I went on to show how this historical myth is effectuated. That is to say, how we are all taught to believe in it. How our sense of identity is shaped by the family, by the school, by society. And yet how, at the same time, each one of us has a certain complicity in this. It's not something you can blame society for. When you try to fix the blame anywhere, I was pointing this out, it's impossible to do. Every time you succeed in getting rid of the blame, you take it back to the snake in the garden, and then to the law of God. And yet,

[01:04]

The more you pursue that sort of inquiry, everything is determined. Then you realize, or be a sinner, so signal it fails to realize, that when you establish deterministic connections between events in such a way that you are totally not responsible for what you do, The implication of this connection is that the events you described are not disconnected. That is to say, they are all one event. And so you are the event. So you're once again responsible. It's so funny about Skinner because he's such a militant behaviorist. And it's also so odd that a man who believes that all behavior is determined, or that any freedom of will is a complete delusion, should write me a book here, all in two, and should make recommendations for a certain change that's entirely great.

[02:12]

You see, he's an added reformer. Like Calvinists, who also believe in predestination, are very, very ardent do-gooders. Because, of course, he doesn't follow his thinking through. He doesn't see that causality is an unnecessary idea. What you have is these events, these separate compartments, and you've named them as distinct events. And the same goes for things, because a thing is the same as an event. There's no difference except that you use a noun for a thing and a verb for an event. But when you see you have split events apart and you've forgotten that you've done that in the first place, then you want to find out how they're connected. You invent a ghost called causality to be responsible for the connection of one event with another.

[03:16]

We don't need the ghosts. All we have to realize is that the split between the events was arbitrary. They were the same event, only an event has varying features in it, just as a tree, which is a thing, has trunk and branches and leaves. But they all go together. We never saw a leaf growing in mid-air in no relation to a trunk. Same way you don't see human heads wandering around, or feet just pattering across the grass. I think the being is all at peace. I mean, it is possible to live a sound, deprived existence if you have limbs amputated or teeth extracted and so on. But after a certain point, if you will stop existing altogether, it would pull you apart enough. But you see, a leg doesn't grow on a human body in the same way as a wheel or a stick can to an ornamental being. when you were an embryo, you had embryonic legs, and gradually the whole thing swelled and grew, and assumed certain proportions all over.

[04:24]

But you weren't screwed together. Although you may have been screwed in, but you weren't screwed. So, in the same way, therefore, that the various so-called parts of our body arise together, or as the Chinese would say, arise mutually, so we exist in our physical environment. Just as when you watch the behavior of water, you can see pulses in it, you can see forms in it, you can see patterns. So in a very similar way, we are patterns, of the universal energy. And just as the whirlpool is a constant pattern in water, but no water stays put in it, so in much the same way we are a constant pattern of physical energy in which nothing stays put.

[05:30]

In the same way that a given club, a golf club, is a so-and-so country club, and remain such for years, but all the membership changes, all the buildings change. So we do, because what the club consists in is a pattern of behavior. And so, too, we are patterns of behavior, but we are in a disorderly connected the entire universe and when we die, we might simply say the universe has stopped waving in this particular way that we called John Doe and so to ask what happens to John Doe when he's dead is like asking what happens to your lap when you stand up because lapping is really what you're doing when you sit down, you're lapping Just like your fisting when you close your hand. The fist is the thing, it's the process. Because it branches, the minute you open the eye.

[06:32]

So if you look upon our beings and everything, our doings, our events, it becomes very simple to realize that if anything can be said to be doing us, it is everything you live, the whole total energy of the cosmos. And this is our self, if we have any self at all. So Skinner sticks to his causal connections and his determinism without seeing what this determinism implies. Now, you see, the minute you see what it implies, that there aren't separate events. that one of them then the determinism idea completely vanishes because to establish a deterministic point of view you have to have two factors the one that determines and the one that is determined the active and the passive something that is pushed around by an external force

[07:52]

But now we are in a position where there isn't anything to be pushed around. The patterns aren't something pushed around by energy. They are the energy. They are forms of the energy. They're not shoved. You see, that's another thing. All kinds of determinism. Again, go back to the beginning of 19th century science, to the work of Newton and to Descartes. they go back to a model of the universe, which we won't get called fully automatic, but we will call it the Juliet model. All these ideas of atoms, our original thought of atoms, were as balls, like trigger balls, that were all being knocked around by each other. And so we still have that kind of mechanics, Newtonian mechanics. It's very, very strong in psychological thinking. When you hear of motivations, of drives, of purges, of outbursts, as a matter of fact, along with the Billion Model, a very powerful model in psychological thinking, is the Hydraulic Model.

[09:08]

In psychoanalysis, the Hydraulic Model plays a great part. We talk about the Damned Up, thought of as a torpedo, stream of consciousness. All sorts of figures like that enter in. And so the mechanics of hydraulics, the mechanics of quills, all involve a view of the world as atomized into particles, which are definitively separate from each other, and which are pushed around, and so the human being becomes a particle in the sense that although he is composed of many particles, nevertheless he constitutes a particle which is pushed around by environmental and hereditary forces.

