through this philosophy, that we have a
/

-17-
 MAN'S l?LACE IN NATURE
-
•
-

combination.
•
My friend Sabro Hasegawa, a great d4
Japanese artist of mlodern times, used to call it the A
''controlled accident .. '' •That there is on one hand, the gc
unexpected thing th;lt happens of itself that nobody oi
could predict-that's the accident. And there is, on the e>
other hand, predict:ion, control, the possibility of pl
directing something along certain lines, just as when the oi
sailor moves against the wind, with the power of the
wind, he is using skill 1to control the wind. So, in the same a
way our controlling tlhings has a place, but it is with the fl1
accidental world of n1ature, rather than against it. ac
So then, this is vvhy the philosophy of nature, and ca
the civilization of the ]Far East is immensely important to tu
us to understand, wit:h our vast technical powers. And th
again in turn we, und.erstanding that point of view, are kE
immensely important to the people of the Far East, so as •
ID
to help them not to 'be too intoxicated by our way of fl,
doing things. There':s a long, long story about why pr
technology developed in the West first, rather than in the bl
Far East, and I'm niot going to go into that for the jii
moment. But the in:iportant thing about this whole th
philosophy of nature, and of man's place in nature is that Ai
this Taoist, and later Zen Buddhist, and Shinto feeling W4
about man's place in the world is today corroborated by tei
the most advanced thinking in the biological and physical WC
sciences. Now, I can'tt stress that too much. ta]
Science is prilmarily description, accurate th
description of what's J~appening, with the idea that if you
describe what is happening accurately, you 're way of

-18-
• OUT OF THE TRAP

describing things will beco·m e a way of measuring things.

And that this in turn will enable you to predict what is
going to happen. And this will build you some measure
y of control over the worl<i. The people who are most
e expert in describing, an1d who are most expert in
.f predicting are the first peoJple to recognize the limitations
e of what they're doing.
e First of all, consider w·hat one has to do in science, in
e a very simple experiment, in which you want to study a
e fluid in a test tube, and deiscribe what is in that fluid so
accurately, that you must isolate that fluid from what are
d called ''unmeasurable vari:ables''. I have a fluid in a test
0 tube, and I want to describie it accurately, but every time
d the temperature changes. rny fluid changes, so I want to
e keep it free from changes of temperature. This already
IS implies an air conditioning system. Also, I don't want my
•f fluid to be jiggled, because that may alter it. So I've got to
y protect it from trucks that :g o by the lab. And so I have to
.e build a special bump-pro<>f room, where trucks won't
.e jiggle it. Also, I have to be ,,ery careful that when I look at
.e this fluid I won't breathe c,n it, and affect it in that way .
lt And that the temperature of my body, as I approach it
.g won't alter it. And I sudde11ly discover that this fluid in a
y test tube is the most diffi~:ult thing to isolate in all the
al world. Because everything J[ do about it affects it. I cannot
take that fluid in a test tub,e and take it out of the rest of
the universe, and make it separate and all by itself.

-·19-
 MAN'S PJLACE IN NATURE
-
-

A scientist is the fi.r st to notice this. Furthermore, he Cal

knows not only that it's his bodily approach that alters ha
things, he finally disco~vers, in studying quantum theory, w~
that looking at things 1changes them. So when we study di1
the behavior of electrons, and all those sub-atomic ha
particles, we find out 1that the means we use to observe ha
them changes them. ~Vhat we really want to know is, di~
what are they doing vvhen we're not looking at them? ab
Does the light in the re:~frigerator really go out when you en
•
close the door? So wb,at will it do when it's not being Ill~
watched? Because we found out that watching them
affects them. Why, )because of course, in order to
observe the behavior o:f sub-nuclear particles, we have to
shine lights on them, as it were. We have to bombard de:
them with other nuclealr particles, and this changes them. do
•
And so we get to th<~ point where we can know the 10(

velocity of the particle, without knowing its position, or to

know its position without knowing its velocity. You lh
•
can't know both at the same time. What all that is telling IS :
us is-we cannot stand aside as an independent observer the
of this world, because you the observer are what you're flo
observing. You 're inseparable from it. bei
Let me put it in ::1nother way. Science, I said, was en·
accurate description. ~,Ve want to describe the behavior grc
of any given organismu whether it's human, or whether OU
it's an ant, or whatever it is. Now how will you tell, how
will you say what an an1t is doing without describing at the
same time, the field or the environment in which the ant
is doing it. You can't S~lY that an ant is walking, if all you

-20-
 OUT OF 'fHE TRAP

can describe is that this ant is just wiggling its legs. You
have to describe the gro und over which the ant is
1

walki~g, to describe walking. You have to set up

directions, points of the compass, etc. And so, soon you
have to describe all the an1t's friends and relations. You
have to describe its food sources. And so you soon
discover that although yo,u thought you were talking
about an ant, what you are ;1ctually talking about is an ant
environment... a total situtation from which the ant is
, inseparable. You 're desc1ribing the behavior of the
'
environment in which ants are found, and that includes
the behavior of ants.
So too, human beha,,ior involves first of all, the
description of the social co,ntext in which human beings
do things. You can't de~scribe the behavior of an
individual, except in the co1ntext of a society. You'll have
to describe his language. ln1deed, in making a description
I have to use language whicl~ I didn't invent. But language
, is a social product. Then b1eyond human society there is
'•
the whole environment of the birds, the bees and the
flowers, the oceans, the :air and the stars. And our
behavior is always in rel:ationship to that enormous
environment-just like ou1r walking is in relation to the
ground, and in relation t•o the form of space, object
outlines and the shape of ~t room.
So then, the result th~tt comes out of it, is that the
more and more the scientist looks at an organism, he
knows that he is not loc>king at an organism in an
environment, he's looking at a total process, which is

- :21-
 -
MAN'S Pl. . ACE IN NATURE

en,
called ''organism'' o,ut of its environment. But he pu
suddenly wakes up arld sees that he has a new empathy
with that which he is studying. He started out to say what ps,
the organism is doing. He found that he had to paste up a •
1n
few steps, and to rE~alize that his description of the thi
behavior of the orga111ism involved, at the same time, a arc
description of the beb1avior of the environment. So that no
although, unlike trees. and plants, we are not rooted to Tb
the ground, but walk a1bout fairly freely inside our bags of ha1
skins, we are nonethe1ess as much rooted in the natural Ut1
environment as any flower or tree. ar~
This gives us at first, as Westerners, a sense of
frustration, because ·we say, ''It sounds fatalistic.'' It hu
sounds as if we were :saying. ''You thought you were an bu
independent organis1n-you 're nothing of the kind. It :
Your environment pushes you around. But that idea •
JU!
simply, if we would e,c:press that idea as a result of hearing yo
what I've just said, it would mean that we didn't kn
understand it. You :see, what was high knowledge a ligl
hundred years ago, i~. today common sense. And most the
people's common se1t1se today is based on Newtonian be
mechanics. The uni,,erse is a system billiard ball of he:
atomic events, and ieverybody regards his ego as an ey~
atomic event-a func:lamental part, component of the kir
universe. All right? S,o all these billiard balls start going rel
clackety-clackety-clac.k, and knocking each other about. th~
And so, you feel your.s elf to be, perhaps, one billiard ball is i
pushed around by the:world, or sometimes if you can get S01

I
-22-
 OUT OF 'THE TRAP

enough up inside that bill'. iard ball. you can do some

e
pushing of the world arou11td. But mostly it pushes you.
V You read B.F. Skinnier, the supreme behaviorist
lt
psychologist, and he descrilbes all phenomena of nature
a
in terms of man being pus~led around. But let's suppose
e
that we live in a world w•tere things don't get pushed
a around, and can't be pushe:~d around. Supposing there's
lt no puppet. Supposing the1re is no cause and no effect.
0
That instead of things bein~: pushed around, they are just
•f happening, the way they clo happen. Then you get an
al utterly different view, and t:his is the view with which we
are dealing, lying behind tllis culture.
•f As I said this mornin:g, there is no boss. You as a
lt human being are not goinit to push this world around,
n but equally, you are not going to be pushed around by it.
l. It goes with you. The exte1rnal world goes with you, in
just the same way as a back goes with a front. How would
you know what you mearitt by c'yourself,'' unless you
knew what you mtant by c>ther. How would the sun be
a light, if you didn't have eyes. How would vibrations in
;t the air be noisy. if you didn't have ears? How would rocks
n be hard, if you didn't have soft skin? How would they be
>f heavy, if you didn't have muscles? It's only in relation to
eyes that the sun is light. It's only in relation to a certain
kind of nervous system th~lt fire is hot. And it's only in
lg relation to a certain muscul:a ture that rocks are heavy. So
t. that the way you are consti1ruted, the way your organism
11 is formed calls into being tl~e phenomenon of light, and
sound, and weight, and collor, and smell.
 -
MAN'S P'LACE IN NATURE
-

There is a koan in Zen Buddhism, ''What is the pe,

sound of one hand?'' There is a Chinese proverb that we
says, ''One hand does. not make a clap. So if two hands wt
clap, make the clap. 'What is the sound of one. hand?'' sa~
You see, what a silly question. And yet everybody is w
trying to play a game ir1 which one side will win, and there th~
can be one hand clap,ping-to get rid of the opposite. ba:
Light get rid of darkne:ss. I conquer the universe. In other the
words, I play the gam,e that I am going to get one up on sq1
them, and hold my pc,sition. I am going to dominate the let
other. And as soon as we get into that particular kind of ex1•
contest we become insane. Because what we're doing is
pretending that there ,:an be an in-group without an out- grc
group. th«
Let me just give: a few illustrations of this from sq,
contemporary social situations. You, or most of you ea1
here, on the whole identify yourself with the nice people. as '
In other words, you live fairly respectable lives, and you wa
look down upon varic>us other people who are not nice. ml
And there are variou!. kinds of not-nice people. thf

In Sausalito, whe1re I live, they're called ''Beatniks''. grc

They are people who ,vear. beards, and who live along the grc
waterfront, and who clon 't follow the ordinary marriage of
customs, and who prc,bably smoke marijuana instead of de~
drinking alcohol, because alcohol is the drug for nice kni
people. COi

What the nice people don't realize is, they need the
nasty people. Think ,o f all the conversation at dinner
tables that you would miss, if you didn't have the nasty

-24-
 OUT OF ·rHE TRAP

e people to talk about. Ho"' would you know who you

.t were, unless you could coimpare yourselves with those
s who are on the out? How de) those in the church, who are
saved, know who they are 1L1nless they have the damned.
s Why St. Thomas Aquinas let it out of the bag and said
e that in Heaven, the saints would look over the
••• battlements of Heaven, ancl enjoy the just sufferings of
the souls in Hell. Jolly wo11't it be, to watch your sister
squirming down there, while you're in bliss. But, that was
letting the cat out of the ba.g, because the in--group can't
exist without the out-grouJp.
Now in my community in Sausalito, where the out-
-
•
•
group is sort of Beatniks, 1they in their turn know that
they are the real in-group, ~tnd that up on the hill. those
n squares who are so dumb 1that they waste all their days
u
earning money by dull work to buy pseudo-riches, such
••• as Cadillacs and houses with mowed lawns, and wall--to--
u
wall carpeting, which they despise, they feel very, very
••• much collective ego strengtl~ by being able to talk against
the squares. Because the 01L1t-group makes itself the in-
group by putting the in-gro,up in the position of an out-
'•
e
group. But both need the other one. This is the meaning
e
of saying, ''Love your enen,ies, '' and pray for them that
1f despitefully use you, because you need them. You don't
know who you are withoutt the contrast. So, love your
e
competitors, and pray fo1r them that undercut your
prices. You go together, you have a symbiotic
e
:r
relationship, even though ilt be formally described as a
y
conflict of interest.
 -
MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE -
'

yo,
Now to see that lcind of thing is the essence of this
yo,
philosophy of nature. Jlt goes together with the idea of the
Stu,
Yang and the Yin, that we don't know what the Yang is,
the positive, the brigh1t side, unless we at the same time, off.
know what the Yin is, ,vhich is the dark side. These things
define each other mut:ually. And to see that, you might
think at first, was to se1ttle for a view of the world that was
the
completely static. Because after all, if white and black,
my
good and evil, are eq,ually pitted against one another,
the,
then so what? It all bc,ils down to nothing.
im1
But the universe i:s not arranged that way, because it
rel~
has in it the principle o•f relativity. Now you would think,
·true
in a Newtonian and 1respectable Platonic universe the •
air
earth would revolve around the sun in terms of the
Bee
perfect circle, but it doiesn't, it's an ellipse. And if it were a
go11•
perfect circle, the eartlh wouldn't revolve, because there
would be no go to it. !5ee, when you take a string with a
w~
WOl
ball on the end, and ycou swing it 'round your head, you
But
don't describe a perfec:t circle. You know what happens?
unt
There's one moment i1r1 that swing when you have to give
knc
the thing a little charge of strength, you go whoop,
trar
whoop, whoomm, whoomm, whoomm, brrumm,
COl'I
brrumm,-and that little pulse sets the thing going.
Listen to your heart. flow does it go? It doesn't go ''pum,
tha1
pum, pum, pum, pu:m, pum, pum,'' but ''pum-pum,
feel
pum-pum, pum-pum. '' It's got swing-it's got jazz! See?
peo
So it seems a little~ off. That's why in all Chinese art,
Ch1
there's not symmetr,,. There's not complete balance
between two sides of 1the painting, because the moment

-26-
 OUT OF 1~HE TRAP

; you have symmetry you hav·e something static. But when

you 're a little off, then it mo,ves. So in that way, when you
, study this architecture, you will see that it's always a little
, off. It would be dead if two :sides of a room were just the
; same. They're always expl,oiting this! -Whoo, whoo,
t
whoo, whoo, whoo.
Well now, you and they can understand this
s
theoretically. If I say it in words, you can probably follow
' my meaning, and realize th~,t all this is very true from a
,
theoretical point of view. But what is much more
important is, do we feel it to be so? Do we experience this
t
relationship of man and na1ture to be as reliable and as
' ·true as we experience the ground under our feet, or the
air coming into our lungs, clr the light before our eyes?
e
Because if we don't experienice it with that clarity, it's not
cl
going to have any effective: influence on our conduct.
e
We'll know theoretically that we are one body with the
cl
world. The world, you might say, is your extended body.
J
7
But this won't make any rea1l difference to what you do,
•
until you know it as surely, i ndeed more surely, than you
know anything else. This amounts to a fundamental
trans-formation of one's ow,n sensation of existence .. of
.,
, coming to be vividly aware, if I may say so: that you're it!
•• As the Hindus say, T alt twam asi. You, or Thou art
that. Only we feel much too guilty to agree with that. We
l,
,7
feel that, uh, oh! that's close to madness. There are
••
people in lunatic asylums who say that they're Jesus
.,'
Christ, or that they're God. ·B ut the trouble with them is,
e
.t

-27-
 MAN'S I>LACE IN NATURE
•

you see, they claim thils for themselves alone. They don't
see that this claim go es also for anybody else. And the
1

moment they stop m;:1king special claims, they feel lost,

something crazy. But you see, if a Hindu or a Chinese
person were to say, ''Well, I've discovered that I'm
God,'' this wouldn't llave the same implications. People
say to him rather, ''(:ongratulations, at last you found
out.'' Because he has an idea of God, or of ultimate reality -
which is not exclusiv«~, which is not something that sets
itself up as a maste:r technician that knows all the
answers.
Well, let's have il brief intermission.

-28-
-
-

't,

n
le
.d
y
ts
lC
OUT OF ~rHE TRAP

'
..

fea
sta·
rel:
na1
dif
sys
On4

rea
Mc
~
are
cor
cor
 ast night we were gettiing into a kind ofsticky mess,
~ as if one had put molasses in one hand and
feathers in the other. put the two together. and then
started to pull off the feat~ters. I was pointing out that
relativity is not only the h\1man situation, but the very
nature of life. It is a sort c:>f balancing act, and rather
different from the ordinary balancing act, in that the
system always balances. Ho·wever far out you may get to
one side, life eventually co1mes up with the other.
But we don't perceivce this for exactly the same
reason that we ordinarily d:o n 't think that space is real.
Most people feel that space is nothing. But when you
begin to consider it carefulli,, you see that space and solid
are relative to each other--that you cannot possibly
conceive any solid bod v except in space. And,
1

contrariwise. you can't ,c onceive space except as

 -
OUT OF THE TRAP
-

occupied by solids. A~nd when physicists begin to talk

about properties of space-curved space, expanding ar,
•
space, and all that ki1,d of thing-it at first strikes the 1n
layman as nonsensical. Thus he simply cannot conceive bl
how nothing can have: any properties. A1
As Einstein once isaid, the fish would not, of course, na
be aware of the water. And, in the same way, we are not of
aware of space as beinit an effective agent of some kind, as d~
•
being really there. 10'

So then, just as wie think solids more real than space, sq

so, in the same way, wie give weight to positive-the Yang th
aspect of things, rather than Yin-the negative. And we p.
are therefore hung u1, on the quest for those positive be
things in life: the gooc~, the pleasurable, and so on, and Bl
think that somehow we can possess them away from, and Et
apart from, their polar opposites. Never forget that this is of
not simply a case oif opposition. Polarity and mere m:
opposition are a little ,iifferent in concept, because when yo
we say that these oppc>sites are polar, we mean that they
are in fact, the abstract terms, or ends, of a sort of WC

continuum that joins them. In the same way, the two lit
sides of a coin are Eucllidian surfaces of a solid: the coin is 8 1

one; the magnet is c,ne. But the heads and tails are th
different, and the nortl:1 and south poles of the magnet are nc
different. So, what you have here is the paradoxical he
situation of identical differences-explicitly different, Ul1
but implicitly one. to
so
be

-32-
 OUT OF 'fHE TRAP

C We get into this situation of realizing that there isn,t

anything I can do to make E~verything always better. And,
in fact, the more I try to d•o so, the more I am becoming
blind to the relative situa1tion, to the nature of reality.
And, because I am trying t·O do something which, in the
, nature of things, is impossible, I slowly develop a feeling
t of chronic frustration, which is called in Buddhism,
s dukkha, usually translatecl as suffering, which is too
imprecise. Dukkha is the ct,ronic frustration of living in a
, squirrel cage where, run as ~vou may to get out, you stay in
~ the same place. And this i s what is called, in Buddhist
e philosophy, samsara, or t~,e Bhavachakra: bhava means
e becoming, chakra means vvheel. And the problem that
i Buddhism sets is: how do ,we get out of the rat race? The
i Eternal Cycle, or to be more exact, the Everlasting Cycle,
s of the pursuit of one end. )Pursuit of one's own end, as a
e matter of fact. Naturally, iif you pursue your own end,
l you '11 go round in' circles.
This poses a real Gol'dian Knot question, because
we find that we are in a circular trap. When you buy a
) little terrapin, and you put it on the lawn, surrounded by
s a ring of chicken wire, it 1ioes around and puts it head
e through every hole. It goes and goes and goes, but there's
e no way out. So, in this fantastically difficult situation,
l how do we get out? W eJ[l, what of course has to be
.,
' understood is that this is tine wrong question. What has
to be understood is that thc~re is a trap only if someone or
something is trapped. If' there isn't any difference
between yourself and the trap, then you are not trapped.

-·33-
 •

OUT <)F THE TRAP • •

When we regard our experience, we always look p

upon it as a changing p·a norama of events passing before b
us. And we conceive that there is some constant witness, e.
'
81
observer, ego, to who1m all this happens. And this, of
course, is a hallucinatio,n of the same type as the circle of
fire created in the d:a rkness by whirling a cigarette
around. And, as you k:now, the cause of that illusion is b
very simply that the ret:inal nerve ends do not become de- tc
81
activated immediately :as the point of light moves. They
V
retain, jut as a radar sc1reen retains the image of what the
rotating beam has shovvn. For the retina is a process that f1
is slower than the process of the circling point of flame.
St
Because of the relative !;peeds of various forms of change,
the slower ones get the impression of a certain g1
0
permanence.
Or, put it in a1t\other way: let's consider our sl
experience as a route, and this includes our sensations, le
our feelings, our tho,ughts, our constant rhythm of el
•
15
vibrations. But in the tremendous variety and
randomness of these tl:1ings, there are certain constants. A
As, when we compose music, we will play at the basis of h
something a constant rhythm, as the tamboura makes a
\\,
drone in Indian music, which goes on and on and on all
0
the time. Now, in rathe'.r the same way, when we examine
ribonucleic acid, we firitd a chain of molecular particles in
d,
a certain order, and thalt order repeats, so that you have a b
chain of a certain kine~. So, in the same way, the total B
order of experience :r epeats certain things, and this
repetition gives us men1ory, and gives us the clue that this

-34-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

particular stream has a sig1rlature. As in music, there may

be certain phrases that are~ constantly repeated, however
elaborated, for there may Jbe variations on the theme, but
always at the basis of it the:re is this repetitious regularity.
Because of that, we g.e t the sensation that there is a
constant observer of the panorama. And then, as that
becomes more and more ~1 fixed impression, we attempt
to use this observer, or by being this observer, to exercise
an influence on the stre:am from a point, as it were,
virtually outside the stre;am. And it's this that sets up
frustration.
We get this when W'e try, under the influence of
schooling and parents, to atlter our feelings. When we feel
guilty for hating our moth ers, or something of that kind,
1

or hating someone at al]l, we say to ourselves: ''You

shouldn't hate.'' But yo,1 do. You say: ''You should
love.•• But you don't. And, obviously, if you make a great
•
'
effort to love somebody wlhom you don't love, then there
is always detectable a kind of phoniness in your attitude.
And loving people by force creates resentment and
•• hostility in both parties .
If you love someone, or rather you manifest what
would be called loving actilons out of nothing but a sense
of duty, the person whom you love in that way feels
deprived. He feels that your heart isn't really in it,
because you are being disl1onest with your own feelings.
But this is the kind of mockery that comes up when we
,•
,•

--35-
 -
OUT OF THE TRAP •
-

are inwardly split int:o the thinker on one side-the

thoughts on the other; the feeler on one side-and the if
•
feelings on the other. an
•
There are variou!; ways in which this split can be an
described and there ar~~ ways in which we can discuss how w)
it arises. I gave you clne: the regular rhythm pattern. all
Being, as it were, abstracted from the main stream, and so
made a separate constilnt. Another is perhaps simpler to an
understand, which is that, as we think, thinking is a an
process of symbolizatic:>n. Among all the things for which da
we have symbols, we 'have one for I, one for ourselves, th
one for this organism, this center of awareness. And this of
symbol becomes, like so many symbols, confused with WC

what it represents, as we confuse money with wealth. pe

•
And, because of that, ·we try to perform operations with IS

the symbol, which would be like trying to do something sa:

with an hour. You kno•w, we say: ••what are you going to th
do with your time?'' ~~s if you could do something with 0~

time! The time is sim.p ly a form of measurement, and th,

•
trying to do somethir,g with time is like eating inches. It.

Very frustrating, inde,ed! pa

So, as a result of: this confusion, we again get the uri
sensation of there beinig an observer. But the funny thing ab
•
is: we can never find i1t. Do what you will to track down am
this observer-it's nev er there. The tail retreats as fast as
1 th:
you follow it. t.h ,
ex
of
grc

-36-
 OUT OF 'THE TRAP

•. Now, on the other hartd, if we think in gestalt terms,

•... if we think in terms of figtnre and ground, you would be
inclined to feel that there i!. some continuum or medium
•. in which experience occur:s. Just, in the same way, that
when you listen to the radio, you 're hearing sounds, but
'
•
all those sounds are on the diaphragm in the spe.aker: the
I sounds do not proclaim th1e diaphragm-they don't say
> anything about it. That's taken for granted. The
l announcer does not announce at the beginning of the
l day: ''Ladies and gentleme11, from now on all the sounds
, that you hear out of this in:itrument are in fact vibrations
s of the diaphragm in the speaker.'' And therefore, just as
l
we ignore space and thinlk of it as nothing, we could
•
perfectly well ignore the co,ntinuum in which experience
l
is occurring. But, if so, that: continuum does not have the
same sort of relationship tc> what is going on in it as does
~
)
the observer to the observe:d. Because the observer to the
\
observed is a function of nrlemory-the repetition. And
i the memory is not the continuum. It's still vibrations in
it. So if there is something underlying the changing
'•
panorama of experience, it is of course completely
e unthinkable, undefinable. We cannot state anything
g about it at all. But that doc~s not however mean that it's
l
impossible to realize its p:resence, in some other form
s than what we would call ordinary experience, and yet, at
the same time, not reallly separate from ordinary
experience. This would adc:l, therefore, to our awareness
of everything a kind of ne,w dimension, and we'd have
great difficulty in pointing :it out, because it isn't hidden.

-37-
 -
OUT OF THE TRAP
-

You can always point •out things that are hidden, but it's of
very difficult to point: out something that everybody's ev,
•
looking at and doesn't: see. IS,
Take a very simple illustration. Let us suppose that
you have been brought: up to think of the moon as simply kn
a plate, a flat disk in t:he sky. Then one day somebody A1
woke up and realized ilt was a ball. He would have great re~
difficulty pointing this out to other people, just as we had
great difficulty in con~lfincing people that the world was re~
round, or that the stars were not supported above us in ca1
crystal spheres. an
In this sense then, the dimension of the moon, once fo1
you see it, is perfectly clear. But if you don't see it, you A1
can't be talked into it. So, in exactly the same way, there do
is this dimension of e:veryday life which isn't different
from everyday life, fro:m everyday consciousness, but we Be
just haven't caught on.to it. yo
Now, let's experirnent a bit with this. Let's go back S81

to the fundamental pc•int: that there isn't anything you to

can do to ''up'' yours1elf. And if you consider that, you
feel sort of stuck. So I would say at this point: Never pl~
mind. So you're stuck. Therefore, you might say that you thi
just have to accept the: way it is right now.
But that isn't saying enough. Or maybe it's saying
too much. Supposing \rou don't accept the way things are pa:
right now? Well, that's the same thing going along too. ha· I

So, therefore, watch ,,.,hat you 're doing very carefully. WC

You can get down to 1the sensation of what I would call yo

the flow of experience. It's going along... it's in the sound Th

-38-
 OUT OF ·rHE TRAP

•• of my voice... it's in the sound of the wind ... it's in

•• everything your eyes see as you look around. And here it
is, flowing along.
Now, what I'm sayin1g is: That's it. I really don't
, know what I mean by that, except: Watch it. That's it.
And if you find yourself no,t watching it, or, for example,
t resisting it, that's it too.
l Just let happen what ~tappens, even if that includes
•• resistance to what is hapJpening. Now watch yourself
l carefully as you do that. Yc)u see, we are not looking for
any result; We are here an<l now. But, if you are looking
•• for a result; if you are in a st:1te of expectation: watch that.
l And follow it. You can't n1ake a mistake, whatever you
•.. do .
t This is the same proce:;s as learning to ride a bicycle.
•• Because whichever way yo\lt fall, to the left or to the right,
you turn the wheel into t~le way you're falling. It's the
•
same thing that pilots learn in flying planes. And they get
l to a point where they say, W'ell, the plane flies itself, and it
l really does, if you get your hands on the wheel of a good
r plane, it flies itself. So, in the same way, as you follow like
l this the flow of existence, you find that it functions by
itself. It does.
At first, then, you rnay get this rather strange,
.• passive feeling that this is happening to me. ''It is
•
happening to me.,, As yo,u watch what goes on, you
•
won't discover any ''me'' separate from the flow that
1 you're watching. You'll r~alize if anything is •'you'', it's
I That.
 -
OUT ()F THE TRAP •
-

Now, I hope you caln follow this. You could do it in a th:

certain way: by simply listening to all the sound that's Be
going on, only I wo1uld say ''hearing'' rather than as
''listening''-as one can ' 'see'' distinct from ''looking'', as yo
it were. Allow your ears to hear anything they want to th,
hear. Simply let these e:a rdrums vibrate to any available
Ct~
sound. And in exactly the same way as you do that, let
your mind think whate,,er it wants to think. And go with
it. Go with the flow of thought. You will see that after a
while it is impossible nc,t to go with it, because even your
resistance to it is part <>f the thought stream, and that's tri
still going along with it~;elf. When you discover that the th,
resistance, too, is part c,f the stream-you will see that it co
•
was redundant to say ''go with it••-there•s no one lt,
• ,
1S
separate from it to go ~with it.
The same thing ap1plie.s exactly in the consideration
of the passage of time. ,~hat we are doing at the moment Ye
is that we've brought ottr attention to bear on the flow of ''1-
experience as it is now . .And in this sort of consideration, di~
this sort of contemplati,on, you get the feeling of being in
the present, watching what is going on. Only, an
momentarily, your thc>ughts may concern themselves yo
with the past or the futtare. You may be concerned about w~
something that's going to happen, and instead of listening so·
fully to the sound of my voice, you're entering thoughts 0 11

about tomorrow. May~,e you 'II check that, you see, and fol
say: ''No, I shouldn't do that, I should come back to ex
'now'.'' But the same p1rinciple applies exactly as turning Se4

the wheel of the bicyclie: if you fall into the past-turn th1

-40-
 OUT OF 'THE TRAP

that way; if you fall into, the future-turn that way.

Because your consideratiorit of the past is happening now,
as is also your consideratio1n of the future. So that just as
you cannot not go with the stream, you cannot get out of
the present. There is nowl1ere else to be.
At first, the situation1I am describing when I say
c•you cannot'' sounds like =1 limitation, a bondage. eel am
trapped. I cannot get out 0 1f this.'' But don't you see that
what you are first of all des,c ribing as the trap is precisely
the condition of freedon1? If you insist that you're
trapped by the present, by the existing flow of thought,
the way it is, or the existi11lg flow of experience, then of
course you -will resent it. \l'hen you discover that you are
it, and the reason that you c:an 't get away from it is that it
is you,-this is a very differ,e nt state of affairs. There is no
trap. You are the process. It's not happening to you.
You 're not its victim. It's :Y4:>U. So then, instead of asking,
c•How shall I get out 01f it'', that question simply
disappears.
Let me go back andl approach that point from
another angle. If you say: ''][ want to get out of it''-when
you want something, you ·p retty much know what you
want, but people when the~~'re really challenged on what
sort of domain they would like to get into other than this
one, they can only talk a little way ahead. But if they
follow through that wish tc> be in some different kind of
existence, they find it diffic:ult to picture it. Because they
see it would always lead a1round to the same place that
they are now, eventually. This is the truth underlying,
 -
OUT (Qf THE TRAP
-

say, the idea that suici1de is no escape, because however

intolerable a situation rnay be, the only way out is into the thi
center. not away. pr4
And so it is only lby, as we must state it because of els
the limitations of langu:age. at first ''going with•• whatever sta
the experience is. Niow, supposing the si'tuation is
horrible. I cannot accc~pt it in the sense of ''liking· it'', yo,
because the situation includes a pain (maybe). and tbs
aggravating the pain b~f my extremely strong objections thE
to it. Those objection1s are just as much a part of the yo1
whole scene as the pain. In fact, they're really int
inseparable. The pain is not pain unless you object to it. wh
So, if you say to yourself: ''Something is going to aw
happen which I dread very much, and, really, if I were a
1
Th
spiritually superior hulman being, I ought not to dread pu:
it''-that's really cre:ilting fantasy. You must allow pr<
yourself to dread it. Yo•u must allow yourself quite freely eve:
to worry, because it's okay. the
When I say, ''it'i; okay''. it's like saying, ''Well, wh
that's it, too.•• And we: don't really know what we mean
by this. except that wh1en I say, ''That's it'', that means: wa·
''Keep watching.'' Keep your mind on the mark - that's Bui
real concentration. Nc>t just staring at something. Real sor
concentration is like fc,llowing music. dancing to music, rea
something like that. It isn't being all tied up in a knot with did
your mind hypnotized like a chicken with its head to a wa1
chalk line. am

-42-
 OUT OF 1rHE TRAP

It's this constant ••flo,'1ing with'', only to discover

that you are the stream. And therefore there is no
problem about flowing wi1th it. You can't do anything
.•
else. But that is a statement of freedom, as distinct from a
statement of bondage.
So you 're your own tl'ap. And if you want to bite
yourself with its teeth, it's a free country. You can do
that. That's the game of hiide-and-seek, pretending that
the trap is different from y·o u. ''Being trapped'' -see if
you can get out! Because, y,ou see, that's what people do
interminably. What do pec>ple spend their time with-
why, with puzzles. You say, ''We've got to kill time for
awhile'', ... what do you dolr-you read a mystery story.
That's a puzzle, a ''whodu111it''. Or you do a crossword
puzzle. Or you play a gam•e. You always set yourself a
problem, and then work it out. Well, that's what
everyone is doing. They se1t themselves a problem, and
•
then they work it out. ?'1ow we've set ourselves a
whopper.
Now, what happens? For a moment, you were
watching this flow going al1ong, this flow of experience.
But then you find, a few 1minutes later, you 're off on
something else. You 're sort of distracted, without
realizing that this distractio1r1 is perfectly okay too. Why
did you leave the point? ~Veil, obviously because you
wanted to. Because you gt~t what you want. And I'm
amazed that all of us rathel' like being restless. It's very
interesting working in a me,d itation session: you 'II often
find that after a period of 1meditation, the director will
 -
OUT C)F THE TRAP
' -

say. •• All right, now, ,everyone can rest.'' I suddenly

caught myself doing t~•is one day, and I said instead,
••okay, everyone, ret1u rn to your normal state of w
restlessness.'• p1
Yet, you see, that llormal state of restlessness can't n~
be fought. If you put it c:lown, all you'll do is you'll stir it
ti,
up. And so you simply 1rnust allow yourself to be restless.
But you will see that as soon as you do that, that brings a 01
dimension of conscioll1sness into it that wasn't there m
before. You 're aware of this constantly restless state and, e,
V(
being aware of it, you as,k the question, ''Is that really the •
way I want to be?'' If yc>u do, you do; if you don't, then 1n

you don't. B1
But if you fight it, it'll back up, just like trying to go ki
fast through the water o,n a ship with a blunt prow: You'll th
0~
back it all up against yo1L1. So there is a way of not fighting
yourself. And even when you 're trying to fight al
yourself-don't fight W'ith that. ta
Now, if we talk ab<>ut this, we go on and on and on, hi
like children playing ''h:and over hand''. And we can say: as
Accept it the way it is; ilnd if you don't accept the way it SC
Sll
is, accept that. And if you can't do that - accept that.
Whenever you get into this sort of infinite regression you it.
are on a circular course. That ••haven't-we-been-here- fi1
before•• feeling develo1>s after awhile. It is exactly the
circular course which ir1dicates that what you are either ga
trying to catch on the 01!le hand, or what you're trying to
Stl
run away from on the other hand, is the fellow that's
doing the running. Tl~at's what the circular course

-44-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

means. And the moment: you discover that, and you

know that-the chase stoJps. Only the chase won't stop
while there's the slighte~,t thought that what you 're
pursuing is not the pursue!'. Or that what you're fleeing is
not the fleer.
Well, you may want t,o bring the intellect to bear on
that, for the simple reas,on that that seems a rather
outrageous statement to so,m e people. They say, ''Do you
mean that every~hing that''s happening to me, including
everything going on in ttle outside world, is myselfl''
Well, indeed it is. But of c:ourse not in the ordinary way
in which we use the worc:l ''myself'', meaning the ego.
But, in a very real sense, wlnich we can demonstrate in all
kinds of ways, biologically neurologically ... physically,
1
•••

the separation ( to talk abo•ut it in purely physical terms)

of the body from the outslide world isn't a separation at
all. It's true: there is a bourldary of human skin which we
take to be the point of separation. But that is a
hallucination because, to )begin with, the organism and,
as a matter of fact, anything whatsoever, has the same
sort of properties as a flanle. Now really, there is hardly
such a thing as a flame. Co1nsider a candle with a flame on
it. We see that bright little: leaf-shaped piece of light, the
fire, and say, ''a flame''. It would be more correct to say,
''a flaming'', because that is a stream of hot gas, and no
gas stays put in it. .If it dic:l, there wouldn't be a flame.
In just the same wa y, everything that exists is a
1

stream. But we can see it as: a wriggle or a whirlpool in the

-·45-
 -
OUT tOF THE TRAP \ -

stream. But, as everytl~ing is flowing through, there is

certainly no fixed distiniction between the outside and the •
1n
inside. And, of course, lbiologically we know that the skin
itself is an osmotic menrtbrane: that is to say, a connector cc
•
1n
of the body with the environment, full of tubes and
extraceptors, nerve-er11ds which are simply commu- \lt
nicating constantly the flow of vibration on the outside to
of the skin to the inside: of the skin. Think about it a little oi
w:
more and you•ll realize that you couldn•t have an inside
without an outside. H[ere is the same reciprocity, the
same thing that we get ~,etween all the opposites, between
front and back and everything else. The self-the
sensation of self-or, I would say, the sensation of here se
and now, goes with c'o1ther'', that is to say, the sensation '
Wl
of ''there'' and ''then''.
wl
You cannot possil,ly conceive the meaning of now
without the meaning ojf then ... of here without there... or cc
or
self without other. Anc~ this inseparability of concepts
cl,
reveals the hidden con5.piracy between now and then, of
ot
the eternity. shall we saiy, of which now and then are the
ca
polar aspects... the omnipresence of which here and there
I',
are polar aspects... the Brahman of which self and other
are polar aspects. ''r
if
We cannot name 4:>r describe the unity between the
W4
poles, because all description is a matter of putting things
a
in boxes; it's classification ... pigeon-holing. And when
you pigeon-hole thing:s, you ask, ''Is you is or is you de
ain't?'' ... ''Do you beloing in this box or don•t you? Either ye
you belong in it or you.don't. There's no other place for de

-46-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

you to go. Either you 're ~ln elephant or you 're a non-
elephant. And everything t:hat's not an elephant belongs
in the box for non-elephants.'' But what is it that is in
common between elephants and non-elephants? What is
in common between the b4:>X and the outside of the box?
Why, obviously, the boun.d ary of the box belongs both
to the box and to what's o,1tside the box. It's the outside
of the box and the inside oif the non-box. They share this
wall-it belongs to both 01f them. It is held in common.
In other words, the dividing line is held in common
by what it divides. It belo1ngs to both of them. It unites
them. It makes them ide11tical differences. So, in that
sense then, what happens to you, is you.
''But.'' you say. ''it's ntot what I want. It's not what I
will. It makes no differenc:e what I do in my head as to
whether the wind blows now or not. It's not in my
control.'' Well, nor is your metabolism... and is that you,
or isn't it? That happens. ·w hat about your volition? I
choose to talk or not to tallc. It seems that way, but on the
other hand, I am damned if I know how I do this thing
called talking. When I really go into it, it happens. Only,
I've got a sort of proprieta:ry sense on it... I've labelled it
''mine''. I do seem to have c:ontrol, choice, selection. But,
if I think down into that" you see, I don't see how it
works. It's fantasti~ that I c:a n make a noise, or even raise
a hand. I don't know hc•w it happens. How do you
•
decide? How do you man~1ge to be conscious? How do
you manage to make an eff,ort. Nobody knows-you just
do it. which is another wai, of saying, ''It just happens.''

-47-
 OUT OF THE TRAP
-
•
-

Now, imagine then getting the sensation of wa

something you're not used to: that everything that goes tig)
on in the outside world, is also you. And it's what you 're hie
doing. That's spooky. See, that's the same feeling you get of
when you are learning to ride the bicycle-it ''happens''. de1
And you feel as if yo•u were suddenly in charge of an A11
enormously powerful automobile, as if something's .int,
running away with yo,u.
Somehow, I find 1that I'm in control of it by not being m,
in control of it-like tlhe plane flying itself. Now this is so olc
strange that it sends S<>me people crazy. And they get up lea
and announce that they are God Almighty, which is what anc
Jung calls inflation. Arld you must watch out for inflation soi
if you 're in the habit of encouraging mystical expe- int
riences. Because, if yo,u 're not experienced in what I call the:
''spiritual know-how'', and the only kind of religious
background you have is J udaeo-Christian, you naturally an,
will discover that y,o u're God. But in the Judaeo- ps,
Christian tradition, God means ''the Boss of the m~
Universe'', and is therefore worshipped under the wi1
symbol of kingship, tlhe royal father of the world. And pa1
therefore. since kings)hip is exclusive, if you say, ''I am pri
God'', and start lettin1g it be known to your fellow men sta·
that you are the king, you'll be playing ''I'm the king of It 1
the castle'' ... ''Get down, you dirty rascal.'' wo
But, you see, if you 're properly educated about enc
mystical experience, you will realize that mystical the
experience isn't really allowed in Christianity. There are pee
Christian mystics, butt they get by because they really rhl

-48-
 OUT OF 1rHE TRAP

watch their language. Th«~y walk a very, very risky

s tightrope. They're always i11 grave danger of falling into
e hideous heresy, or pantheism. And Christians are afraid
:t of pantheism because, as: I have pointed out, it's
• democracy in the kingdom of heaven. Everyone's God .
rt And this, to a tyrannical form of government, is an
s .intolerable suggestion.
If you think of all this in terms of quite a different
g mythology, say, Hindu m,,thology or Buddhist myth-
::> ology, this problem then oi~ inflation doesn't arise, or at
p least not so easily. You can., of course, give yourself airs
1t and graces of being a Budldha, being a great rishi, or
[\ something like that, but sc>eiety doesn't resent that so
intensely
. as it resents the claim to be in personal charge of
ti the whole universe.
.S Lots of people in insarile asylums get this sensation,
V and nobody knows what to do about them, because
psychiatrists as a rule don.'t know anything about the
e mystical experience. You m:ay be sure, as a matter of fact,
e with certain exceptions, psy·c hiatry, as we know it today,
d particularly the psychiatry c,f mental hospitals, the army,
prisons, and many ordinary practitioners, will define any
state of consciousness that i~; not quite usual as psychotic.
It doesn't matter much wl,at it is. There is a research
worker at Langley Porter, ~tho has been making electro-
lt encephalograms of people iin a state of meditation, and
ll they get a different kind c>f alpha rhythm from other
e people. They find that tliley can control their alpha
y rhythm. When these electr,o encephalograms are shown
 OU1~ OF THE TRAP
•

to most psychiatrists, and they are not told under what

circumstances they W'e re made, they will look at this and
say, ''Hmm ... there's ]pathology there.'' Because you will
find similar alpha rhythms in some pathological cases, as
in catatonics: you see:, they're very withdrawn and quiet.
So, official psycl1iatry is a frantic paranoia, a frantic
concern with preserviing the consensus of what reality is.
Reality is what you read in the newspaper... reality is, you
know, ''facing facts.'' Any experience different from
that, particularly whf~n any kind of religious significance
is attached to it, will atutomatically be called psychotic. If
you ever get mixed up with a mental hospital, never,
never say a word ab,out religion. Because according to
most psychoanalysts, to official psychoanalysis, religion
is a delusional systen, anyway, and this feeling is widely
prevalent in that par1ticular profession, although I must
acknowledge the excf~ptions. You see, that's always what
lies behind the fear c>f what we used to call as children,
''religious mania.'' You know, the little old ladies who
cluster around the ch1urch, and are always in and out-we
call them religious m~lniacs. And the ultimate extreme of
religious mania is to Jproclaim oneself to be Jesus Christ.
And so this is somet·hing to watch out for, this sort of
inflationary situation that comes as soon as you see that
the inside world and t·h e outside world go together-are a
single field, or proce:ss, or whatever you want to call It.

-50-
-
-

at
ld
ill
as
et•
•
lC
.s.

:e
If YOGA CARA
:r,
to
,n
ly
st
at
•
n,
lO
~e
of
~t.
of
at
~a
rt.
•

sul
w~
me
otl
pre
me
dis
wh
bu1
,ch~
exi
 o then, we're conti1nuing with the subject of
Mahayana Buddhism. And, in the last seminar I
discussed almost entirely,. the school of Mahayana,
which is known as Madyamica in Sanskrit-this word
meaning, approximately, ''1the middle way.''
Madyamica has been ci1lled, in the best books on the
subject, the central philoso1phy of Buddhism, and is not,
what we call in the West:, a philosophy at all. It's a
method for changing you1r state of consciousness. In
other words, it's not a system of ideas such as
propounded by Plato, or K~tnt, or Hegel. It's a dialectical
method. That is to say, dialectic being in the sense of a
discourse between a teacher and a student, the purpose of
which is not to explain or irtculcate a certain set of ideas,
but to change one's basic st~ate of feeling, that is to say, to
change the sensation tha.t you have of your own
existence.

__,-
c·3
 YOGA CARA -

All Buddhism is concerned with this. The very crux

dia
to
of Buddhism, the thi1rtg which is called Bodhi, b-o-d-h-i,
which means, ''awake:ning''. It comes from the same root aS J
tht
as the word Buddha: B-o-d,h, Bodh, or B-u-d-h, Budh, is
eve
''to know,'' but bette~r' it is ''to be awake.''
all
Some of you hav'e probably exposed yourself to the
tal'I
teachings of Giurdjief~f, a wonderful old rascal, who used
do
to give lectures in which he would keep completely silent
for a while, and get everybody embarassed, and you
nee
know, they were all e:x pecting something to happen, and
wil
he would look indiviidually at everybody in the group,
me
and when everybody ·was feeling awkward, he would say,
to~
''Wake Up!'' ''You're~ all asleep, and if you don't wake
be<
up, I won't give any lecture.'' And this is a very good
the
attitude, actually.
of,
Zen, as you kn•ow, uses sharp tactics of various
004
kinds, and the whole: idea then, is that a person who is '
uni
under illusion (Mayat), thinks of himself basically as a
rec
victim, someone caught in a trap, someone subject to
fate, the will of God, •or whatever you want to call it, who
wh
got involved in life p~1ssively. That's why I use the word,
in 1
''victim'', and he ha1s, therefore, the sensation of his
the
consciousness as being a kind of passive, but nevertheless
Th:
very delicate and tt!nder receptor, or participant of
pre
everything that goes •on, so that life in general occurs to
Bui
you-it happens to y,o u, and there's nothing you can do
about it.
And you say, ''V..~ell, it's awful. I can't get myself out •
Uni
of this trap.'' So, t},e technique of the philosophical

-54-
 OUT OF 1rHE TRAP

lX
dialogue that I was describi11g as Madyamica is to get you
•
·l,
to drop your defenses. In other words, you can discover
)t
as practically a physical sensation, that you tend to be on
• the defensive all the time.. You are exerting, through
lS
every muscle practically, a resistance against the world,
all of which is excessive. 1(ou do need a certain resis-
•e tance, you need a certain m111scular tonus, but your body
does that for you. You dor1 't need to will it.
lt
It's like if you lie on tl1e floor and relax, you don't
need to do anything to holcl yourself together, the floor
will hold you up, and your skin will keep you inside. But
p,
.
..,
most people are actually doilng things to hold themselves
together, even in this situation of complete relaxation,
:e
because they don't really trl1st their own life. And that is
the lack of trust in one's o~vn life, the perpetual attitude
of defensiveness, it is a resuilt of a kind of mis-feeling of
JS
•
one's own existence, as being something alien to the
lS
universe that endures, as I said, and is simply a passive
a
recipient of experience.
:o
So then, the whole proicess of a therapeutic dialogue
lO
which was invented by this marvelous man, Nagajuna-
d, in the following of the Buddlha-(lt's a strange thing that
•
lS
the Buddha was very, very c1reative towards other people.
ss That is to say, the basic :idea of Buddhism does not
)f preclude other people bei1ng just as much Buddha as
~o Buddha was.)
lo There's a little difficultty in Christianity about this,
you see. Everybody harps back to the Christ as the
~t unique and only incarnatio,n of God, and so He's on a
al
_5;5_
 -
YOGA CARA
\

very special pedestal V1t1hich nobody else is ever allowed to

climb up on, and this, of course, makes the teaching and hac
work of Jesus comple:tely ineffective. But Buddhism has WO

the advantage, they ne:!ver did that: so that Nagajuna, who WO

could come later tharil Buddha was in a way a wiser man pr<
than the Buddha himself. But only because he stood on talc
the shoulders of Bladdha and carried the Buddha •s fur
dialogue to, not it':s full conclusion, but to a full me
COi
conclusion.
We can go furth,er today. you see, this thing hasn't the
•
IS
stopped at all. It isn't something that we go back to as a
past and say. ''Well, we're going to tell you all about a tea,
CO\
thing called Buddhisn1, which is a fixed body of practices
WO
and beliefs, in which c:ertain people in Asia believe, and if
you're interested, you1 can believe in it, too.•• It's not like nu1
that at all! It's an activrity that is going on, and when it gets anc
mixed up in the context of Western Civilization, western ma
science, western technology-it will do things that the pre
Asian people never dreamed of, and might not approve to-1
of. tha
•
So, it's very imp ortant in approaching this-this is
1
1n t
COl
one of our difficultie:~s you see. If I were a lecturer on
Buddhism in the context of the academic world, I would put
have to observe certain game rules. That is to say. I would cas1
WOI
have to discuss the subject as entirely historical-as
something of the pas1t. And I would be expected to give
you extremely accura1te information about what it was,
what other people thought, and what they did.

-56-
 OUT OF lfHE TRAP

:o The moment that I beigan to suggest that this thing

d had any vitality to it, and mi1ght have some effect on you, I
lS would be ruled out as acadc~mically unrespectable. They
0 would say, ''This man is no longer qualified to be a
.n professor, because he is adv·ocating these things, and not
taking an objective point of view to it.'' You see, it's very
funny-all obsolete subject:; are studied by the historical
11 method. So, if you study in the university religion, it
comes under the heading oj~ the history of religions. For
't the same reason, the introductory course in philosophy
a is usually the History of· Philosophy. Just imagine,
a teaching children mathem:atics with the introductory
:s course being the History o,f Mathematics, so that they
if would start doing sums in Egyptian and Roman
:e numerals, and going throl1gh all the procedures that
ts
ancient man went thro\Jtgh to arrive at modern
·n mathematics. In the first course of medicine, they
le proceed immediately to pr~actical matters, the most up-
re to-date knowledge of human physiology, and they teach
that-only when you beconr1e a graduate school student
is in the history of medicine, ~10 you run across an elective
in course in the history of me<iical science? So, this way of
ld putting everything at a distance of history is a way of
ld castrating it, making it com1pletely ineffective, so that it
:lS
won't do anything anymort:.
,e So that's why I cannot ·w ork in the academic world,
s, because, although I know tlh eir game rules, and how to
study Buddhism from the hiistorical method-when you
 'i'OGA CAR.A
-
• -

get involved in that, ai:ter a while nobody's interested and ~

it becomes completely boring. You can acquire a huge al1
library, and you can g:o into the facts endlessly, and then th
what? But the one thing that the academicians can as
console themselves ~,ith, is the one thing they're very pr
much afraid of-a t:eacher of religion who's out to pr
convert people. Becat1se that, you see, is imposing upon th
you a particular, indiv·idual, and subjective point of view.
So if, in other wo,rds, a person who is teaching th
Christianity should s,t art preaching from his academic co
chair, instead of just saying what Christians did and so th
on, in such and suc:h a period-they would be very bl
frightened of that. co
The advantage a. Buddhist has, is that he has no re:
opinions that he is tri,ing to put over on you. He's only Ot
trying to help you get rid of your opinion.s. That is to say, th
to get rid of any fixed view of the world, and of wl
yourself-because Wte use what are called views, in •
1n:
Sanskrit: drish-ti, as m.e thods of clinging to existence. So,
there is something thi1t is called in Sanskrit, sa-kaya-dris- nc
ti, which means ''the ·view of separateness.•• The view of wl
your being, this thi1,g that I was talking about-the 01'1
separate, the insular recipient of experience.
Say, you have feelings. But, the language we speak w~
compels you to say you have feelings, as if you were ar~
something on the one hand, and your feelings were cli
something else on the other. You have thoughts, as if the
thinker stands on the one hand and inspects thoughts on wt
the other. So, that on~~ has a view of life in which there is a A1

-58-
-
- OUT OF 'THE TRAP

d panorama of thoughts, of feelings, of sensations going

:e along constantly, but one ,can say constantly because of
n the impression that you are~ distinct from them, standing
n aside from them as the constant inspector of the
Y procession. You get the jfeeling that you endure, but
o precariously, threatenedl\,, while the procession of
n thoughts and feelings goes on by you.
'· Now you can very easily see that this is the result of
ig the memory process, w·hich gives the illusion of
1c constancy in the flow, and, therefore, in the same way as
o the famous old Buddhist ar,alogy, that when you rotate a
Y burning brand in the darkr1ess, you give the illusion of a
continuous circle of fire b ecause of the memory of the
1

o retina, where the impression of the spark doesn't fade

.y out immediately, but ling1ers. And so, as you see this
,, thing in front of your ey~~s. it seems to form a circle,
>f whereas there is no circle. There is only a moment, an
n instant of flame. So Buddl~ists argue, there is only this
>, moment. And actually, yota, who come in at the door are
s- not the same people who ;ire sitting here. Just as in the
>f whirlpool of water, there iis no constant water, there is
1e only going on a continuous behavior, whirling in the
water-but no water stays in it. So, in exactly the same
.k way, you who came into thie door a few minutes ago, and
~e are now sitting here, are er,tirely different, only you are
~e clinging to the idea of your continuity.
le Actually, there is only the moment, the instant,
,n what is called in Sanskrit, tine ksana, life is instantaneous.
a .A nd if you see that, you ge~t a kind of a new angle on St.

-59-
 'r'OGA CARA -
\
-
Paul's famous pronc:>uncement that we shall all be
g1,•
changed in a momen1t, in a twinkling of an eye, on the
morning when the l~nst trumpet sounds. You see, the fr<
Christian has put ever·ything into chronology-that there he
'' J.
is going to be a thing c:1lled the Last Da~,, and a trumpet of
pa
the angels is going to awaken the dead.
The trumpet's sounding now, you see, for the
fu1
Buddhists. Wake up! There is this moment! And this is
eternity. Only you are stringing the moments together, a1
air
and you are creatin1~ time out of eternity. You are
A,
wondering, you are idlentifying yourself, in other words, •
1n1
with all the things tha1t have happened to me. And you're
me
worrying about all the~ things that will. But actually, you
fir,
are never anywhere ~,ut now. This is a very interesting
po
discipline, that is given in all systems of Yoga and
pri
Buddhist meditation. The student is told to live in the
present completely, tc, never relax awareness of what you
thi
are doing now. Be herie. So you would say in the ordinary •
IS I
way, I have thoughts about tomorrrow and yesterday,
So
I'm distracted, my nrlind doesn't stay focused on the
flo
present. That's the w:ay it seems, yes.
thi
What you do i11stead is, you try to focus your
to
attention completely <>n the present. You find this a very
m<
difficult thing to do l,ecause you don't know when the
tot
present is. In other words, you don't recognize that
Ye
anything happens untill it's already a memory. It has, as it
were, to be in your cc>nsciousness long enough to make •
int
an impression. And yc:>u say, well, in looking at this table,
sec
( I wish I could find s.o mething different from tables to
Bu

-60-
•
OUT OF 'THE TRAP

give illustrations from, all lecturers are always talking

from tables.) In looking at this pipe, I don't know that it's
here until somehow, or otlller, it has lingered. So, I ask,
'' Am I actually knowing th.e present pipe, or is it always
past?''
As you continue to pralctice this exercise, you get the
' funny feeling that your mernory of something past is also
IS
a present event. You see? You have the memory, it is
r,
already here, and this begi1ns to bug you, like it did St.
Augustine. He couldn't u1nderstand memory-he got
into a terrrible tailspin ab,out it. Because, you see, the
memory of the past is some:thing always present. So, you
finally realize the whole ex«~rcise you're undertaking was
pointless, because there is nowhere else to be but the
present.
That was the point int trying to make you do this
u
thing-to get you to realize 1that there is no past, and there
y
,, is no future. There is only niow, and you can't get out of it.
So~ relax, you 're in eterni1ty. in the moment. And this
1C
flows along, or flows, or c:loesn 't flow, you know this
thing of Tennyson's poem, ''Such a tide of moving seems
1r
to sleep, to full for sound or foam?'' The unmoved
y
mover. The idea of someho,w, motion and stillness going
:e
together. Activity and peac:e. The eye of the hurricane.
lt
•
You see, everything is reallly like that.
lt
Well, now, all th:at I've said hitherto in
:e
introductory, to going on to this seminar, to discuss the
.,
~

second great point of view that is involved in Mahayana

0
Buddhism. The first, the l~adyamica, the middle way,

-t61-
 'YOGA CARA -
-

was, as I said, to destr·oy all your hang-ups, fixed opinions I1

about the nature oif life so that you don't use ideas, an
beliefs, religious preJudices, preferences, opinions. You cot
On4
don't use-them to clir,g. It demolishes every idea of rea lity .
vie
that you could have. That's Madyamica, that's Nagajuna.
tra4
Now, a little later in 1time, there arose in India, two other .
ts 1
great Buddhist philc•sophers, respectively, Asanga, and bu•
Vasubandhu, and tl~ey have been two Vasubandhus,
we1
either father and so111, or teacher and student, who took
his teacher's name, :and they lived in this vague dating the
that we have. It's im1possible to pin it down, about 400 nol
A.O. you·
They are respo1nsible for what is called the Yoga
tree
Cara school, sometimes called also, the Gnatimatra,
the
which means, ''The School of Consciousness Only.''
aro1
And, it looks decep1tively like what we call in Western •
sine
•

philosophy, Subjective Idealism, as taught, say, by

Berkeley or Bradley,. That, in other words, the only
to .
reality is your mind. As this is propounded in Western
fro1
philosophy-everyt~ling that exists is in your mind. You
of
know an external W<>rld only in your mind. You know
str~
the sense of space between yourself and something
Sul
distant from you. That is a mental phenomenon. And so,
kus
it could be argued th1at your mind alone exists, and that
use.
all that you see is a111 imagination.
of
The extreme wa·y of posing this is the doctrine called
Sul
''Solipscism, '' that there is only yourself, and that
everything else is yo,Jr dream. There has never been any
way of disproving tlnis, except my idea, which I think

-62-
-
- OUT OF ~rHE TRAP

ns I
lS,
almost disproves it, that I would like to present at a
conference of Solipscists, ~,here they argue as to which
:>u
one of them is the one that iis really there. So, the point of
lty
,a. view, of say, Berkeley or Bradley, in the Western
tradition of Subjective Idealism, is not solipscistic. But it
ter
rid is that everybody has a certain independent existence,
but as a mind. And that alll particular minds are, as it
: were, minds in a super mind, which is the mind of God.
The Western philosopl~er has, therefore, dealt with
~ the problem, "Does something exist when there's
nobody around to look at 1it?'' by saying, ccThere was a
~ng man, who said, 'God, I find it exceedingly odd, that a
ga
tree, as tree, simply ceases to be:when there's no-one around in
r' a,,, the quad.' 'Young man, your aston-ishment's odd, I'm alwa"'s J

· around in the quad, so the tree, as a tree, na,er ceases to be,

rn
since obsert1ed by yours faithfi,lly, God.' ''
by But, this isn't the same 1>oint of view that we're going
lly
to deal with in Or,i ental plhilosophy, because we start
rn from completely different ats sumptions as to t h e nature
:>u of mind and matter. You see, if you don't get those
>W straight, you confuse thf! Yoga Cara school with
ng Subjective Idealism. Unfo·r tunately, Professor Tako-
,o, kusu, in his book, The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy,
lat uses Western school names to classify the different types
of Buddhist philosophy-1uses, you know, Nihilism,
ed Subjective Idealism, etc., all down the line, and this is
lat very confusing. Because W~len you start with the basic
ny jdea of what is Mind, you don1 't begin with the opposition
rtk

-6,3-
 -
'VOGACARA

that we begin with, which is Mind/Matter. You begin of

instead with the co,ntrast, Mind and Form. Form is no
furthermore broken down into Name and Form. It is an
called in Sanskrit, l'1ama Rupa, name-form. And this th4
stands, in their systern, as distinct from the idea of matter w
meaning ''stuff'' in c•ur common sense. w•
We begin with 1this break, that we have the notion sh:
that there is some kir,d of heavy, hard substance, and this he
substance is energize·d by spiritual forces, which, just as th«
the potter turns clay into pots, the spiritual forces take Cal
hold of the unintellig:e nt stuff of matter, and weave it into sh~
all the various shapes of life. And so, then, when we die, ep]
here is a person, yo,u see, that is going along, talking, the
chatting, doing his business everyday, and suddenly:
•
zingo! his body lies t•,ere. Where is he? What's happened an ,
to him? StU
Of course, the rnind has left, and there lies only the thE
stuff. So, we've got t:his idea in our minds of the energy, ma:•
which is something impalpable, something un-stuff, you OV4

see, animating or not animating something that is heavy, SOI

and hard and dusty. Now that great contrast comes, of Stu
course, from the boc,k of Genesis, from the idea that the ow
Lord, God, formed t 0 the world out of some clay. Adam
1 pe<
was a clay figurine. WO

This idea is not in the same way in Hindu thought, ide

but something dece1,tively like it is in Hindu thought,
which causes the cor,fusion. For example, Shankir, who wh
is the great interprete~r of the Upanishads, in the tradition WO

me

-64-
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OUT OF "fHE TRAP
-

,n
•
of interpretation which is c:alled the Advita Vedanta, the
is non-dual vedanta, sometirnes uses the symbol of gold
•
IS and things made of gold which sounds like the pots and
liS the clay, but he uses it i1n another way than we do.
er Whereas we use the clay as 1the symbol for the stuff out of
which things are made, and which is inferior because the
>n shape, being spiritual, is mc•re important than the stuff-
,is he uses it in exactly the op:p osite way. All beings are of
as the nature of the divine, julSt as many different objects
ke can be made out of gold. It is all one gold, though the
.t o shape may change, and he describes the shape as
ie, ephemeral and impermane11t, but it is the gold which is
lg, the thing that endures.
ly: Do you see, that's usirilg the analogy, rhe metaphor,
ed in exactly the opposite way than the way we use clay, or
stuff, and form in the W estt? So then, you don't have at
he the basis of the mind-only philosophy, a conception of
n', mind, which is the.kind of' impalpable spook presiding
ou over the hard and heavy stuff. You have to begin
,y, somewhere else all together,, And this is the fascination of
of studying Oriental
•
culture. You have to re-adjust your
he own common sense to get int it. What on earth do these
,m people mean? Especially w'hen I don't really have any
words in my own language i11to which I can translate their
l
r1t, ideas.
lt
[l , Fortunately, it isn't all that inaccessible, because
no what we have here is not merely words, if that were all, we
on would be absolutely lost - we have the techniques, the
meditation disciplines, whi,ch you can use, and through

-t,5-
 )(OGACARA
-
-

using them, find 01L1t what it was that they meant,

experimentally. ec
So then, we Sta.rt basically with the fundamental •
l[
word that is used in Sanskrit for the activity of mind,
citta. We Romanize t:h is as c-i-t-t-a, the root, c-i-t is basic o·
to mind. Now the Sa1nskrit language has many words for Y4
mind. We've got this, one word: mind, which sort of has Ui
to take care of everything. We've got intellect, we've got
vision, consciousnes:s, and so on, but they're all very pl
vague in the way their used. Sanskrit is quite precise. But eJ
cit is the basic term. }~nd reality, itself, is called in vedant eJ
philosophy Sat-cit-an.:inda. Sat means, ''real''. This word, pl
the root sa in Sanskrit is, what is manifest and is really re:
there. It comes from !breathing out. You make the sound, ,,,
sa. And so, it's reall,, there. '']
Cit is, it is conscious, has the quality of
consciousness, ananda means bliss. Because reality if not .,,,
blissful, would not },e. The game has to be worth the
candle, or it would stop. If the fundamental energy and •
15
impulse of the universe were not blissful, the whole as
system would have c:e ased long ago. Even if it involves w
pain, this pain is maisochistic. That is to say, it is pain
being enjoyed fundarnentally as a pleasure. Like you can u~
have a grievance, arld make your whole life a cause hi
around your grievanc:e, by• being a professionally rejected w
woman, or a failure of some kind, and you can really di
build this up into a bi1g thing. And so, in this funny sort of cc
rather trivial human way, you make an ecstasy out of •
1n
suffering. The idea1 here is that the universe is

-66-
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- OUT OF THE TRAP

fundamentally, insofar as it involves suffering, makil\g an

ecstasy out of it. That is to ~say, that every element of pain,
al in the whole scheme of thir,gs, is the necessary, what will I
d, call it, contrasting element that you need in order to bring
•
,IC
out the fundamental exu~>erance and joy of being, that
:>r you wouldn't know. In otlh er words, that you were here
as unless something stopped you.
ot Mind in this philoso,phy, what is meant by cit, is
ry practically exactly the same thing as we mean by
ut existence. When we use tt,e word being, in order to, for
nt example, when Dr. Jo]~nson heard of Berkeley's
d, philosophy that everythini~ existed only in your mind, his
ly response was to kick a :stone-as if to demonstrate,
d, ''That's the real world!'' ]But it is exactly this sense of
''humph'' that is meant b v cit.
1

of That's why, when a Zen master would be asked,

ot ·••What is the fundament~ll meaning of Buddhism?''-
''Ha-a! '' You know, this thing, this sense of impact-that
is what it is. In other wordls, mind, in this philosophy, is
as concrete as you can imagine. And so it is called, and
we, in a future seminar, vvill go into this from another
•
1n point of view, the word: Vc:igra, which means diamond, is
ln used for it, because the diiamond is simultaneously the
se hardest thing there is, and the most transparent. There's a
~d whole philosophy of Bu.ddhism worked around the
ly diamond. So what you '·ve got here, you see, is a
of conception of mind, w·h ich instead of being the
of impalpable ghostly thing that we have had, is the most
•
lS

--67-
 Y'OGACARA

intensely tough reality, adamantine mind. Bang! Hard!

You. Here. You see, this very strong sense of being. So
the philosophy of ''it 11s all in your mind,'' has to be hung
on this as distinct fro1rn being hung on something flimsy
and impalpable. Nrow we're going to have an
• • •
1nterm1ss1on.

-68-
•

i!
,o
lg
:y
.n

THE PSYCI-IOLOGY OF
MYSTICAL l~XPERIENCE

•
 •

1
4
'
]
•
C

..C
C

• C

t
 have throughout alll my life been a disciple of
William James, who, as you may know, wrote a book
called The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have always
been fascinated by Janles' approach to this subject
because it involves a way· in which we might understand
the dynamics of various people's differing accounts of
their visions of God, ancl of their place in the universe.
Sometimes these vision:s sound very different: some
people seem to experienc:e God as extremely far-out and
others, as something ''up there'' to be venerated, adored,
and obeyed; but other pe ople seem to experience God as
1

something completely iraside, as something that is the

essence of what, when yclu really come down to it, you
call yourself. And so it seems that there is a conflict
between these two form:s of experience. But I am very
suspicious about these va1ried accounts because I am not
so sure that they aren't t,wo different forms of the same
thing, described in diffef'ent kinds of language.

·-71-
 -
PSYCHOLOGY 0 F MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
1

Speaking from another domain of experience, some C4

people will describe a pain as a cold sting, while others f~
will describe it as a hoit pang-because very, very cold is p
pain, and very, very h,ot is pain; but when it comes right Ii
down to it, both are t:he same kind of pain.
Then there are otlher extremes of human experience, d
such as ecstasy. Think of absolute pleasure. It is said that ZC:
when a French girl wl10 is really on to it, is being made a1
love to, she will exclaim, ''Kill me, kill me!'' to her man. d
Thus, we can describe ecstasy in the language of pleasure, 31
and we can describe it' in the language of pain. There is a
domain where pleasur,e and pain meet, such that we weep 31
for joy and shudder with delight. And by this sort of
1
3~
reasoning I seek to unify the quarrels between religions. w
On the one hand, I will as eagerly sit in meditation with
Buddhists, where the\, cross their legs and look exactly U]
like the image of their 1venerated being, the Buddha; or on di
the other hand, I will, like the Christians, Jews, or SI
Muslims, bow before the unseen, transcendent presence, w
I will go with either on,e. What this entire argument really tt
comes down to, and what I think is of vital interest to
1

every one of us, tis that we are presently, and

uncomfortably, aware of being alive at the end of time- 31
in what the Hindus c:all Kali Yuga. Things are running
down, and time is ru1rlning out. We are haunted by an tc
insuperable set of' problems-over-population, SC
pollution, the nucle~nr bomb, irreconcilable political b4
tc

-72-
 OUT OF: THE TRAP

e conflicts-and everyone of us has the sense, the haunting

s feeling, that these problerns cannot be solved, and that
s probably we have only about thirty or so more years of
t life on this planet.
Of course, this may not be so. We may muddle
,
.•
through. But the fact of t:h e matter remains that within
t zero to seventy years fro1n now, all of us will be dead
e anyway. And we all krlow this. It is a recurrent,
1.
disturbing thought in the back of our minds: the end-
.• , and then what? We all have to face it. We are all going to
a evaporate, and turn into b1ones and dust. But now, I look
:)
' at this problem with comp,lete fascination. So, instead of
.f avoiding this, or looking the other way and saying, ''Oh
well, later,'' let's look at i.t.
l What would it be like: to go to sleep and never wake
V up? Every child thinks ~1bout this. But philosophers
l disdain the question. They' say, ''Oh, that's a meaningless
r speculation. You 'te just t1sing words.'' But for a child,
.•, who is an essential persorl, it is vey real to think about
V this. So, lets face facts. Let us not dream of reincarnation
) or of det1a chan or of worl1ds beyond, but let us suppose
:l that it is very real that wl1en you're dead, you're dead,
- and that you are never going to wake up again.
g Well, I scratch my he;:ad and think, ''That isn't going
l to be like going into the dark forever, because darkness is
something I can imagine. And it's not going to be like
'
being buried alive, it is goi11g to be like nothing. It is going
to be as if I had never existed at all, and that never had

--73-
 •
PSYCHOLOGY O :F MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
-

anything else ever exi:sted-it is just going to be as if I

never was.'' And then l think, ''Well, wasn't that just the
way it was before I w:is born?'' Thinking backwards in
time, I can remember tQ a certain distance, and then I
p
come to a total blank. ,And yet, here I am. I have emerged
p
out of that total blan~~- And so have we all.
E
Have you ever trie!d to realize total blankness? I often p·
think that the best wa~v of doing that might be to try and d·
look at my head with my own eyes. Because no matter
how I turn around, I catnnot see my own head. It isn't that
there is a black spot b,ehind my eyes, but that there is a
total blank-the same kind of total blank, or w
nothingness, as that O\Jlt of which I entered this world. At •
If
night I look at the stars, and I see them as vividly real,
energetic points of firie scattered all over the sky in the a1
middle of black nothiri•gness. Now, how do you think the
S<
stars would look if tl~ere were no space? How would
Y•
space look if there wc~re no stars? You see, the two go re:
together. You cannot realize what you mean by ''is'' •
IS
unless ycu also have along with it a thing which you UJ
understand as ''isn't.''' Void goes with form. w
The Buddhist sut1ra says: ''That which is form, that di
exactly is emptiness; tt,at which is emptiness, that exactly lil
is form." And all rnysticism is comprised in this.
Mysticism, as we use it in English, comes from the Greek
t.
h:
word muein, which mc~ans, the finger on the lips, quiet, pl
''mum's the word,''--we cannot really say it. You see,
there is a secret. There is something that you are not di
supposed to know, bu:t that you really should know for w

-74-
 OUT Of; THE TRAP

[
your sanity, and we are goiing to pass it on to you ''on the
q.t.'' In ancient times, it really was ''on the q.t.'' but
\
nowadays nothing is ''on ·t he q.t.''-everything has been
[
published. All knowledgE~ is available, and there is no
I possibility anymore of tl:1ere being anything esoteric.
Every one has smoked rraarij uana or taken LSD and
\
practiced yoga, and so all this is simply a matter of public
I discussion. It is of the es:sence of scientific honesty to
r
make all information public. And it is also the essence of
t
democracy: if we are a rep,ublic, where
•
all men are equal,
l
then every single citizen c>f the United States, however
r
well or not-well educatecl, has a right of access to all
t
information.
' That is supposedly what we believe in; which is
1

another way of saying tha1t you are all God. There is not
.
i:.
someone else who is Goel, like some sort of boss over
l you, because that wouldl be a monarchy and not a
)
, republic. But the trouble vvith the United States is that it
is a republic peopled by those who believe that the
l universe is a monarchy. T:herefore, they take an attitude
which is paternalistic and ~authoritarian, and yet this is in
direct conflict with the b:asic ideas upon which people
like Thomas Jefferson an•d Benjamin Franklin founded
this republic. This is the lbasic social conflict which we
C have to face; but let us g,o back to our more universal
,
.'
problem, called death .
., We can see by a ver~, simple process that when we
t die, we go into a negative dlimension of consciousness, as
r we do when we sleep eve:ry night. Sleep is a very little

--75-
 PSYCHOLOGY C)F MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE -
-
understood phenome:non by psychologists. but what is
obvious to us all is tllat sleep refreshes us. It is curious.
at
but being unconsciou:s for a while, being nowhere, brings W4
us back to life. Of cc•urse it does! Because we wouldn't nE
know we were alive ·unless we had once been dead, or th
unless we occasionall v went to sleep. We wouldn •t have
1
•
IS
the feeling of realit,v, of here-ness, of now-ness, of ari
sensitivity, unless it c:ould be contrasted with nowhere. m:
or nothingness.
st=
All knowledge. aind all energy, is a phenomenon of SU
contrasts. Like a wa~ve. All energy is basically a wave gr1
phenomenon-there is the crest and the trough. It is at bl
times upstanding, or ,c onvex, and at other times, down- lei
standing, or concave. 'T his is the difference between male
and female. And if we~ understand this, we are not going st~
to have anymore fights about women's lib. The male is so
upstanding, the female is hollow; and you cannot realize
the one without the o,ther. This is absolutely basic. You
cannot see the figure vvithout the ground, and you cannot co
understand what is important without what is I ab
unimportant. All loitic, all discourse, all thought, all fli1
imagination, all cor1sciousness, depends upon this
contrast. And the sec1ret of it is that the two go together. pu
And this is what I ,Nas talking about as ''mum's the pe
word.'' muein-that ~,hat appears to be things opposed, grc
unrelated, fighting ( ~ls in the various religions of the bl~
world), are really thilngs that cannot do without each
other.

-76-
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- OUT OF THE TRAP

•
lS
Just before he died in 1958, I was visiting Carl Jung
s,
at his summer house on t:he edge of Lake Zurich. We
tS were walking alongside th•e lake, with swans swimming
't
nearby, and at the end of 01ur talk I said to him, ''Is it true
>r
that swans are monogamoll1s?'' And he said, ''Why yes, it
is curious that they are mo1:1ogamous. And do you know,
>f another interesting fact al,out swans is that when the
male and female begin to 1make love to each other they
start by fighting until tt,ey discover what they are
>f supposed to be doing.'' Th1en he said, ''This has been of
great help to some of my i~emale homosexual patients;''
lt but he didn't explain it any 1further, he just dropped it and
left it at that.
So you see, ''make lc•ve, not war,'' is a very great
statement, not of an ide:al, but of a necessity. It is
•
lS something that we are goinit to have to do whether we like
:e it or not, because the oppo~;ite, the things that we seem to
,u see as in absolute conflict-consciousness and un-
)t consciousness, life and dleath, black and white-are
•
lS absolutely essential to each1 other. And we can suddenly
11 flip this into any dimensio,n of human experience.
is Let us take black people and white people-whi.c h is
r. purely a caricature, becal1se there really aren't black
le people and white people, there are brown people and
l, greyish-pink people-but nevertheless, we'll call them
le black and white. And what I hope you see by this is that
h we can only realize the ric:hness of experience because
there is this differentiatio111. For instance, the way black
people swing and behave w,ouldn 't be recognizable unless

-77-
 PSYCHOLOGY <)F MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
-
-

it were in contrast wi:t h the way white people behave. The to1
two groups should le~arn to be thankful to each other for of
their differences. So too, ,vith man and woman, Vive la ex1
petite difference!. Lor11g live the difference! wt
I might also e,c:press my point by asking you to en
consider all in-group:s. Those people who see themselves
as elect and saved, lilce the church, must realize that they lik
can only understand! themselves in contrast to an out- in~
group-those who are the damned, all those awful ha·
people who live on t}1e other side of the tracks, or in hell. m<
Even St. Thomas Aq1uinas gave away the secret when he at
said that the saints iln heaven occasionally walk to the on
edge of the battlemer1ts and look down at the squirming, me
burning, sufferings o,f the damned in hell and give praise ''54
to God for the administration of divine justice. He said co:
that! In this way, the saints, by contrast with the to
sufferings of the darinned, know in what bliss they are. ''o
Now, I hope yc>u realize that I am sort of making th~
jokes and giving par·ables to express the point that we ex1
only know what reality is, or what it is to be alive and to ou
exist, by contrast with nothingness, space, emptiness, ho
and death. The one :generates the other. and you might we
also understand this by considering the word ••clarity.•• yo
What do you think c)f when you say ''clear''? Well, you Sp4
might think of clear in the sense of wiped clean, soi
transparent, or emJ>ty space; or as a finely polished yo
mirror, or perfect, fllawless lens. But the next thing you
think of as clear migl1t be a completely articulate form- ex1
something with outlines that are perfectly definite and so1

-78-
-
OUT OF 'THE TRAP
-

he totally in focus. Now, isn't it fascinating that in the idea

or of clarity, we have both ernptiness and form in perfect
la expression? This is the me:aning of the Buddhist saying
which I referred to earlier: ''emptiness is form, form is
to emptiness''-all is embrac«~d in the idea of clarity.
Another fundamental contrast in our experience,
ey like form and space, iis the voluntary and the
1t- involuntary-what you do, on the one hand, and what
ful happens to you on the oth«~r. This is absolutely basic to
:11. most of us. We know, or w,e think we know, that there is
he a thing called ''what I am dc>ing'' along with my influence
he on '"'it, while on the other h1and there is its influence on
,g, me-self and other. And our big struggle is to make
lse ''self' win over ''other''. This is what we call the
lid conquest of nature. Collectively, humanity, as self, wants
he to subdue, beat down and control, what is called
~e. ''other''. But do we really ,Nant that? If we succeeded in
ng that enterprise, that is, if we put the element of
we experience-the things that happen to us which are not in
to our control-in our com1plete control, we would be
ss, bored to death. It \\·ouldl be like screwing a plastic
,ht woman. Nobody wants th:at. When you love someone
,'. •• you want them to come ~tt you in an unexpected, or
ou spontaneous, way. You 'want to feel that there is
1n, something out there that is different, that will surprise
ed you.
OU
In exactly the same w:1y, you would not be able to
_ experience the situation th:a t you call ''self,'' as being a
nd source of action more or less in control, unless it had the

-79-
 -
PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
•

contrasting field of so•mething ''other'' that is not in its

control. Thus, you ne·ver know what that is going to be, th
and yet these two sensations go together, they are back bt
and front of the same: coin. lif
Following this lilne of reasoning, have you ever wl
considered the possi~•ility that the whole technological w1
enterprise of the Wes1t, which is designed to control the th
universe by technological methods, is in the final analysis ed
not sufficiently conscious of itself to know where it is a11
~i~. ~
We do not comi:,rehend our direction because it is ~
not part of our ed,ucation that we understand the ha
relationship between opposites. We are so frantic to
survive, and so terrified of night, and of death, that we are to
going to destroy the pllanet out of our anxiety to survive. id,
The whole colossal 1rnilitary enterprise is wasting the at
energies of the earth in the most appalling way. The Tl
Americans, the Rt1ssians, and the Chinese are tal
squandering their sub,stance in the creating of so-called le~
defensive technology--instruments intended to protect su
themselves from each other-which can only destroy us
all. They can do nothirng else. They protect no one. ''Join ur
the Air Force, and be :;afe''-you'll be the only ones who pe
will be. Women and cl~ildren can go hang; no one is going go
to protect them anymlore. The whole technology of the th,
military world is corinpletely wasteful and destructive, at1
and it is all being finaritced by you in the name of survival! m:
In other words, you want to survive so badly that you are re:
going to have to com1m it suicide. re:

-80-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

s So the point is: we do, not need to survive. Let's get

.•, that into our heads! We do,n't really have to go on living,
because the nothingness of death, being the opposite of
life, simply generates it. l"he empty space of the sky is
r what is generating the stairs, and the hollowness of the
ll womb is what generates li·ving beings. The emptiness is
e the form. But this is not in our logic, it was left out of our
s education. We never sa\\, it, and therefore, we have
s anxiety all the time. We think: ''To be or not to be, that is
the question''-but it isn't . To be is not to be, and not to
.s be is to be. They impl,, each other. They are the
e background. And so... , st<>P worrying!
0 Now, please understa11d, I am not saying all this just
e to be some kind of sophist, who enjoys throwing funny
••• ideas at you. I am here to s,Jggest that it is very important
e at this time in our evolutiorl that we human beings cool it.
e That we reduce the volumte of our anxiety and learn to
e take things easier. :fhat we eat less, run around less, fuss
d less, and worry less abolat being there. I seriously do
:t suggest this.
IS Now look, a lot of peo,ple do not know they are alive
n unless they are making a tremendous vibration. A lot of
0 people need to get behind t:he wheel of a car or plane that
g goes vvvrrooooomm! And then they really know they are
.e there: ''Oh my, I'm a m:in!'' And this is fouling the
.•, atmosphere, and creatint~ an immense noise-it is
I! making a great impressioril. Yes, but seriously, do you
e really have to? Do you hav·e to expend all that energy to
realize you are there? Are~you like some people who

- ·8 1-
 PSYCHOLOGY O:F MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
•

always have to get into• a fight, who've got to hit someone

to know that ''I can knock you down, and that tells me
that I'm real''? Is that really necessary?
I would like to s1L1ggest that you can just as equally
well know that you ~lre real by humming to yourself.
Instead of making a c,o lossal din or a spectacle of prize
fighting, you can kno,v reality, and its energy, by simply
humming to yourself or with other people-you know,
-
1

we could all have a mutual hum: oommmmmmm,

oommmmmmm, oommm1mmmm ... and you can dig that, you
can get with it, you cat\ get right into it. You can feel that
soft, deep energy, an1d you won't have to go roaring
}
around, knocking peo•ple over the head, and so on.
If you can just get with this, you'll see that this is the
life thing going, this is 1God. And you can hold hands, and
sit around in a circle, :and go oommmmm, oommmmmmm,
oommmmmmm....... antd I realize this sounds silly to
Americans. They will s,ay, ''What will happen to progress
if people do that?'' w ·ell, as G.K. Chesterton once said:
''Progress is finding a good place to stop.''

-82-
e
e

'f
••
••
e
V
',
------·

: HISTORICAL BUDDHISM
e
:I

)
,
s
l:
an
co·
re~
ph
th~
yo
are:
of

cal
•
510
wh
bel
 ahayana Buddhism1was India's principal export
to the civilization of Asia, and quite basically, it's
an attitude to life, based o·n complete non-fear, or you
could call it, ''Not clinging: to things.'' It's based on the
•
realization that you are nc>t just your organism, your
physical body, or your O\\rn particularized psyche. But
that you, even if you don't know it consciously, (just as
you don't know consciousl y how to grow your hair), you
1

are fundamental reality, wllich is beyond any limitation

of time or space-you're lit. You 're what there is.
The Hindus have a syimbol for this thing that they
call the Brahmin, the Atmlan, the Self. The Buddhists
simply modify this by sayirag if you have a symbol of it,
which is something that yol1 believe in, as one might say,
believe in God, or believe i1n Heaven, or life after death,

--El5-
 -
HlST0 RlCAL BUDDHISM
1

or in an immortal sou.11; the fact that you believe is still an v~

act of attachment or· clinging-which is unnecessary. A1
And so, an unne:~cessary thing is what we would call, tie(

''Gilding the lily,'' or they use a wonderful phrase in Zen m~

Buddhism, ''Puttin1~ legs on a snake." Now, legs an
embarass a snake-it: needs no legs. And gilt kills the lily. the
So, the Buddhists }1ave worked out a religion of no the
religion, that is to sa~,, in not believing in anything at all-
not because they beJlieve that reality is nothingness, but sci
because believing is ,1nnecessary. It's gilding the lily. So, 15
this was the fundam,ental idea of this morning's lecture. ap:
Now, I want to i~o on this afternoon and put some of 10
this in a kind of syst emmatic and historical perspective,
1 U1
so that you all know where we are in time, and in space, 1st
and what this is all al,out, and how it came to be. Though ea1
the funny thing is ·t hat the Indians have no sense of th~
history whatsoever. ~[his is one of the fundamental gripes · ab,
of Western schola1rs. That when they read all the wa
documents of Indian literature, there is no historical
consciousness runnia,g in it, and so, you don't kno,v what pe<
period it comes frorin. hu1
To begin with, they didn't start writing anything an<
down until about two centuries B.C., maybe a little Eu1
before. Prior to that, everything was transmitted orally,
•
and nobody has the f:aintest idea how far back it goes. The tnv
average educated guc!ss today is that the Upanishads go kiri
back to about 800 B.C., and they are poems which hir,
represent the stand1>oint of Vedanta. Vedanta means: relc
clanra-almost our \llord for end or completion, of veda. bar

-86-
-
OUT OF ~rHE TRAP
-

an Veda is our word video, vicLere-to see. Vid is knowledge.

And so, the most ancient :scriptures of India are called
111, veda, or vision, you se'.e. They are poems in a
en mythological form, and th~~ Upanishads constitute veda-
~gs anta, that is to say, ''The c<>mpletion of the vision,'' and
ly. they tell you the secret-the:! inner meaning that underlies
no the mythology.
- So, let us presume thalt the most educated guess of
,ut scholars today is that the te~xt called the Vedas are about
1500 B.C., and the text <:ailed Upanishads run from
re. approximately 800 to considerably later-BOO to at least
of 100, and some even late1r than that. But the major
,e, Upanishads such as the Brihadaranyaka, the Kana, the
:e, lsha and the Mondioku tJ panishad, all are relatively
gh early, so they will be anywh.ere from 800 to 600, prior to
of the time of Buddha. But still, you see, we're very vague
,es . about when all this started, because the Vedic tradition
he was brought to India from somewhere in central Asia.
:al The Arians who cons;titute the castes, the ruling
,at people of India ( and have done so for hundreds and
hundreds of years) came fr•:>m somewhere to the north,
ng and have common ances:try linguistically with our
tie European languages, but th:ey had no sense of history.
ly, If you write a story al,out a certain king who was
he involved with a certain sag,e, you alter the name of the
go king every time you re-tell the story-you simply make
ch him the king of the present t:ime, because then it becomes
lS: relevant... so nobody kno~ws. The Jews, on the other
la. hand, had a sense of histo1ry, and were very particular
 HISTOltICAL BUDDHISM -
-
about when, and whe:re, and what happened. So, it's far
vet
easier to make clear elates about the Old Testament, and
lea
compare them with a1rcheological remains, than it is with
be1
anything from lndi;i, especially. India is a tropical
country where everything decays quickly. It is a kind of
Bu4
swarming, lively, slimly turnover of life, so no one can be
hu1
sure when all this sta:r ted. So, to even Buddhism being a
pee
relatively late phenomenon out of Indian culture, the
nat
dates are a little bit: more certain than they are with
for
Hinduism.
so 1
So, we know that Gautama, the Buddha, lived
Un<
shortly after 600 B.C:.-but we are very, very uncertain
·ten
as to what he taught. There are two great sections of
Buddhist scriptures: iOne is written in the Pali language,
and the other in Sans:k rit. Although most of the Sanskrit
texts no longer exist, and have to be studied in either
Tibetan or Chinese translations, Western scholars are
,are
largely of the opinionl that the Pali books represent more
,Dei
definitely the authen1tic teaching of the Buddha than the
thi!
Sanskrit ones. Altho1Jgh, there's room for debate on this
Wh4
still. Pali is a sort of colloquial, south Indian form of
Sanskrit. For example, if you say c'Nirvana'' in Sanskrit,
VOl
you say Nibana in P~lli; if you say ''Karma'' in Sanskrit,
yot
you say Kama in P:ali. It's softened. So, all southern
my
Buddhists, Theravaclens, Inayana, make the Pali text
firs
their authority. And the earliest Pali texts we have are
to ,
written on strips of p,a lm leaf like this, just about so long,
-SCC4
with characters w~•ich look like they are almost
tho
indistinguishable frorm the figure eight, unless you look
rep

-88-
-
- OUT OF l~HE TRAP

ar
ld very closely .... And they have holes in the middle of the
th leaves so that they can ~,e strung together. and set
al between two boards of wo•od.
of Well, now when you look at this record of the
,e Buddhist teaching, you ri1ise questions, because no
human being sitting around! in conversation with other
:a
people could have ever spolcen this way. It simply is not
:~ natural conversation. What it is, is a highly tabulated
form of instruction, tabulatc~d in order to be memorized,
~d so that it is easy to rememb er things if you classify them
1

. under one, two, three, four1, five, six, seven. eight, nine,
1n
of ·ten. Buddhism is all numbe:rs.
There are thr~e chara.cteristics of being: Duca-
:e , suffering, Anitia-imperm~nnence, and Atna-no self.
rit
There are Four Steps. Th~~re are Four Noble Truths.
er
~here are Eight stages of the Noble Eightfold Path. There
re ,are Ten Fetas. There are Twc!lve Elements of the Chain of
re
,D ependent Origination. Ev·e rything is numbered. And
~e
. this, therefore, takes us ba4ck to a time before writing,
llS
when everything had to be committed to memory.
of
. Now, it is conceivable 1that if I were going to talk to
~t, you, and I were going to exarnine you later. to be sure that
it, you understood everything I said, that I would number
rn my remarks, and say, ''No·w, you've got to remember
xt
first this, second that, third that,'' and I would talk back
re to you, and say, ''What was; the first thing, what was the
lg, -second thing, what was the third thing? But the style of
•st those Pali scriptures is so artificial, and everything is
)k repeated again, and again and again, so that it's, quite

-8'9 -
 -
HISTOl~ICAL BUDDHISM
-

•
honestly, something that monks put together on a wet Ori
afternoon, with nothing better to do. It is terribly boring, Ari
and I simply don't ~•dvise anybody, ( except a serious SC~
scholar who wants to comb it all out, and get the results) the
ever to bother readir11g the Pali scriptures. •
livi
The advantage c>f the Christians, you see, is they
have this inimitably beautiful English bible, translated for
under the reign of K:ing James, and it is so exquisitely ide
done .... And the Je",s were great poets, and it is very yo1
readable. Buddhist scriptures are boring to the extreme, of~
with exceptions. hoc
There is this bo,:ly of Pali literature which is called Sol
Tipitika. Tipitika me:ans, ''Three baskets,,, because the wrc
palm leaf manuscript:s were stored in baskets, and three am
big baskets constitu1te the tradition of Hinayana, or Mc
Therabada Buddhisn,. In addition to this, there is the att1
Mahayana Canon, or body of scriptures, which is one of hoc
the single biggest boclies of literature in the world. It is WO

somewhat larger tha11 the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and of

the official edition., existing today, is called the rep
) .
Tishodizokio, which is the Japanesse edition of the cla1
Chinese texts; and th«~ other is called the Tung-jur, which aut
is the Tibetan edition,-but that's not so easily come by.
But the standard edition of the Tishodizokio is a great, wr1•
vast collection of vol11mes, all in Chinese, translating the the
•
1m1
Sanskrit scriptures.
Now again, the :general opinion of scholars is that my
•
the Mahayana sutra:; are from a later time than the amr
Buddha, the importa1nt texts in this collection, range in tho

-90-
-
OUT OF THE TRAP

et origin from 100 B.C., appr«:>ximately to about 400 A.D.

g, And so, according to t:he standards of Western
1s scholarship, these are forg«~ries. They are attributed to
;) the Buddha, but were actually composed by individuals
living a lot later.
~y Our morals, our literary morals, would say this is
~d forgery, and that has a bad intent, but this is a modern
ly idea. If we go back to Wes1tern scriptures, for example,
~y you will see a book in the A~pocrypha called the Wisdom
e, of Solomon, The Song of Songs, attributed to Solomon, the
book of Prooerbs in the Old Testament, attributed to
:d Solomon. It is absolutely ilnconceivable that Solomon
,e wrote these books. The book of Deuteronomy is
:e attributed to Moses. It is absolutely impossible that
>r Moses wrote the book of ]Deuteronomy. But why is it
,e attributed to Moses? Beca\1se the actual writer of this
)f book was too modest to glive it his own name, and he
is would therefore say,. ''I feel 't hat I have been into a center
ld of my consciousness that is beyond me, and I am
,e reporting things from a level of my being which l cannot
,e '
·claim as my own. Therefore, I have to ascribe the
:h authorship to a person wh<> is archetypal.''
y. Solomon represents vvisdom, so certain Hebrew
lt, writers, at certain periods of history. when they felt that
,e they were in touch with real wisdom, would feel it
immoral to say, ''I, Ishmael 13en Ezra, will put this forth in
at my own name. On the cointrary, that would be very
,e immodest. I say, this is a revelation from Solomon.,, In
ln those days, before copyrigh1t it was considered the ethical
thing to do.
- ·9 1-
 HISTORICAL BUDDHISM

So, in exactly the ~;ame way, Indian Buddhists, living

long after the Buddha, living, say in the University of y
Malanda, around the b,eginning of the Christian era. No, ~
Malanda is later than tl1at, Malanda takes us to 200 A.O., 1~
specifically to a man ,:ailed Nagajuna, who lived about ~
200 A.O., who was the blinking genius of the whole E
Mahayana movement (we don't know whether Nagajuna E
wrote the scriptures he: commented on, or only wrote the d
commentaries). But th1ere's a huge body of literature in 1• 1
Sanskrit, and is known1 to us mainly through it's Tibetan VI

and Chinese translatio1r1s, called Pragnaparamita. Pragna, r,

as I explained to v<>u, means ''intuitive wisdom''.
Paramita-''a going ac1ross'', that is to say, to the ''other E
shore''. Wisdom for c:rossing to the other shore. a:
•
Almost all of this literature has been translated into l!

English by Edward C,onzy, and you can get selections ti

from it in his book, wl1ich is now available in paperback
in the Harper Torch Book series, Buddhist Texts Through
1 tl
the Ages. For the avera1,e person who does not want to be B
a specialist scholar, btat wants to get a good idea about
what all this is about, t:his is it. It has excellent selections tl
from all types of Buddlhist literature, and especially this B
class. f,
•
It is conceivable tl1at Nagajuna wrote the scriptures, 11

in the name of the Buddha. And others did, too. But they ti
were simply, by their s1tandards, too modest to say, ''This
is mine.'' They are saying, ''It comes from a deeper level B
of consciousness tha11 my ego, and therefore is the 0

Buddha's.'' Now, you see, in our morals, that's forgery.

In their morals, it's n<>t.
-92-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

In Buddhism, you do,n 't have the same problem that

F you have in Christianity. In Christianity, we want to
know, what were the very ·w ords ofJesus? And what was a
late edition? The authorit\, is so peculiarly involved in the
•
historical Jesus. In Budd)~ism this is not the case. The
· Buddhists, in general, feel that Buddhism is like a tree.
l Buddha planted the seed, and later the tree grows. Very
•• definitely. You see, in <:hristianity, Jesus is the only
l incarnation of God. The C:hristian, orthodox Christians,
l will on the whole argue--there will never be, there was
never, another incarnation of God.
' But in Buddhism, it i~; of the essence of the thing that
• Buddhas can appear in tl1e world again, and again and
again. Anyone of you cain become a Buddha. So there
> isn't this fastening of aut••ority to a particular historical
•• time and place. So th,e n, the Buddhist scriptures
•
• represent, although they are all attributed to the Buddha,
l they represent an. uncov,e ring of questions which the
•• Buddha raised .
t For this purpose, it's important to understand one
• thing that is not made cle:~ar in almost all the books on
•
Buddhism that I have ever read. Buddhism is absolutely,
••
fundamentally a dialogue. And this dialogue, which is an
, interchange between a teacher and an inquirer, ( as were
the teachings 0£ Socrates) is quite different from an
'
; authoritative pronouncen,ent. There are no teachings of
1 Buddhism. Everything yo·u will find stated as a teaching
of Buddhism, is actually cl question, not a teaching.
•

--93-
 •

HISTORJlCAL BUDDHISM •

[
Let•s go to a very fundamental point. Buddhism
ll
deals with the problem of suffering. Because after all, •
II
suffering is the probl,em, that's what we mean by the
whole idea of a proble1m. I suffer. I have a problem. So, if
you don't like sufferin1g, you say, ''How do I not suffer?'' s
And you go to a wise~ guy and say, ''I am in pain. I'm
anxious, I'm afraid, l'nri this, that and the other. How do I
VI
not do it?'' So the Bud,:lha answers to this question, ''You
suffer because you d esire. If you didn't desire, your
1
a
desires would never be frustrated, and so you wouldn't d
suffer. So, what woul,~ happen if you didn't desire?'' a
This is not a teaching. It is not saying, ''YOU ought
not to desire.'' It is a r·equest for making an experiment. d
Could you possibly no•t desire? So the inquirer goes away d
0
and he makes this exp~~riment. He says, can I possibly get
rid of my desires? A1rid he discovers in the course of p
making this experimerilt that he is desiring to get rid of his s
desires. And so, he returns to the teacher, and says, ''It is
c:
impossible not to desire, because in trying not to desire,
\1'
I'm desiring.,, And t:h e teacher says, ''You're getting
warmer.'' You see, in every respect, everything that the s
Buddha ever suggestecl that his followers should do, was
g:
by nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered it's
a:
final teaching. What i1t was actually after, all it describes
g1
are various experiments you can make to get on the road
a:
to it.
0
It is of the naturE~ of it that it is a dialogue. Indeed,
E
many of the books of the Pali scriptures are called
V

-94-
 OUT OF' THE TRAP

l Dialogues of the Buddha. This is very, very important to

, understand-that all the:s e records and scriptures are
•.. interchanges.
f One of the first thi1ngs, for example, when I was
starting to study Buddhis1m in my teens, was that I met a
'
\
wonderful Japanese Sanslc:rit professor, and he explained
l to me: •'Buddha taught tbtree kinds of being: Duca-the
l
world as we live it is suffering, Amitia-impermanent,
r
and Atman-without self. •• And he said, ''Buddha teach
t
duca, to contradict wroulg view, duca. Buddha teach
amitia, contradict wrong view amitia. ,,
This is wonderful. T'h e whole idea, you see is, you
t
,. don •t, you can't say wh~lt the truth is. So there is no
dogma. All you do is, you get going a dialogue, the effect
~
of which is to counterbalance people's wrong view, or
t
partial view. All Buddhisnil is view, the way you look at it.
f
See?
s
So, the first .step oi~ the Noble Eightfold Path is
s
called, Sam:yadrishti, whic'h means: Sum:ya-perfect, our
.',
word sum, summation, :it comes eventually from the
g
Sanskrit, sam:yag, meanin1~ perfect view.
e
There•s a wonderful story about Suzuki, who was
s
giving a course on Buddhi:Sm at the University of Hawaii,
s
and he was going through the Four Noble Truths, and he
s
got to the fourth one, andl he was lazing around on a hot
i
afternoon with a group o:f students, half-asleep, as he is
often as an old man, andl he said, ''First step of Noble
' Eightfold Path is Sho-ker,, mean right view, complete
:I
view. All Buddhism is vi,ew. You have right view, you

--95-
 HISTORICAL BUDDHISM

C4
have all Buddhism. Rit~ht view is no special view. Second
step of Noble Eightfold Path ... I forget second step. You e
look it up in the boo·k . '' So, I told this story to Sabro
Hasegawa of Kioto, atnd he said, ''First step of Noble 11

Eightfold Path, in Jap;1nese, sho-kien, sho means correct, f:

kien means view, he s:aid is ssh.''
What you have t,o understand then, simply, is that
you can't look up the teachings of Buddhism in the same \l

way that you can loolc up the teachings of Hegel, Kant,

Spinoza, Jesus Christ, ~rhomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and so q
on. They don't exist--they've never been written down. u
All that has been writtten down is the dialogue that leads p
0
up to the understanding.
Somebody raisecl the question in this morning's tc

discussion about whether you needed other people. Was

SI
it you, Virginia? And in a way you do, because this is the
S1
need of the guru. 1'Jow the guru is not necessarily
somebody who is a qualified master. The guru is \
something against whi,ch you bounce. It may be a book. It
may be your own re:flection in the mirror, said I to Y·
y,
myself, said I?
\\
But this dialogue is the way in Buddhism. Question.
y,
Answer. That's why all those Zen stories are mondo •
15
which means questi<>n-answer. The whole body of
0
literature is simply a feeling out of a question. So then,
0
what's the question? ''What's going on?'' As I said, the
basic question, the w:ay Buddhism approaches it is: ''I
suffer, what shall I de, about it?'' Answer: ••you suffer h
because you desire, t1ry not to desire.'' Next question: tc

-96-
 OUT OF THE TRAP

I ''But I'm desiring not to dlesire. '' Next answer: ''Try not
1 even to desire not to desilre.''
) Or, put it in this way--don 't desire not to desire any
.
II more than you can mana1ge. In other words, .accept the
, facts as they are. But then,, I find I can't help desiring to a
certain extent that alwai,s makes me uncomfortable.
t Well, the question comaes back, ''Who is it that's
e uncomfortable? Who's c<>mplaining? Who are you?''
.., This is always what i1t gets down to. Who raises the
) question? Who, in other words, is in conflict with the
universe? Find out who Jou are, and this is always
••
s peculiarly difficult, because it's like trying to look at your
own eyes without using ~• mirror, or to bite your own
s teeth-to define yourself..
s And so, all this liter~ature is really the gyrations of
e somebody trying to find who . he is, which will never
succeed. And that is why it's called the Doctrine of the
V
s Void. That one really h~1s to be reconciled, not only
t
reconciled to, but deligh1ted with-the fact that you,
)
yourself, are basically indiefinable. If you were definable,
you would be a mortal thing like anything else. And you
would just dissolve. But so long as you're not definable,
•
)
you 're eternal. As much of you as you can't catch hold of,
is the real you. But the pric:e you pay for this, the privilege
f
, of being eternal, is that yo1u don't know it. You can't grab
onto it! See?
[ This comes out of sorrows. In the Buddhism that we
have in the Pali Canon, th1e dialogue goes as far as all the
r
•
techniques for renouncir•g desire, so that the general
•

--97-
 HISTOR.ICAL BUDDHISM

trend of Saravata fJuddhism is ascetic. But what

happened historically was, that many of those monks a
who practiced all the: ascetic exercises, started to ask
•
themselves the questic,n, ''Why are we doing this?'' And u
they discovered that tl1e reason they were practicing the i:
ascetic exercises was that they were scared of life, and 11

wanted to get out of it,, which nullifies the effect of those a

exercises. In other words, they were acting in an unselfish d
way, for selfish reasonis. And all those monks who were u
simply naive and periceptive enough to recognize this, ~
}
then moved on into th e Mahayana stage of development.
1

You can go thro,Jgh a tough meditation discipline y

where you try to cont1rol your thoughts completely, and 1
not think anything lustful, or harmful, or selfish, and so
on, but you are eventually compelled to come to the
question, ''Why are yc:>u doing this?'' And the answer is, tl
of course, the same olid reason I started with. ~'I desire.'' ti
And this is still desir(~. So, then the dialogue has to be
carried on from that point, in such a way, that the h
problem is increasingl y thrown back at the source of the
1 a:
p
question. ''Who's asking? Why asking?'' Until, you see
what they call in Zen that you are raising waves when no n
wind is blowing. You are making the problem. E
And this comes, back, you see, to the most C
fundamental, original ideas of Buddhism, which Sir ai
Edwin Arnold expresses in his poem about the teaching S1

of the Buddha, ''Ye s·u ffer from yourselves, None else

compels, None other holds you that you live and die, p.
k

-98-
 OUT OF: THE TRAP

t And whir upon the wheel" And hug and kiss its spokes of
s agony, its tire of tears, it~; nave of nothingness.''
C But, you see, the who•le game we play with ourselves
I is, ''I'm not responsible.'' .A person can turn back to their
. parents, and say, ''You itOt me in this mess. You two
I males and females were having fun in bed together, and as
a result of this, you irresJponsibly created me. And you
\ didn't provide for me pro•perly. You were economically
.
a unsound or something, anld I blame you for all this.'' See?
, What an alibi that is, ancl all life is based on this game.
•
And nobody will admit, you see, that the evil gleam in
1

.a your father's eye when he was after your mother, was you!
1

I That same surge of life wa.s just the same as you are. See?
) You started the prob lem. And you can't just blame
1

.a somebody else, because i1f you blame your parents, and

, they are in any way blame·w orthy, they can always blame
their parents, for getting tl1em in the mess, and on it goes
'
..a way back to Adam ancl Eve. And you know what
.
a happened then? When tl1e trouble started, God came
.a around and said to Adam, '·Man, what have you done?''
..a And he said, ·'This woma11t that Thou gavest, she tempted
)
me, and I did eat.'' And then God went and looked at
Eve. And she said, '·The sc~rpent gave it to me.'' And then
t God looked at the serpe11t, and the serpent didn't say
r anything, because the seri,ent knew all too well what the
story was, but wasn't gonlna let on.
..a You see, because the serpent is the unacknowledged
part of God, only it mustn't be. Let not your left hand
' know what your right han•d doeth. Especially let not your

--99-
 HISTORICAL BUDDHISM
•

!
right hand know what your left hand doeth because the •
I
right hand is the hand that's honest. Shake hands with the
right hand, eat with th•: right hand. But the left hand is the 1
inauspicious hand. W'ith that you clean up messes, and 1
you eat with the oth,e r see, so you don't get the two I
mixed. Mustn't get yo1ur head mixed up with your tail. So
this is called the See1n Hand, and this is the Obscene
Hand. This is ini>ropitious, this is propitious, I
(
unpropitious, propiti<>us. So, keep that going see, don't
let go, don't give awa,, the secret of these two hands, or
t
that the two ends are all one.
t
In Mythology, th1e serpent Ouroborus is eating it's
own tail. Now this act1Jally means it's nourishing itself on
its own excrement. Btlt it doesn't know it. If it did know
it, it wouldn't. So there is, just behind the serpent's head
an unconscious place .. You see, your eyes look out this
I
t
way, they don't look ~,ack that way, and by virtue of that,
s
you make a block of unconsciousness in the circle, so
t
that you don't know what you 're getting is what comes
a
from you. And so lor1g as you don't know, you keep it
up. 'r
If you say, ''Well I, after all, realize this is nothing
t
but me.'' And they 5iay, ''Well, why bother? It's just
a
going round and a1round. '' And that's why total
C
omnipotence or omniiscience would have no future in
I
it-because you couJld do nothing, you could know
a
nothing except what y,ou already know, and you'd know
all of that. There w ould be no surprises. And the
1

C
moment there isn't a surprise, that means there isn't

-1 00-
 OUT 01~ THE TRAP

e something unconscious, t:hen you won't have any life. So

e it all depends that anythin.g happens at all, on there being,
e besides being, besides i,ower. besides consciousness,
J besides pleasure, non-b,eing, impotence, unknowing,
:>
pain. Without this nothi11g happens.
So then, if you say, ,,:oh. but I want to get rid of that
:>
e side of things which is; non-being, unknowing, im-
• potence, pain''-the teacl1er is trying to show you by the
••
't
dialogue that you don't understand the way you have
stated your own quest1ion. You haven't thought it
r
through. You are, in ott,er words, desiring something
that you don't want.
s
Let's suppose a ver·y simple illustration of this. I
ll
don't want to die. O.K! You have the problem of the
~
Wandering Jew, who ca11not die, who's condemned to
d
life, so that when he throws himself into the ocean, it
s
~
.
•

0
throws him out. He casts l1imself into the fire, and the fire
shrivels. You cannot die. And you realize what a horror
this state is, because yo\Jl can't forget. You must go on
'5
accumulating memories forever, and ever, and ever, and
it
ever, until you become sic:k, you get indigestion with the
multiplicity of memories. But people don't ordinarily
think this through. They, say, ''I'd like to go on living
t
always, please, I don't wa1llt to die, not yet, no.,, For they
l
don't think it through. Th.e y say. ''I want to go to Heaven.
I want to be reunited wit:h all my friends and relations,
and be happy for ever, an1d ever, and ever.'•
They don't realize \\,hat an absolute bore this state
could be! You would be horrified if you don't think it
t

--101-
 HISTORllCAL BUDDHISM
•

through. The point otf the dialogue is that the teacher

forces you to think thr,ough all your desires. Be careful of
what you desire, you 1may get it! '
And you know, ·t his is the story about the three
wishes. There was, 01nce upon a time, a person who •
l
discovered the ear of t}1e statue of the Oracle, Adelphi, in
a
Greece. It was found iln an antique shop, wrapped in a
\
little sliver of paper which said, ''Be back by 3''.
This came into tlhe hands of two very intelligent
a
gentlemen. (I'm repeating a story that Gerald Hurd told)
I
These very intelligent i~entlemen had a dinner party one
evening in the presen,:e of this ear, and they discussed i
t
what .it meant. They s:aid, ''Look, this ear is probably a
wishing ear, you whisper things into it. Let's try and work
f
it out.''
C
So, you know hoiw people are when they get in the
t
presence of magic, thc~y always ask it to do something
a
trivial-they said, ''Mlake this vase turn upside-down.
r,
This is our first wish.,, How stupid can you get, you
a
know? So, they did that.
Well, apparently nothing happened. But in a little
C
while they all began to feel funny, and they felt more
0
comfortable with their arms up in the air, than lying on
s
the table. What had hilppened was, indeed, their gravity
b
was reversed from the 1gravity of the vase. And they were
a
very uncomfortable al,out this. So, with what did they
h
ha\.·e now? Two wish.e s left. (There are always three
wishes.)

-102-
 OUT 01~ THE TRAP

• What was the secon•d wish? Obviously to undo the

'
first. So they said, ''Let e,,erything be as it was before we
f
wished.'' And they were comfortable again.
••
Now they had but OJt\e wish left, with no possibility
• of reverting it. And one c>f the men said, ''Let's not take
it, let's just abandon the vvhole thing.•• But the other was
an adventurous man, and he grabbed the ear and said, ''I
wish not to wish''.
At that moment, the: stone ear leapt out of his hand
and fell on the hearth, ancl hissed in flame, and dissolved.
But suddenly they founld themselves sitting there in
••
peace. Everything was ju~;t right the way it was, because
I
they had wished not to ~~ish.
l
•
So, to desire not to desire must finally include the
•
fact you see, that you do clesire. And that this is a feature
of your nature, in just the same way as blue is a feature of
••
,, the sky, that feet have five: toes each on them. You desire,
and if you desire not to <iesire, that is to say you desire
•
not to be a human being, ·y ou're fighting the facts, which
l
as a matter of fact, are yc>ur own facts.
The whole secret of 1che matter is that we construct
••
our psychology so that we:~ experience a whole segment of
••
our experience as sometlhing that's put on us. It's the
l
same thing as you blame your parents by saying, ''You
'•
•
brought me into this worlci'', or ''Water is wet, fire is hot,
and I did not bargain for ·t his, I didn't arrange it.'' So by
'•
•
having a whole segment o,f our experience that we don't

--103-
 HISTORI~CAL BUDDHISM
•

assume responsibility fc>r, and we say, ''You did it!'' Then

it's not my fault! Yous«~. this is, it is this that creates the
problem.

Q. Ma, I interject a qi.estion?

A. Yes.
Q. How do 1ou explain 1rhe Buddhist monk's vow ofum, to
free himself from desirei? Isn't that one of the vows?
A. Yes of course. W lh ere he says in the Mahayana
Vows, ''However inrilumerable the hang-ups are, I
vow to conquer therin all.'' Kesha in Sanskrit, the
hang-ups.
Q. How do I vow to k~~ep m,self from the passions.
A. Yes, they're the Kiesha. Yes.
Q. But yet, a true Malwt1ana Buddhist would assume that
you are the passions. Y'ou could. not be ,au without these
passions.
A. Right, right.
Q. So how can you fre1e ,ourself?
A. So, you set your s,elf the infinite task. •
Q. l'1.1e been perplexed b, that. Could it possibl, be that
the, could the keyword b,e that 1ou won't be dela,ded b, the
whole problem of passi,on?
A. See again, that the ,,ows must be understood in the
context of the dialog1ue. Undertaking these vows is
part of being involvecd in a dialogue with a teacher,
and the teacher sugg1ests that you undertake these
vows-which are ridi1c ulous.

-104-
 OUT OJF THE TRAP

Q. Well, that's my objec:tion!

A. Sure, but you W'On 't find out that they're
ridiculous unless you try them.
Q. But, they're magical, i'.n a certain sense-I'm speaking
personally.
A. Oh, sure they are! \lfell, look, we're going to have
an intermission.

--105-
----·

PHILCJSOPHY
OF NATURE

•
n
}
I<
ti
p
v,
p
ti
tc
p

b
0
b
 want to talk to you a bit about the general purpose
of this tour. I might Sa\, that I'm interested in Japanese
materialism, because ciontrary to popular belief,
Americans are not materialists. We are not people who
love material. but our cul1ture is by and large, devoted to
the transformation of m~nterial into junk, as rapidly as
possible. God's own junk~vard! And therefore it's a very,
very important lesson for ,a wealthy nation, and for a rich
people. And we are all coliossally rich by the standards of
the rest of the world. It's ,,ery important for such people
to learn and see what hap~>ens to material in the hands of
people who love it.
And so, you might s~ay that in Japan, and in China,
but in Japan in a peculiar vvay. the underlying philosophy
of life is a spiritual materialism. There is not the divorce
between soul and body,. between spirit and matter,

- ·109-
 PHILOSC>PHY OF NATURE

t
between spirit and ninture, or God and nature, which
(
there is in the West. And therefore, there is not the same
r
kind of contempt for 1material things. We regard matter
as something that gets in our way, something whose
limitations are to be ~lbolished as fast as possible, and
therefore we have bull dozers and every kind of technical
1
I
(
device for knocking it out of the way. And we like to do
1
as much obliteration <>f time and space as possible. We
a
talk about killing tiru1e, and getting there as fast as
t
possible, but of cours,e, as you notice in Tokyo, and as
t
your noticing here, th•e nearer it gets to you by time, by
the abolition of dista11ce, the more it's the same place
s
from which you startc::d.
f
This is one of the :great difficulties-what is going to
l
happen to this city, an,:l this country when it becomes the
a
same place as California. In the same way, in other words,
you could take a str,eetcar from one end of town to
s
another, and it's the s~lme town. So, if you can take a jet
C
plane from one city to :another (and everybody's doing it,
V
not just the privileged few), then they're going to be the
f
same town.
tl
So, to preserve thie whole world from indefinite Los
ti
Angelization, pardon :me, those of you from Southern
tl
California, but, we h~tve to learn in the United States, •
14
how to enjoy material, and to be true materialists, instead (
of exploiters of material. And so, this is the main reason
~
for going into philosc,phy of the Far East, and how it
a
tl

-110-
 OUT OJF THE TRAP

relates to every day life--to architecture, to gardens, to

l
:Ill
clothes, and to the higher arts of painting, tea ceremony,
•
music, sculpture, ritual, ::1nd so on.
r
:Ill
Well now, basic to, all this is the philosophy of
•
nature. And the Japan ese philosophy of nature is
1

I
probably founded historitcally in the Chinese philosophy
1
of nature, and that's wha1t I want to go into to start with.
)
To let the cat out of the bag, right at the beginning, the
..
:Ill

assumptions underlying F=ar Eastern culture, ( and this is

s
true as far west as India, ~1lso) is that the whole cosmos,
s
the whole universe, is onle being.

' It is not a collection of many different beings, who

somehow floated together like alot of flotsam and jetsam
from the ends of space, ar1td ended up as a thing called the
)
universe. They look at thte world as one, eternal activity,
and that's the only real self that you have. You are
' theworks-only what we c:all you, as a distinct organism, is
)
simply a manifestation oif the whole thing. Just as the
t
ocean when it waves, it's t:he whole ocean waving when it
,
waves. And the whole oce:an, when it waves, it says,'' Yoo-
Hoo, I'm here!'', you see. !5o·each one of us is a wave of all
that there is, of the whole works. And they don't, you see
s this is, in this culture, not something that is just a
\
theory-not just an idea, llike you -would have, I have my
,
ideas, you have your idteas, in other words, you 're a
i Christian Scientist, I'm a :Baptist, or something like that.
l
No, or I'm a Republican, ilnd you're a Democrat, and I'm
t a Bircher, and you're a c•~mmunist. It isn't that kind of
thing-it's not an opinio1n, it's a feeling.

--111-
 PHILOS<)PHY OF NATURE

And so, the great, the great men of this culture ( not
everybody), but the great men, the great masters, of
whatever sphere they 're in, are fundamentally of this
feeling that what you are is the thing that always was, is
and will be, only it's playing the game called, ''Mr.
Tocano,'' or ''Mr. LeE~,'' or ''Mr. Mukapadya.'' That's a
special game it's playing, just like there's the fish game, ]
the grass game, the b:a mboo game, the pine tree game, 1
they're all ways of g:o ing ''Hoochie-koochie-doochie- 1
doochie-doochie-doo. '' You see everything's doing a
dance, only it's doini: it according to the nature of the
dance. The universe is fundamentally all these dances, I
whether human, fish, bird, cloud, sky dance, star dance, I
etc., they are all one fundamental dance. Or dancer. Only
in Chinese, you don '1c· distinguish the subject from the
verb, I mean, you do1n't distinguish the noun from the 1
verb in the same way that we do. A noun can become a
J
verb, a verb can beconr\e a noun. But, that's the business.
A civilized, cult:ured, above all, an enlightened (
person, in this culture, is one who knows that his so-
called ''separate pers.onality, '' his ego, is an illusion. ,
Illusion doesn't mean a bad thing, it just means a play, (
from the Latin wordl, ludere, we get English illusion. 1
Ludere means to pla.y. So, the Sanskrit word, maya, •
I
meaning illusion, alsc• means magic, skill, art, and this i
Sanskrit conception c,omes through China to Japan with
the transmission of B·u ddhism.
'
-112-
 OUT OJF THE TRAP

The world as a Mayia, or sometimes as it's called in

Sanskrit: lila, (our word 'lilt'); Lila, is play. So, all
individual manifestation.s are games, dances, sympho-
s
nies, musical forms, bei1ng put on by the whole show.
s
And everyone is basically the whole show, so that's the
•
•
fundamental feeling .
a
But Nature, Nature as the word is used in the Far
.,
I

East doesn't mean quite 1the same as the word Nature in

.,•
the West. In Chinese, 1nature, the word we translate
nature, titTan, or in Japa1nese, shizen, is made up of two
a characters. That first 011e means ''of itself,,, and the
e second one means ''so''. What is so, of itself. This is a
•,• rather difficult word to translate well into English. We
.,• might _say, automatic:,'' but automatic suggests
y
something mechanical.
e When a Chinese cooilie was supposed to have seen a
e tram car for the first tilme, he said, ''No pushee, no
a pulley, go like mad!'' But1, uh, this mechanical idea of the
•
•• automatic won't proper Iy translate this word zitran, in
d Chinese, shiten inJapanes.e. Of itself so, what happens, or
as we say, what comes natturally. It's in that sense of our
l.
word nature, to be natlJ1ral, to act in accordance with
r,
one's nature, not to striv4~ for things, not to force things,
that they use the word na1tural. So, when your hair grows,
l, it grows without your tellting it to, and you don't have to
.s force it to grow. So, in tt•e same way, when the color of
n your eyes, whether it's blue or brown, or whatever, the

--113-
 PHILOSC>PHY OF NATURE

•
eyes color themselves, :a nd you don't tell them how to do 1
it. When your bones g1row a certain way, they do it all of
themselves. '•
I
And so, in the sarne way, I remember a Zen master
once, he was a beautiful man, he used to teach in New I
York. His name was l\tir. Sazaki. One evening, he was !
sitting in his golden rc,bes, in a very formal throne-like a
chair, with a fan in hiis hand, he had one of those fly- a
whisks made of a whit(e horse's tail. And he was looking
very, very dignified-,incense burning on the table in
'
C

front of him, there w,as a little desk with one of the

•
scriptures on it that he was explaining. And he said, '' All I
C•
nature has no pu,rpose. Purposelessness most
fundamental principle: of Buddhism, purposelessness. ~

Ahhh, when you dro,p fart, you don't say, 'At nine s
o'clock I dropped .fart,' it just happen.' ''
So then, it's fundatmental to this idea of nature, that C
Cl
the world has no b<>ss. In, this is very important,
especially if you're goi1r1g to understand Shinto. Because, 11•
we translate, kami, or s,hin as God, but it's not God in that C

sense. God, in much of the Western meaning of the (

word, means ''the con1troller,'' ''the boss of the world.'' 11
And the model that ~1e use for nature tends to be the \I

model of the carpente1~, or the potter, or the king. That, g

just as the carpenter talkes wood and makes a table out of
it, or as the potter takes inert clay. and with the b
intelligence of his handls evokes a form in it, or as the king n
is the law-giver who, from above, tells people what order
they shall move in, atnd how they shall behave, it is

-114-
 OUT O:F THE TRAP

ingrained into the Wes.tern mind to think that the

f universe is a behavior wh1ich is responding to somebody
in charge, and understan,ds it all.
• When I was a little b,oy, and I used to ask my mother
r many questions, sometim1esshe'dgetfed up with me, and
•
• say, ccMy dear, there are :s ome things in this life that we
•• are not just meant to kno·w. '' And so I said, ccWell, what
• about it? Will we ever k1now?'' ccw ell,'' she said, cc yes,
,, when you die, and you go to Heaven, God will make it all
l clear.''
•• And I used to think, that maybe, on wet afternoons
l in Heaven, we'd all sit ~,round God's throne and say,
ccHeavenly Father, why ~lre the leaves green?'' And he
would say, ccBecause of th1e chlorophyll!'' And we would
•• say, •cOh!'' .
Well, that idea, you see, of the world as an artifact
could prompt a child in 01ur culture to say to it's mother,
''How was I made?'' And it seems very natural. So when
it's explained that God matde you, the child naturally goes
t on and says, ''But who made God?'' But, I don't think a
•• Chinese child would ask that question at all, ''How was I
made?'' Because the Chi11tese mind does not look at the
world of nature as somet:h ing manufactured, but rather
grown.
f The character for cc,ming into being in Chinese is
•• based on a symbol of a gr,o wing plant. Now growing and
,, making are two different things. When you make
•
'
something, you assemble· parts, or you take a piece of
,• wood and you carve it, working gradually from the

--115-
 PHILOSC)PHY OF NATURE
'

outside inwards, cutti1ng away until you've got the sh.a pe li

you want. But when V'OU watch something grow, it isn't (
going like that. l'I
If you see, for example, a fast motion movie of a rose V

growing, you will sec~ that the process goes from the
•
inside to the outsid.e -it is, as it were, something u
expanding from the ccenter. And that, so far from being e
an addition of parts, ilt all grows together, all moves all VI
over itself at once. A.nd the same is true when you're a
watching the formati on of crystals, or even if you 're
1
h
watching a photog1raphic plate being developed. C
Suddenly, all over thee area of the plate, over the field, ii
shall we call it, like a magnetic field, it all arises.
That idea of the: world as growing, and as not n
obeying any laws, beca1use there is in Chinese philosophy
no difference between the Tao ( that is the word t-a-o ), the n
Japanese do, there is--no difference between the Way, tl
the power of Nature, and the things in Nature.
It isn't, you see, ,vhen I stir up wind with this fan, it Ii
isn't simply that the w,ind obeys the fan. There wouldn't it
be a fan in my hand unless there were wind around. tc
Unless there were air,, no fan. So the air brings the fan \\
into being as much as the fan brings the air into being. So, ~
they don't think in tl~is way of obeying all the time- b
masters and slaves, lo,r d and servant. ti
Lao-Tse, who is s1upposed to have written the Tao Te
Ching, the fundament:al book of the Taoist philosophy, p
lived probably, a little before 300 B.C. Although
tradition makes him a1contemporary of Confucius, who

-116-
 OUT 01= THE TRAP

e lived closer to 600, he sa~~s in his book, ''The great Tao

't flows everywhere, to the left and to the right. It loves and
nourishes all things, but dloes not lord it over them. And
e when merits are attained,, it makes no claim to them.''
e The corollary of that is, that if this is the way natu!'e
g is run, not by governme:nt, but by, as it were, letting
g everything follow its co\1rse, then the skillful man or
ll woman, or the skillful rul1er, or the sage interferes as little
e as possible with the cours1e of things. Of course you can't
e help interfering. Every tirine you look at something, you
l. change it. Your existence ils, in a way, an interference, but
l, if you think of yourself a.s something separate from the
rest of the world, then yo•u will think of interference or
,t not~interference. But if you know that you 're not
V separate from it, that yo,u are just as much in and of
e nature as the wind or the cll ouds, then who interferes with
I
, them?
In general, the notio,n is that life is most skillfully
it li,1ed when one sails a boatt, rather than rowing it. You see
't it's more intelligent to sail( than to row. With oars I have
l. to use my muscles and my· effort to drag myself along the
[\ water, but with a sail, I le1t the wind do the work for me.
More skillful still, when I learn to tack, and let the wind
- blow me against the direc:tion of the wind. Now. that's
the whole philosophy of the Tao. It's called in Chinese,
•
e wu-wei, wu-non~ wei-striving. Mui is Japanese at
• pronouncing the Chinese wei. Mu is Chinese wu. Mui, as
h
0

--117-
 PHILOSfOPHY OF NATURE

distinct from ui. Vi m,eans to use effort-to go against the

grain, to force things. Mui-not to go against the grain, to r·
-
go with the grain. t i'
And so, you will see around you, in every direction, fi
examples of mui-of the intelligent handling of nature, t
f1
u
so as to go with it rath1er than against it. For example, the
famous art of Judo is. entirely based on this. When you a
are attacked, don't si1nply oppose the force used against 0
you, but go in the samte direction as it's going, and lead it 11
to its own downfall.
So it is said, in tile winter, there's a tough pine tree, I
which has a branch li]ce this, and muscles. And the snow p
piles up and piles up, and this unyielding branch d
eventually has this h1uge weight of snow. and it cracks. 0
Whereas the willow tree has a springy, supple branch, a
and a little snow conies on it, and the branch just goes le
down, and the snow falls off, and whoops, the branch b
•
goes up again. ~

Lao-Tse said, ''Man, at his birth is supple and it

tender, but in death, he is rigid and hard. Plants when Y·
they are young, are so,ft and supple, but in death they are it
•
brittle and hard. So, suppleness and tenderness are the 11
characteristics of lif•~, and rigidity and hardness the 0
characteristics of death.'' He made many references to h
water. He said, ''Of :all things in the world, nothing is \\

more soft than water, and yet it wears away the hardest
rocks. Furthermore, ,Nater is humble, it always seeks the 0
low level, which m,en abhor. But yet, water finally b
overcomes everythinti• '' ti

-118-
-
OUT Of; THE TRAP
-

When you watch ·w ater take the line of least

resistance, you watch for example, water poured out on
the ground, then you see:! it, as it were. ejecting fingers
l, from itself, and some of those fingers stop. But, one
e, finger goes on-it's found the lowest level. Now. you say,
''Oh, but that's not the:~ water, the water didn't do
anything, that's just the co,n tours of the land, and because
st of the contours of the lancl, the water goes where the land
it makes it go.•• Think agai1r1.
Does the sailing boat go where the wind makes it go?
e, I never forget once, I was out in the countryside, and a
w piece of thistle-down fle~, out of the blue. It came right
:h down near me, and I put ,out a finger. and I caught it by
s. one of its little tendrils. A1nd it behaved just like catching
~
.~s a daddy long-legs, you knc)w, when you catch one by one
leg it naturally struggles to get away. Well, this thing
:h behaved just like that, andl I thought well. ''It was just the
wind doing that, it only ai:,pears to look as if it was doing
it.'' Then I thought again, ''Wait a minute! It is the wind,
yes, but, it's also that thiis has the intelligence to grow
re itself, so as to use the ,wind.'' You see that? That is
le intelligence. That little str1Jcture of thistle-down is a form
le of intelligence, just as surely, as the construction of a
:o house is a manifestation 1of intelligence. But it uses the
•
IS wind .
st In the same way, the water uses the conformations
te of the ground. Water isn't just dead stuff. It's not just
ly being pushed around. Nothing is being pushed around in
the Chinese view of natuire. Because you see, my first

--119-
 -
PHILOS<)PHY OF NATURE
-

point as I've been sa,;ring, is what they mean by nature;

that it is something th1at happens of itself-that it has no
boss. The second point is that it does not. In the sense
that it doesn't have a boss, somebody giving orders,
somebody obeying <>rders, that leads further to an
entirely different con•ception of cause and effect. Cause cc ·
•

and effect is based <>n giving orders. When you say, y

''Something made tlhis happen.'' It had to happen y
because of what hap:p ened before. The Chinese don't b~
think like that. His iidea of causality is called, or the a1
concept which does d,1ty for our idea of causality is called m
''mutual arsing. '' w
Let's take the reli1tionship between the back and the se
front of anything. Is tlhe back the cause of the front, or is
the front the cause of' the back? What a silly question! If ar
things don't have fro1nts, then they can't have backs. If ta
they don't have backs, they can't have fronts. Front and ef
back always go togetlher, that is to say, they come into cc
being together. And s,o , in just the same way as the front fe
and the back arise t<>gether, the basic sort of Chinese 01
Taoist philosophy se4~s everything in the world coming be
together. th
This is called the Philosophy of Mutual Inter-
penetration. In Japanc~se, gi-gi-muge. We'll go into this in to
detail when we get to nara, because nara is the center of c~
Kegon Buddhism, :and so, this is the particular of
philosophy which de~'eloped gi-gi-muge. But still, it goes
way back into the his1tory of the Chinese idea of nature. "
fo

-120-
-
OUT OF THE TRAP
-

~; Now look at it very simply. Let us suppose that you

o had never seen a cat, an d one day you were looking
1

;e through a very narrow slit: in a fence, and a cat walks by.

s, First you see the cat's he:ad, then there's a rather non-
n descript fuzzy interval, anid a tail follows. And you say,
.e ''Marvelous!'' Then the cat turns 'round and walks back.
f, You see the head, and the,n after a little interval, the tail.
n You say, ''Incredible!'' T~te cat turns around and walks
't back again, and you see first the head, and then the tail,
1e and you say, ''This begins to look like a regularity, there
d must be some order in this phenomenon, because
whenever I see the thing \\rhich I've labelled head, I later
te see the thing I've labelled tail.''
is Therefore, where there is an event which I call head,
If and it's invariably followe~d by another event that I call
If tail, obviously head is the cause of tail, and the tail is the
1

1d effect. Now, we think that: way about everything. But of

:o course, if you suddenly ,widened up the crack in the
1t fence, so that you saw thatt the head and the tail were all
;e one cat, and that the headl, and when a cat is born, it's
•g born with a head and a tail, it isn't that there is a head, and
then later, a tail.
r- So, in exactly the samie way, the events that we seem
1n to call, ''separate events,'' atre really all one event, only we
>f chop it into pieces to descr·ibe it. Like we say, ''The head
1r of the cat, and the tail of thie cat,'' although it's all one cat.
~ When we've chopped it to pieces, then we suddenly
e. forget we did that, and try to explain how they fit

-121-
 -
PHILO~;OPHY OF NATURE
•
-

together-and we iritvent a myth called ''causality'' to he

explain how they do. The reason we chop the world into so
bits is simply for purposes of intellectual convenience. m
For example, o,u r world is through and through th
wiggly, and you notic:e that very much, how these people, W 4
although they have mlodels, symmetry and use of space in th
the construction of h1ouses, they love wigglings and their pr
garden, you see, is very fundamentally wiggly. They
appreciate wiggly roc:ks. I remember so much as a child, ye
wondering why Chir,1ese houses all had wiggly roofs, the go
way they were curvecl. And why the people looked more of
wiggly than our peoi>le look. Cause the world is wiggly! bi'
Now, what are you g<>nna do with a wiggly world? You've dii
gotta straighten it <>ut! So we notice that the initial tir
solution is to try an<J straighten it out. th
People, of course, are very wiggly indeed. Only ab
because we all appea1r together, do we look regular. You ·
know, we have two e~yes, one nose, one mouth, and two ta)
•
ears, and so on ... We look regular so we make sense. But
,
lt,
if somebody had nev,e r seen a person before, they'd say, W (
''What's this extraordinary, amazing, wiggly phen- yo
•
omenon?'' We are-·the world is-wiggly. IS[

One of the wig,~liest things in the world is a fish. ha

Somebody once fou11,d out they could use a net and catch th1
a fish. Then they th ought out a much better idea than so
1

'
that-they could cat:ch the world with a net. A wiggly Ef
world. But what happens? Hang up a net in front of the He
world and look thr,o ugh it. What happens? You can fr<
count the wiggles, b·y saying, this wiggle goes so many

-12 2-
-
OUT OF 'THE TRAP
-

to holes across, so many hole:s down, so many holes across,

to so many to the left, so mar,y to the right, so many up, so
:e. many down ... What do yo\1 have? You have the genesis of
gh the calculus. And your n,e t, as it were, breaks up the
le, world into countable bits, as we now say in information
•
1n theory, ccwe have so m1any bits of information to
•
~1r process.''
ey In the same way, a bit i.s a bite. You go to eat chicken,
.d, you can't swallow the whc»le chicken at once, so you've
ne got to take it in bites. But you don't get a cut up fryer out
ire of the egg. So in the same way the real universe has no
ly! bits. It's all one thing, it's 1t1oc alot of things. In order to
ve digest it with your mind, vvhich thinks of one thing at a
lal time, you've got to make a1 calculus, you've got to chop
the universe into bits, so :is to think about it, and talk
tly about it.
)U · You can see this whole fan at once, but if you want to
VO talk about it, you have to ta.lk about it bit by bit. Describe
ut
,
it, go into the details. Wt,at details? Well, so with the
ty, world. If you don't realize that's what you've done, that
n- you've 'bitted' the world :in order to think about it, it
isn't really bitted at all. If y,ou don't realize that, then you
:h. have troubles, because thf~n you've got to explain how
ch the bits go together. How tlley connect with each other-
an so you invent all sorts of ghosts, called c•cause and
•
:ly Effe<;.t'', and influences. The word influence, you know-
ne How do I influence you? As if I was something different
an from you. So influences, ar,d ghosts and spooks, all these
tty

-123-
 PHILOS.OPHY OF NATURE ~

things come into bei.ng if we forget that we made the

initial step of breakirilg the unity into pieces in order to
discuss it. s
So then, steppinlg back again, we have these very, 1:
very basic principles then. The world as nature, what ·
happens of itself, is lo,oked upon as a living organism, and C

it doesn't have a boss. because things are not behaving in r,

response to somethir,g that pushes them around. They V

•
are just behaving. And it's all one, big behavior. Only if 11
you want to look at iit from certain points of view, you
can see it as if sometthing else were making something
happen. But you do that only because you divide the
thing up.
••so now,'' you say, ''final question. Is their nature u•
chaotic? Is there no l~lw around here?'' There is not one r,

single Chinese word t:h at means the Law of Nature, as we

use it. The only word in Chinese that means law as we use a
it is a word tse, ancl this word is a character which tl
represents a cauldron with a knife beside it. And this goes tl
back to the fact that i11 very ancient times, when a certain n
emperor made laws fo,r the people, he had the laws etched s·
on the sacrificial ca,Jldrons, so that when the people d
brought the sacrifices; they would read what was written
on the cauldrons. Arld so this word, tse. But the sages,
who were of a Taoist 1feeling at the time that this emperor ~

lived said, ''You sho,Jldn 't have done that, sir. Because e
the moment the pe<>ple know what the law is, they ti
develop a little dis-spilrit. And they'll say, 'Well now, did d
d

-124-
-
OUT OF: THE TRAP
-

le you mean this precisely, did you mean that precisely.

:o And we'll find a way of vvrangling around it.' •• So they
said that the nature of nat1L1re, Tao, is wut-se, which means
y, lawless, but in that sense of law.
at But to say that naturt~ is lawless is not to say that it's
td chaotic. Now the Cl1inese word here for the order of
tn
' nature is called in Japanes;e ri, Chinese Li. Ri, is a curious
~y word, it originally meant '''the markings in jade, the grain
if in wood, or the fibre in m1uscle. '' Now when you look at
jade, you see it has this ,vonderful, mottled markings in
it. And you know, someh1ow and you can't explain why,
those mottlings are not chaotic. When you look at the
patterns of clouds, or the patterns of foam on the water,
re isn't it astounding, they r1ever, never make an aesthetic
,e mistake.
:,e Look at the way the s;tars are arranged, or they're not
se arranged! They're just lilke, they seem to be scattered
:h through the sky like spra'y. But would you ever criticize
es the stars for being in poior taste? When you look at a
Ln
' mountain range-it's i:>erfect. But somehow, this
~d spontaneous, wiggly arr:angement of nature is quite
le different from anything vve would call a mess.
~n Look at an ashtrayr, full of cigarette butts and
'S , screwed bits of paper. L<>ok at some modern painting,
>r where people have gone out of their way to create the
se expensive messes. You se,e, they're different. And this is
~y the joke, that we can't put our finger on what the
id difference is, although wie jolly well know it. We can't
define it. If we could deifine it... in other words, if we

- -125 -
 •

PHILOS.OPHY OF NATURE
•

could define aesthe:tic beauty, it would cease to be ••

interesting. In other words, if we could have a method b
that would automati,cally produce great artists, anybody C
could go to school ar,d become a great artist. Their work d
would be the most boring kind of kittsch. But just ·n
}
because you don't know how it's done, that gives it an
•
excitement. a·
And so it is with1this. There is no formula, that is to b
say, no tse-no rule ~lccording to which all this happens. g
And yet it's not a 1mess. So this idea of ri, ( you can
translate the word ri :as organic pattern). And this ri is the li
word that they use fo•r the order of nature, instead of our b
idea of law, where tl1e things are obeying something. If C
they are not obeying :a governor, in the sense of God, they p
are obeying principle'.S, like a streetcar. Do you know that p
limerick? h
There was a :you1r1g man who said, ''Damn!'' h
For it certainly s~~ems that I am b
A creature that 11nooes, in dete,,ninate grOOtJes n
I'm not a,en a bau, I'm a tram! \\

So that idea of tl~e iron rails, along which the course n

•
of life goes is absent here. And that is why basically, this 15

accounts for Chinesf~ and Japanese humanism. And here ti

( this is very importarlt), there's a basic humanism to this 0

culture. The people in this culture, Chinese andJapanese e1

don't feel guilty e~~er. They feel ashamed, yes .. of \\

something. Ashame•d because they have transgressed \\

social requirements. But they are incapable of a sense of

-126-
- OUT OF THE TRAP
-

be ''Sin''. They don't feel, in other words that you are guilty
:>d because you exist, you o,Ne your existence to the Lord
dy God, and you were a mistake anyway! You know? They
rk don't feel that. They lhave social shame, but not
1st · metaphysical guilt, and tl1at leads to a great relaxation.
an And you can sense it if you're sensitive, just walking
around the streets. You realize that these people have not
to been tarred with that terriible monotheistic brush which
lS. gives them the sense of g1L1ilt.
an They work on the Sl1pposition that human nature,
he like all nature is basically good. It consists in it's good-
ur bad. It consists int.h e pa~;ions as much as the virtues. In
If Chinese there's a word un. I don't know how it's
ey pronounced in Japanese. J:'11 write it backwards. How do
lat pronounce that in Japanese? This means human-
heartedness, humane-nes:s. Not in the sense of being
humane in the sense of 1oeing kind necessarily, but of
being human. So I· say, ••()h, he's a great human being,''
means that's the kind of person who's not a stuffed shirt,
who is able to come off it, who can talk with you on a
·se man-to-man basis, who recognizes along with you that he
•
llS is a rascal, too. And so people, men for example, when
:re they each affectionately call a friend of theirs, ''Hi, you
•
llS
old bastard, how you gt:tting on?'' This is a term of
:se endearment, because they know that he shares with them
of what I call the ''Element c>f Irreducible Rascality''-that
ed we all have.
of

- ·127-
 •

PHILOSC)PHY OF NATURE

fl

So then, if a per:s on has this attitude, he is never

f
going to be an over-,weaning goody-goody. Confucius
said, ''Goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.'' Because
t
you see, if I am right, tl1en you are wrong. And we get into
b
a fight. What I am is a c:rusader against the wrong, and I'm
going to obliterate yc,u, or I'm going to demand your
t:
unconditional surrendler. But if I say, ''No, I'm not right,
i1
and you 're not wrong but I happen to want to carry off
ti
your women. You kn,ow, you've got the most beautiful
h
girls and 1•m going to fight you for them. If I had done
a
that, I would be very careful not to kill the girls.'' }
In modern war w,e don't care. The only people who
E
are safe are in the Air Force! They 're way up there, you [
know, or else they've l!:ot subterranean caves they're in-
\II
women and children b•e gone! They can be frizzled with a
e
Hiroshima bomb. Bu1t we sit in the plane and be safe.
a
Now this is inhunrtane because we are fighting
VI
ideologically, instead of for practical things like food,
E
and possessions, and being greedy. So that's why the
d
Confucian would say he trusts human passions more
VI
than he trusts human virtues: righteousness, goodness,
n
principles, and all that high-fallutin' abstractions. Let•s
get down to earth, let's come off it. [
So then, this is "'hY the kind of man in whom the
r4
kind of nature, the kin,d of human nature in which trust is
C
put. Because you see, look, if you are like the Christians
and the Jews-not so• much the Jews, but mostly the
n
Christians-who don't trust human nature, who say,

-128-
 OUT OF: THE TRAP

'tit's fallen, it's evil, it's pc:!rverse~'' that puts you in a very
r
funny position. Because it· you say, ''Human nature is not
s
to be trusted,'' you can't e·ven trust the fact that you don't
e
)
trust it! See where you 'Ill end out? You '11 end out in a
hopelessness!
tl
Now it's true, hll1man nature is not always
r
trustworthy, but you mu:s t proceed on the gamble that
.•,
~
f it's trustworthy most of the time, or even 51 % of the
time. Because if you don't, what's your alternative? You
ti
have to have a police state:. Everybody has to be watched
e
and controlled, and then vvho's going to watch the police?
And so, you end up this way, in China just before 250
)
B.C., there was a short-llived dynasty called the Ching
LI
Dynasty that lasted fiftee:n years. And the man decided
- who was the emperor c>f there, that he would rule
a everybody. Everything wc,uld oe completely controlled,
•
••
and his dynasty would last for a thousand years. And it
g
was a mess. So the Hun D1ynasty, which lasted from 250
l, B.C. to 250 A.O. came int:o being, and the first thing they
e did was to abolish all laws, except about two. Q. What
e were those? A. You know, elementary violence ... you
•,' mustn't go around killing people and things like that, or
s
robbing, but all the complexity of law. And this Hun
Dynasty marked the heiglh t of Chinese civilization-the
e real period of great, gre:a t sophistication and peace ...
s China's Golden Age. I 1nay be over-simplifying it of
s course, but all historia1r1s do. But this, this was a
e marvelous thing you see. llt's based on this whole idea of

--129-
 PHILOS()PHY OF NATURE

the humanism of the: Far East-that although human

beings are skalliwags, they are no more so than cats, and
dogs, and birds and you must trust human nature.
Because if you can't, 'y ou're apt to starve.
I've talked for lc,ng enough. What I suggest is, in
these seminars that we have a brief intermission so we can
stretch for five minute~s or so, and then we finish this at 1
o'clock, but you can come back and ask questions in
about 5 minutes time.

-130-
•

n
d
•••

n
n
1
n

TRIBlUTE TO
CARJLJUNG

•
•

1
1
I
t
t
(

I
C:

l
J
(
a
 am sitting late at ni~tht, in a lonely cottage in the
country, surrounded by many favorite books which
I've collected over a numlber of years. And as I look up at
the shelves I see that there's a very large space occupied
by the volumes of one m:an-Carl Gustav Jung, who left
this world not more than a few weeks ago. I• d like to talk
tonight about some of th~~ great things tha.t I feel Jung has
done for me, and also t~le things which I feel to be his
enduring contributions toward the science of psych-
ology, of which he was s,uch a great master.
I began to read Jun1g when I first began to study
Eastern philosophy in 1rny late adolescence, and I'm
eternally grateful to him for what I would call a sort of
balancing influence on th1e development of my thought.
As an adolescent, in rebellion against the sterile
Christianity in which I w~ls brought up, I was liable to go
absolutely overboard for exotic and foreign ideas until I

--133-
 TRIBU1rE TO CARL JUNG
•

read the extraordinarily wise commentary that he wrote

to Richard Wilhelm •:s translation of the Chinese Taoist
text called, The Secre·t of the Golden Flower. It was Jung
who helped me to remind myself that I was, by
upbringing and by tr:adition, always a Westerner, and I
couldn •t escape from :my own cultural conditioning. This
inability to escape wa.s not a kind of prison, but was the
endowment of one's being with certain capacities, like
one's arms and legs, and mouth, and teeth, and brain,
which could always b,e used constructively. I feel it's for
this reason that I have~ always remained, for myself, in the
position of the comlparative philosopher, wanting to
balance East and We~;t rather than to go overboard with
enthusiasm for exotic imports. There are aspects of
Jung's work far beyond this that I want to discuss.
First of all, I want to call attention to one
fundamental principle that underlies all his work, and
that was most extraordinarily exemplified in Jung,
himself, as a persorit. This is what I would call his
recognition of the p•olarity of life. That is to say, his
resistance to what is, to my mind, the disastrous and
absurd hypothesis th:!t there is in this universe, a radical
and absolute conflict between good and evil-light and
darkness that can ne,,,er, never, never be harmonized.
Obviously, when, certain crimes and catastrophes
occur, human emotic>ns are deeply and rightly aroused.
And I would, for myself say, that were I in any situation
where inhuman acts ~vere occuring, I would be roused to
•

-134-
•
OUT OF THE TRAP
•

a degree of fury that I can hardly imagine in my present

te
existence. But I know it would come out from me. I
st
would oppose those sort:s of atrocities with all the energy
,g
that I have, and if I was trapped in such a situation, I
,y
would fight it to the endl. But at the same time, I would
.I
• recognize the relativity of my own emotional
IS
involvement. I would know that I was f~ghting in the
,e
same way, shall we say, t:hat a spider figts a wasp, insects
~e
which naturally prey up,on one another, and fight one
tl,
another. But as a huma1tl being I would not be able to
>r
regard my adversary as~, metaphysical devil-that is to
,e
say, one who representeid the principle of absolute and
:o
unresolvable evil.
:h I think this is the mo.s t important thing in Jung-that
)f
he was able to point o,Jt that to the degree that you
condemn others, and find evil in others, you are, to that
,e degree, unconscious of tl1e same thing in yourself-or at
td least of the potentiality c,f it. There can be dictators and
g, tyrants, just because there are people who are
is unconscious of their ow,n dark sides, and they project
•
IS
that darkness outward tc> whatever enemy there may be.
td And they say, ''There is t·h e darkness. It is not in me, and
al therefore because the dal'kness is not in me, I am justified
td in annihilating this ene·m y whether it be with atom
bombs or gas chambers, c)r what-not.'' To the degree that
es a person becomes consc1ious that the evil is as much in
d. himself as in the other, tc> this same degree he is not likely
to project it on to son1e scapegoat, and commit the
criminal acts of violence· upon other people.

--135-
 TRIBUT'E TO CARL JUNG
•

·N ow this is to mle the primary thing that Jung saw:

that in order to admit, and really accept and understand
the evil in oneself, or1e had to be able to do it without
being an enemy to it. ,~s he put it, you had to accept your
own dark side. And hle had this preeminently in his own
character.
I had a long talk with him back in 1958, and I was
enormously impresse:d with one who's obviously very
great, but at the same time with whom everyone could be
completely at ease. T~tere are so many great people, great
in knowledge, or gre:at in what is called holiness, with
whom the ordinary irtdividual feels rather embarrassed.
He feels inclined to sit on the edge of his chair, and feel
immediately judged b·y this person's wisdom or sanctity.
4
•
Jung managed tel have wisdom, and I think also
sanctity, in such a wa,, that when other people came into
1
it's presence they did11't feel judged. They felt enhanced,
)
encouraged, and invited to share in a common life. And
there was a sort of twinkle in Jung's eye that gave me the
impression that he k1new himself to be just as much a
villain as everybody ~~lse. There's a nice German word,
hintergedanker, which means, a thought in the very far, far ••
,
back of your mind.Jung had a hintergedanker in the back
1
of his mind which s~towed in the twinkle in his eye. It
J
showed that he knew· and recognized what I sometimes
call, ''The Element oif Irreducible Rascality'' in himself.
And he knew it so strongly, and so clearly, and in a way,
I
so lovingly, that he W<>uld not condemn the same thing in
(
others, and therefore would not be led into those

-136-
 OUT 0 F THE TRAP
1

i,: thoughts, feelings, and acts of violence towards others,

d which are always charact«eristic of the people who project
It the devil in themselv·es upon the outside, upon
1r somebody else, upon th,e scapegoat.
n Now this made Jun,~ a very integrated character. In
other words, he was a 1rnan who was thoroughly with
lS
himself. Having seen ~tnd accepted his own nature
·y profoundly, he had a )kind of unity and absence of
conflict in his own nat,Jre, which had this additional
•e
lt
complication that I find s;o fascinating. He was the sort of
:h man who could feel anlxious, and afraid, and guilty,
without being ashamed of feeling this way. In other
:I.
words, he understood that an integrated person is not a
el
person who simply elimiinated the sense of guilt, or the
~. sense of anxiety from his life-who is fearless, and
0
wooden, and a kind of s~tge of stone. He's a person who
0
feels all these things, bu.t has no recrimination against
l,
himself for feelirtg them .
.d
This is to my mind a profound kind of humor. As
le
you know, in humor, th«~re's always a certain element of
a
malice. There was a talk g:iven on the Pacifica stations just
:I,
a little while ago, which ,was an interview with Al Capp,
tr
who made the point thlat he felt that all humor was
:k
fundamentally malicious . Now there's a very high kind of
It
humor, which is to laugl~ at oneself. The real humor is
not jokes at the expense c>f others, it's always jokes at the
f.
~.
.n
expense of oneself, and of course it has an element of
malice in it. It has malice towards oneself: the recognition
of the fact that behind th1e social role that you assume-

--137-
 TR1BU1rE TO CARL JUNG
.

behind all your prete1ntions to being either a good citizen,

or a fine scholar, c)r a great scientist, or a leading
politician, or physicialn, or whatever you happen to be-
behind this facade, there is a certain element of the
unreconstructed butm. Not as something to be
condemned and wailed over, but as something to be
recognized as contrilbutive to one's greatness, and to
one's positive aspect:, in the same way that manure is
contributive to the i:,erfume of the rose. Jung saw this,
and Jung accepted this.
I want to read al passage from one of his lectures,
which I think is one c:,f the greatest things he ever wrote,
and which has been a very marvelous thing for me. It was
in a lecture he dellivered to a group of clergy in
Switzerland, a considerable number of years ago, and he
writes as follows:
''People forget that even doctors have moral
scruples, and that certain patients' confessions are hard,
even for a doctor to s·wallow, yet the patient does not feel
himself accepted unle~ss the very worst in him is accepted
too. No one can brinit this about by mere words, it comes
only through reflec:tion, and through the doctor's
attitude towards him.self, and his own dark side. •
~

If the doctor ,wants to guide another, or even

accompany him a ste:p of the way, he must feel with that
person's psyche. Hie never feels it when he passes
judgement. Whether he puts his judgements into words, 4
•
or keeps them to himself makes not the slightest

• -138-
-
OUT OF THE TRAP

difference. To take the ,opposite position, and to agree

n,
with the person offhand:, is also of no use, but estranges
him as much as condem.nation.
- Feeling comes o•nly through unprejudiced
1e
objectivity. This sounds almost like a scientific precept,
,e
and it could be confw;ed with a purely intellectual,
)e
abstract attitude of mindl, but what I mean is something
to
•
quite different. It is a t,uman quality, a kind of deep
IS
. respect for the facts, for the man who suffers from them,
IS,
and for the riddle of suc~t a man's life. The truly religious
person has this attitude. ]He knows that God has brought
~s, all sorts of strange and i11conceivable things to pass, and
:e, seeks in the most curiou!. ways to enter a man's heart. He
as therefore senses in every1thing the unseen presence of the
•
tn Divine Will. This is wlhat I mean by ''Unprejudiced
1e Objectivity.,, It is a moral achievement on the part of the
doctor, who ought not to let himself be repelled by
·al sickness and corruption ..
d, We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
:el Condemnation does not !liberate-it oppresses. And I am
~d the oppressor of the pe1rson I condemn, not his friend
es and fellow sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that
·'s we must never pass jud1iement when we desire to help
and improve, but if the doctor wishes to help a human
1

~n being, he must be able tc, accept him as he is, and he can

at do this in reality, only when he has already seen and
es accepted himself as he is. Perhaps this sounds very
ls, simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In
:st

--139-
 TRIBUT'E TO CARL JUNG
•

actual life, it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so

acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral
problem, and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life.
That I feed the bc:ggar, that I forgive an insult, that I
love my enemy in tlrie name of Christ-all these are
undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of
my brethren, that I de> unto Christ. But what if I should
discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all
beggars, the most impru dent of all offenders, yea, the very
fiend himself, that thf~se are within me, and that I myself
stand in need of the arms of my own kindness, that I
myself am the enemy· who must be loved. What then?
Then, as a rule, the! whole truth of Christianity is
reversed. There is thein, no more talk of love and long-
suffering. We say to the brother within us, ''Rrrrr.. .'',
and condemn and ra~~e against ourselves. We hide him
from world, we deny eiv er having met this least among the
lowly in ourselves, ain d had it been God himself who
drew near to us in thi:s despicable form, we should have
denied him a thousar1d times before a single cock had
crowed.''
Well, you may tlnink the metaphors rather strong,
but I feel that they are not so needlessly, this is a very,
very forceful passage--and a memorable one in alljung's
works. Trying to he·al this insanity from which our
culture in particular has suffered, of thinking that a
human being can becoime hail, healthy, and holy by being
divided against himself in inner conflict, paralleling the

-140-
 OUT OiF THE TRAP

0 conception of a cosmiic conflict between an absolute

ll good and an absolute e,vil, which cannot be reduced to
any prior and underlyi111g unity.
I In other words, ou1r rage, and our very proper rage,
e against evil things whiclh occur in this world must not
•f over-step itself. For if ~Ye require, as a justification for
d our rage, a fundamental and metaphysical division
ll between good and evil, ~,e have an insane, and in a certain
y sense, schizophrenic 11niverse, of which no sense
lf whatsoever can be made. All conflict, Jung was saying, all
I opposition has its resolu.t ion in an underlying unity. You
t? cannot understand the 1rneaning of ''to be,'' unless you
'
lS
understand the meaning of '' not to be." You cannot
,,, understand the meaning of good, unless you understand
the meaning of evil. Even St. Thomas Aquinas saw this.
''
n For he said that just a.s the silent pause which gives
.e
sweetness to the chant, !iO it is suffering, and so it is evil
which makes possible tile recognition of virtue. This is
0
·e
not, as Jung tries to expllain, a philosophy of condoning
the evil. To take the opi,osite position, he said, to agree
d
with the patient off-hancl is also of no use. That estranges
him, the doctor, and est1ranges him, the patient, as much
,, as condemnation.
Let me continue further reading from this
's
extraordinary passage. c·cHealing may be called,'' Jung
tr
says, ''a religious probl,e m. In the sphere of social or
a
national relations, the st~lte of suffering may be civil war,
.g
and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of
.e
forgiveness and love of one's enemies. That which we

--141-
 TRIBUTE TO CARL JUNG
•

recommend, with the conviction of good Christians, is

applicable to external situations. We must also apply it
inwardly in the treatment of neurqsis. This is why
modern man has hearc:l enough about guilt and sin. He is
sorely beset by his ow11 bad conscience, and wants rather,
to know how he is tio reconcile himself with his own
nature-how he is to love the enemy in his own heart,
and call the wolf his b rother. The modern man does not
1

want to know in what way he can imitate Christ, but in

what way he can Uve his own individual Ufe, however
meager and uninteres1ting it may be.
It is because every form of imitation seems to him
deadening and sterile, that he rebels against the force of
tradition that would h:old him to well-trodden ways. All
such roads, to him, le::td in the wrong direction. He may
not know it, but he bt!haves as if his own individual life
were God's special will which must be fulfilled at all
costs. This is the sourc:e of his egoism, which is one of the
most tangible evils of the neurotic state. But the person
who tells him he is too egoistic has already lost his
confidence, and rightli, so, for that person has driven him
still further into his neurosis. If I wish to effect a cure for
my patients, I am fiorced to acknowledge the deep
significance of their ei~oism.
I should be blind indeed if I did not recognize it as a
true will of God. I mu!.t even help the person to prevail in
his egoism. If he succ:eeds in this, he estranges himself
from other people-h-~ drives them away, and they come
to themselves, as they should-for they were seeking to

-142-
 OUT C)F THE TRAP

s rob him of his sacred e1goism. This must be left to him,

.t for it is his strongest ancl healthiest power. It is, as I have
V said, a true will of God, ,which sometimes drives him into
s complete isolation. Ho\\rever wretched this state may be,
, it also stands him in goo,d stead for in this way alone, can
he get to know himsel1f, and learn what an invaluable
.•, treasure is the love of hiis fellow beings. It is, moreover,
only in the state of complete abandonment and
loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our
own natures.'' End of q1uote.
This is a very striking example of Jung's power to
tl
comprehend and integrate points of view, as well as
,f psychological attitudes that seem on the surface to be
11
completely antithetical. For example, even in his own
work, when devoting h1imself to the study of Eastern
V
e philosophy. he had so11ne difficulty in comprehending
!I the, let's say, Buddhistic: denial of the reality of the ego.
e But you can see that ir, practice what he was actually
:\
trying to get at, was mo·ving towards the same position
s that was intended in bo,t h the Hindu and the Buddhist
tl
philosophy about the NJture of the ego.
r
Just for example. as: the Hindu will say that the ••1••
principle in man. it is niot really a separate ego, but an
.J
expression of the univer.sal life of Brahman, or the God-
head. So Jung is saying h,ere, that the development of the
a
ego in man is a true \l,ill of God. And it is only by
:\
following the ego and de·veloping it to its full extent, that
f
e one fulfills the function which, you might say, is a
)
temporary illusion in m~ln's psychic life. He goes on and

·-143-
 TRIBUT'E TO CARL JUNG

says: ''When one has several times seen this development

at work, one can no longer deny that what was evil has
turned to good, and 1that which seemed good has kept
alive the forces of evil. The arch-demon of egoism leads
us along the royal 1road to that in-gathering which
religious experience dc~mands. What we observe here is a
fundamental law of lifie. And it is this that makes possible
the reunion of the wa1rring halves of the personality, and
thereby brings the civ il war to an end.'' End of quote.
1

In other words, h,e was seeing that, as Blake said, ''A

fool who persists in his folly will become wise.'' That the
development of egoism in man is not something to be
overcome or better integrated by opposition to it, but by
following it. It's almo:st, isn't it, the principle of Judo-
not overcoming what appears to be a hostile force by
opposing it, but by s,,..inging with the punch, or rolling
with the punch. And so, by following the ego, the ego
transcends itself, and :in this moment of insight the great
Westerner, who com.es out of the whole tradition of
human personality, w;hicb centers it upon the ego, upon
individual separateness, by going along consistently with
this principle, come,s to the same position as the
Easterner. That is to s,ay, to the point of view where one
sees conflict, which at first sight had seemed absolute, as
resting upon a primordial unity, and thereby attaining a
profound, unshakeable, peace of the heart, which can
nevertheless contain c:onflict, not a peace that is simply
static and lifeless, but a peace that passes understanding.

-144-
 OUT C>F THE TRAP

Jung began to see tlilem, I think, in a primitive way. I

think his archetypes are~ perhaps still not at the deepest
level of the patterns tli1at underly the world-and it's
interesting that in the <:::.G. Jung commentary, that he
wrote to a translation <>f a Chinese classic by Richard
Wilhelm, called, The Sec:~et of the Golden Flower. You may
a
remember that in that cc>mmentary he takes out the very
e
fascinating problem oif the dangers inherent in the
d
adoption of Oriental w.ays of life by Westerners-but
•
more particularly, the adoption of Oriental spiritual
practices such as Yoga. J'. remember I learned a great deal
e
from that essay, and api>reciated it very much in ever so
e
many ways, because even in my own fascination with
y
forms of Oriental philos,ophy, I've never been tempted to
- forget that I'm a Weste:rner. But, as I think this essay
y
over, I'm not sure that Jfung discouraged the practice of
g
Yoga for quite the right reasons.
0
I've found so often, the difficulty in Jung's ideas lies
lt
in his theory of history, ~which is, I feel, a hang-over from
•f 19th century theorie!, of history encouraged by
n
Darwinism. Namely tl1at there's a sort of orderly
h
progression from the ap.e, through the primitive, to the
e
civilized man. And of co1urse, naturally, at that time, that
.e
was all hitched in with the theory of progress. It was
lS
highly convenient for t}1e cultures of Western Europe,
a
which were then one up, on everybody else, to consider
n
themselves in the line of progress. When they visited the
natives of Borneo and A~ustralia, and so on, they would

--145-
 TRIBUl~E TO CARL JUNG

feel that they were 1:,erfectly justified in appropriating

their lands, and dotininating them, because they were
giving them the benefits of the last word in evolution.
Therefore, unde1r the influence of that sort of theory
of history, which is felt in the work of both Freud and
Jung, one gets the :feeling of there being a kind of
progressive developn1ent of human consciousness. Jung
is charitable enough to assume that because the Chinese
and Indian are immt~asurably older than ours, they've
had the possibility of' far more sophistication in psychic
development, even th.o ugh he feels, and probably rightly,
that there are things they can learn from us. But the
reason why he disc,ourages the Westerner from ·the
practice of Yoga is, h,e says, ''This is a discipline for a far
4
older culture than o,urs. which along certain lines, has •

progressed much further, and has learned certain things 1

•
that we haven't maste:r ed at all yet.•• And as he points out,
when somebody emi>races Vedanta, or Theosophy, or I
any Yoga school in the West, and tries to master a I
discipline of concentration in which they have to oust J

from their consciousr1ess all wandering thoughts, he says

•
that this, for a W este1rner, may be a very dangerous thing I
(
indeed-because just exactly what the Westerner may
(
need to do, is to allow free reign to his wandering
(
thoughts, and his im:agination, and his fantasy. Because
it's only in this way that he can get in touch with his I

unconscious, and tha1t his unconscious will not leave him I

in peace until he gets in touch with it. And Jung assumes
the members of Oric~ntal cultures have done this long
before they went in f~or Yoga practice.
-146-
•

OUT OJF THE TRAP

•

,g Now I don't think t:his is quite true. But I do think

re there are other reasons why Western people need to
l. exercise a good deal of discrimination and caution in
adopting Eastern disciplines and ways of life. In other
words, it's rather like tlite problem of taking medicine.
You know, if you don't feel very well, and you go to a
friend's medicine cabinert, and you sort of look it over,
and you see bottles of rinedicine in there, and you say,
''I'm sick, I need medicine.,, So you take some medicine,
•
lC any medicine will do-~>ut it won't. And according to
y, what's the matter with ,,ou, so the medicine has to be
,e prescribed.
1e I don't think that the things which some of the
ir Eastern disciplines are clesigned to cure are quite the
!S same things that we need . It's fundamental to my view of
~s the nature of such forms; of discipline as Buddhism and
lt, Taoism, that there are w;:ays of liberation from a specific
>r kind of confinement. T}1at is to say, there are ways of
a liberation from what I',ve sometimes called the social
st h,pnosis.
~s Every culture and ev,e ry society as a group of people
1g in communication with c~ach other has certain rules of
lY communication, and fro1n culture to culture these rules
1g differ in just the same way that languages differ. And a
se culture can hold together on very, very different kinds of
•
,lS
rules. I won't say an, ki11ds of rules, but very different
m kinds of rules, always provided that the members agree
es about them, whether th,e y're forced to agree, whether
1g

--147-
 TRIBU1rE TO CARL JUNG
•

they agree tacitly, or whatever the reason may be. These

1

rules are, in a way, ve·ry much like the rules of a game. In

other words, take a 1game like chess. You can have the
kind of chess we play,. with an eight-square board, or you
can have the kind of chess that the Japanese play with a
nine-square board. l1t doesn't make any difference, so
long as you both play on the same board and by the same
rules. Chess is a g:1me, and in the same way the
development of hum~,n cultures is also in a way a game-
that is to say, the elaboration of a form of life and the fun
of it, in a way, is the: fun of elaborating it in just some
interesting form, as t},e same is the fun of a game. The fun
of a game is that it has a certain interest. But it doesn't 4
•
follow that the rules c>f the game correspond to the actual
structure of human n:ature, or to the laws of the universe. 4
•
Because in every cult:ure it's necessary to impress upon 1
especially its younger members that these rules jolly well 1
have to be kept, the~r are usually, in some way or other 1
connected with the laLws of the universe, and given some 1
sort of divine sanctilon. There are indeed cultures in 1
which the senior men1bers of the group realize that that's I
a hoax, that that's as if it's made-up, and is done to terrify C

I
the young. When th,e y become senior members of the
culture themselves, tl~ey see through the thing, but they ,
don't let on, they kf~ep it quiet. They don't let out to f
those who are suppc,sed to be impressed that this was
really a hoax to get them to behave. t

-148-
•

•
OUT 01= THE TRAP

;e Well anyway, after :l great deal of careful study I've

ln come to the conclusion tl~at the function of these ways of
liberation is basically to make it possible for those who
have the determination ( :and we'll see why in a while), to
be free from the social ~lypnosis.
~o If you were a memlber of the culture of India at
almost any time betwef:~n maybe 900 B.C. and 1800
A.D., it would be, for y,ou, a matter of common sense.
- about which everybody ~lgreed, that you were under the
Ln control of a process callced Karma. Not exactly a law of
,e cause and effect, but a prcocess of cosmic justice whereby
Ln every fortune that occurred to you would be the result of
l't some action in the pa:st that was good, and every
al misfortune that occurrecl to you would be the result of
e. some action in the past t:h at was evil. Furthermore, that
,n this action in the past might not have been done in this
~11 present life. but in a fornrter life. It was simply axiomatic
er to those people that the~, were involved in a long, long
1e process of reincarnatio,n , reaping the rewards and
in punishments. There was 1not only the possibility of being
:'s reincarnated again in the: human form, but if you were
fy exceedingly good, you might be born in one of the
lC heavens, the paradises, a1nd if you were exceedingly bad
~Y you might be born for an ilnsufferable period of years, not
to forever, in a purgatory. 'The purgatories of the Hindus
as and Buddhists are just as :ingeniously horrible as those of
the Christians.

--149-
 TRIBU1rE TO CARL JUNG
,.

Well, of course, (everybody knows, I mean anybody

who seems to have arity sense, that all this imagination of
•
post-mortem courts c>f justice is a way of telling people, 1
''Well, if the secular 1police don't
•
catch you, the celestial 1
police will, and therei~ore you had better behave!'' It's an I
•
ingenious device for 1e ncouraging ethical conduct. I
Now remember, for a person brought up in that
climate of feeling w~tere everybody believes this to be '
t
•
true, it seems a matter of sheer common sense that it's so, I
and it's very difficult for a person so brought up not to f
believe that is the st:ate of affairs. Take an equivalent (

situation in our o~vn culture. It's still enormously a

difficult for most peo:p le to believe that space may not be 1
•
Newtonian space, th.a t is to say, a three-dimensional 1
continuum that extenlds indefinitely forever. The idea of i
a four-dimensional C\ltrve seems absolutely fantastic, and r
can't even be conce:~ived by people unversed in the a
mathematics of mod•~rn physics. Or again as I've often '1
pointed out, it's very· difficult for us to believe that the
forms of nature are nclt made of some stuff called matter. r
That's a very unnece:ssary idea from a strictly scientific C
"'
point of view, but it's awfully difficult for us to believe it. C
•
To believe, in other words, that there isn't this II
underlying stuff. Nc,t so long ago it was practically s
impossible for people:to conceive that the planets did not r
revolve around the ea·r th encased in crystalline spheres. It
took a very conside:rable shaking of the imagination '
r.
when astronomers be:gan to point out that this need not r
necessarily be so. d

-150-
•

OUT Of; THE TRAP

•

ly All right, so now let's go back to the problem of

>f somebody living in the culture of ancient India. Here it is,
e, it's a matter of common s,ense, you see, that he is going to
al be reborn. Now, for some perhaps exceedingly intelligent
person, who for one reaso•n or another discovers that this
idea is not so. After all, \\,hen you get such disciplines as
!t Vedanta and Buddhism, they say that the ultimate goal of
,e the discipline is a release f~rom the rounds of rebirth, and
:>, incidentally also ( which ils fundamental to it), a release
:o from the illusion that irou are a separate individual
lt confined to this body. Btnt so far as both of these things
ly are concerned, they alsc, say that the person who is
,e liberated from the round of rebirth, as well as· from the
al illusion of being an ego, sE:es that when he is liberated, the
)f process of rebirth an<l the whole cosmology of
td reincarnation and karma,, as well as the individual ego,
,e are in a way illusions. Th~lt is to say, he sees that they are
maya. •
,e I would like to transl:ate maya at this moment, not so
r. much illusion as a playfull construct, a social institution.
'•
IC So he sees, you see, that those things are not so, they are
,t. only pretended to be so. A.. nd you see, he ceases to believe
•
IS in karma and reincarnatiion and all that in exactly the
ly same way that a modern a1,nostic no longer believes in the
)t resurrection of the bod~, on the Day of Judgement. I
It know this to be so becalJ1se, although you will get very
many Hindus and Buddhists who say that they believe in
reincarnation and come over here and teach as part of the
doctrine of Vedanta or Buddhism, the most

--151-
 TRIBu·rE TO CARL JUNG

sophisticated and th e most profound (I'll say perhaps

1
l
profound, rather th;an sophisticated) Budd.h ists that I
have known, have said that they don't believe in it
•r
literally at all. And soi I could say, those that do believe in ()

it, believe in it simply because it's part of their culture, e

and they've not yet l,een able to be liberated from it. It ',
seems to me very funny indeed when Western people I
who become interes,t ed in Vedanta or Buddhism-in s
forms of discipline to liberate Hindus and Chinese C
•
people from certain social institutions-Western people 11
'
adopt it, and then al:s o adopt the ideas of reincarnation t.
and karma-from wl,ich these systems were designed to
liberate them! Of co1urse they adopt them because they s
feel it's consoling tha1t one will go on living. That wasn't tl
the point at all. Or, tl,at it explains something-that why fi
one suffered in this li:fe was not because the universe was
unjust, but because you committed some misdeed in the y
past. ~

And so, W estf;~rners who take up the Oriental (

doctrines in that spirit, unfortunately take up the very p
illusions ·from which these documents were supposed to n
be ways of deliveranc:e. Now that may be difficult to see,
just because so man y practicing Hindus and Buddhists
1
"
d
say they believe in reincarnation, and this whole process p
of the cycles of kar1ma and so on. They after all, are
practicing it, and they should know. When I look here, t)
there's a certain goc,d reason why they shouldn't. Of
course I'm making a111 exception of the Indian or Chinese d
who's been educatecJ in Western style. He ceases to SJ

-152-
-
OUT OF~ THE TRAP
-

ps believe maybe in the cosnlologies of his own culture, but

·I he's not liberated in the Buddhist sense, because in
it receiving a Western educ:ation he's become a victim of
in our social institutions instead, and then he's just
·e, exchanged, as it were, one·trouble for another. But, when
It you take the situation as it stands, or as it did stand in
1
le India, isolated from W,e stern culture, obviously no
in society can tolerate withiirt its own borders the existence
se of a way of liberation, a way of seeing through its
1le institutions, without feeli1t1g that such a way constitutes a
>n threat to Law and Order .
to Anybody who sees through the institutions of
~Y society, and sees them for, as it were, created fictions, ( in
l't the same way as a novel or a work of art is a created
1y fiction). Anybody who :sees that, of course could be
as regarded by the society a:s a potential menace. But then
:ie you may ask, ''But if Buddhism and Vedanta, and so on
were indeed ways of liberation, how could Indian or
:al Chinese society, or Burm,ese society have tolerated their
ry presence?'' Well, the an:;wer lies simply in the much
to misunderstood esotericis1n of these disciplines. In other
:e, words, those who taught them, the Masters of these
its disciplines, made it incre:~dibly difficult for uninitiated
iss people to get in on the iritside.
re Their method of initiating them, in a way, was to put
:e, them through trap, after trap, after trap, to see if they
)f could find their way thro,ugh. Such a master would not
se dream of beginning by c~isabusing the neophyte, and
to saying, ''Well you know, i1ll these things you heard from

--153-
 TRIBUifE TO CARL JUNG

your father and mother and teachers and so on were

fairytales. ,, Oh no, in1deed! He would do what is called in \;

Buddhism, exercise tl1e use of Upa1a. It's a Sanskrit word t

meaning, 'skillful de~vices,' or 'skillful means,' some.- V
times described as gi·ving a child a yellow leaf to stop it fl

crying for gold. Aftc~r all, when you approach one of

these ways of liberation from the outside, it looks like
something very, very fantastic. l,
Here you are literally going to be released from a a
literally, true and ph·ysical cycle of endless incarnations ti
in Heavens, and Hell:; and all kinds of states. Therefore, e
naturally to do that the neophyte is re.a dy for almost s·
anything. And what an undertaking that must be. What a e
wonderful, extraordi1n ary person you've got to become. tl
The teacher, because'. the fundamental problem in this C
whole thing is for hirn to get rid of the illusion, you see, d
that he's a separate eg:o . If there's no separate ego, or sort
of soul, then there's; nothing to be reincarnated. The 0
teacher has all kinds c>f complicated ways of doing it, but
all that he really says. to him is: ''Well now, if you will 0
look deeply into yo\J1r ego you will find out that it is a \\

non-ego, that yourself is the Universal Self,'' as he might d

say if he were a Ved~tntist. Or, if he were a Buddhist he f~
might say, ''If you loc>k for your ego, you won't find it- n
'
so look for it, and seie, and really go into it.,, And so he gi
gets the man meditatiing, and trying by his ego to get rid of p
his ego.
o·
cc

-154-
-
OUT OF= THE TRAP
-

re Well, that is a beautiful trap. It can last forever-

•
ln until one sees through i1t. In other words, this is like
~d trying to, you know, sweep the darkness out of a room
with a broom. Chuang-'Tse had a nice figure for it:
it ''beating a drum in search of a fugitive.,, That•s to say you
,f know, when the police go out because they had a
ce telephone call that was a burglar. They come racing to the
house with the siren, full blast, and the burglar hears it
a and runs away. Because, 1of course, to try and get rid of
lS the ego for one's advantage in some way, is an egotistic
e, enterprise, and you can't do it. And so of course, the
st student gets to the point where he begins to realize that
:a everything he does to get rid of his ego is egotistic. This is
e. the kind of trap in which the teacher gets him-until of
•
115 course, he comes to the p<>int of seeing that his supposed
e, division from himself i1rito say, ''I'' and ''me'', the
,r t controller controlling part: of me, and the controlled part
1e of me, the knower"and the~ known, and all that, is phony.
Lit There's no way of standing aside from yourself, in
ill other words and as it were, ''changing yourself'' in that
a way. But he discovers this finally, and at the same time he
~t discovers, almost at the l:ast minute you might say, the
fallacy, ( or rather the f~antasy nature), the game-like
- nature of the system of cc>smology which has existed to
1e give the basic form of the social institutions of his
of particular culture or socic~ty.
In other words, you rnay put it in another way. One
of the basic things which all social rules of convention
conceal is what I would c~all the fundamental fellowship

- ·155-
 TRIBU"fE TO CARL JUNG

between yes and no. !5ay in the Chinese symbolism of the g

•
positive and the neg:ative, the Yang and the Yin, ( you 11
know you've seen th:it symbol of them together like two
interlocked fishes), well, the great game, the whole a
pretense of most societies is that these two fishes are s
involved in a battle. There's the up fish and the down i:
fish, the good fish anld the bad fish. And they're out for V

killing. And the whitie fish is one of these days gonna slay C

the black fish. But W~len you see into it clearly, you realize
that the white fish an1d the black fish go together. They're
twins, they're really not fighting each other-they're
dancing with each other.
That you see thc~ugh, is a difficult thing to realize in a
set of rules in whi<:h yes and no are thei basic, and
formally opposed te1rms. When it is explicit in a set of
rules that yes and n,o, or positive and negative are the
fundamental principles. It is implicit, but not explicit,
that there is this fu1nd.amental bondage, or fellowship·
between the two. Thle theory is, you see, that if people
And that out, they w<>n't play the game anymore. I mean,
supposing a certain S4:>cial group finds out that its' enemy
group, which it's sup:p osed to fight, is really symbiotic to
it. That is to say, the enemy group fosters the survival of
the group, by prunin.g its population. It would never do
to admit that! It wc~uld never, never do to admit the
advantage of the enemy, just as George Orwell pointed
out in his fantasy oi: the future 1984, that a dictatorial

-156-
-
OUT Of~THE TRAP

~e government has to have atrl enemy, and if there isn't one,

)U it has to invent one. By th1is means, by having something
~o to fight, you see, by having something to compete
•le against, the energy of soc:iety to go on doing its job is
re stirred up. What the Buddha, or Bodhisattva type of
~n person fundamentally is, i.s one who's seen through that,
or who doesn't have to be sti1rred up by hatred, and fear, and
ay competition to go on with the game of life.
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--157-
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Ego . Death. Birth. and the Unborn I.II
Nothingness Philosophy of Nature
T ime ~tan's Place in Nature
Death Diamond Web
Cosmic Drama Doctorinc of the Void
T he ~lore It Changes Historical Buddhism
Go d Yoga Cara
~lcditation

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\Ve As O rganism Veil of Thoughts (Parts I-IV)
~l ysc lf: Concept or Confusion'? Early Chinese Zen Buddhism
Lintits o f Language (Parts I-IV)
Intellec tu al Yoga
She is Black Medit.ation
1.andscapc. Soundscape Philosophy of Meditation
!\Ian in Nature (Parts I-IV)
Wo rk as Play Sonic Meditation (Parts I-IV)

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