[10:12]

But when you realize that the analysis of the world into particles as if you were to say well what is really here is the particles everything else is a kind of construction of that these are the basic building blocks and they are what is really here what is really going on you are taking a medieval school of thought to an extreme. We know in medieval philosophy there were two great combative schools. One was called nominalism and the other realism. Realism then didn't mean what it means today. Realism was the belief in universals, that universals or ideals, again not moral ideals but ideal forms, really existed.

[11:23]

That is to say that every human being was an instrument of a universal called humanity. And humanity exists in the same way as a tree exists, according to realistic thought. The nominalists, on the other hand, got the name of their school from the fact that they said, universal, it is only nominal. They say only in name. There is not such an entity as mankind. There are simply people. This doesn't happen. But now, if you press nominalism through to its conclusion, there isn't such a thing as an individual human being. There is only a collection of particles. I mean, particles have an inconvenient way of being divisible. With every new step in physics, we've got to molecules, and we found atoms, and we found electrons, we found neutrons, neutrinos, we found mesons, protons, and finally antimatter.

[12:26]

And when nobody knows, both go to snot. So you finally, in your endeavor to find the real particles, you start splitting sets of dots infinitely. And somehow you get a feeling that somewhere back along the line, you missed the point. You've got to go back and make another book. Because you see. Of course, one feature that all this way of thinking leaves out, you look at particles. You can look at a collection of balls or of stars, but what have you forgotten when you were looking? I'm going to talk a bit more about what I call the myopia of consciousness. You ignore the space between them. as if it wasn't any importance, as if it were nothing, you see. And that simply because the way we think, as I think is sufficiently proved in Gestalt psychology, the way we think is that we notice, but you cannot notice without at the same time ignoring.

[13:46]

You notice the figure and ignore the background. you notice what moves and ignore what is relatively still. Despite the fact that you couldn't see the figure without the ground, or you couldn't notice motion without something relatively still, but you screen that out. Our senses are in the first place a screen. They respond only to a very, very narrow band of the total spectrum of measurable vibrations. And they screen out x-rays, cosmic rays, gamma rays, and so on. You have to have special instruments to notice them. But after our senses have screened the physical world, our consciousness screens it even more. And we respond to sensory, physical, all kinds of things that never enter into our consciousness at all. So in this process of ignoring, one of the most important things that we ignore is space.

[14:56]

And we don't see that space is as real as solids. That in fact, the reality of the physical world is a space-solid thing, not solids in space. then arouses the interest of physicists to begin to talk about properties of space, curved states, expanding states, just in the same way that architects are aware that states are important, and painters are aware that states are something rare. I mean, consider the motion of your hand like this. the molecules of your hand have vast spaces between them relative to their sides. So that if you magnified your hand so that a molecule was beside a tennis ball, you'd look out of the window and you'd see a flight of tennis balls moving around in the sky, apparently all moving together as one, but with no strings attached between them.

[16:06]

I think this is extraordinarily odd. But there's something that we don't understand yet, does it? About a space relationship between. They have, I noticed, properties. And it's in here, of course, Dahlgren of Germany. research on gravitation gravitation is very possibly not a form of magnetism but a form of the shape of space something of this kind but we ignore it anyway space isn't there for all practical purposes and so this is what the particulate theory of the world tends to overlook But, of course, there have been philosophies, metaphysics, which went in exactly the opposite direction.

[17:16]

They ignored part of the Pository of God as great. And those forms of philosophy, which generally go under the name of idealists, and, let's say, Berkeley, to Hegel, and to some extent the Buddhists, tend to be saying that space is the basic reality. But they also equate space with consciousness. It was apparent to man living before 1500, it was part, as far as we know, it was part of that common sense that space was the same thing as your mind. And to see things in space was the same as to see them in your mind. Dante will reflect this kind of thinking. And so you could perceive that an infinite space or infinite mind as being, I mean, when people try to formulate an idea of God that's more or less logisticated, instead of thinking of an old dead woman or a girl who's grown, they think of infinite space.

[18:30]

But again, you see, this is sort of one-sided. Attitude that what it there is not just space But something we don't have a main for space solid and the two are in a polar relationship to each other If you don't have one without the other they are the fundamental That the Chinese would say the yang and the yin the yang is the positive the solid the masculine and the space of the yin Would like the enclosing the receptive and the feminine The state appears to be passive, the solid appears to be active. But they are terms of each other, and our intellectual thinking is unable to think of and is unattainable to it. Or we have difficulty in doing that, because all intellectual and logical thinking is in an either-or dynamics. because a logical thinking is based on classification.

[19:35]

It is a sorting of experience into intellectual pigeonholes. And the nature of a pigeonhole is such, the function of a pigeonhole is you ask the question, is the thing in or is it outside? Is you in or is it away? And the fundamental either or is possibly part of the way we think, because neurons either fire or don't. Computers work on a zero-one system of binary arithmetic. And out of that, either-or, we construct fabulous patterns. But what we can't quite get into our ordinary logic is that either and error are not mutually The inside and the outside of a class, although from one point of view they are mutually exclusive, from another point of view are inseparable.

[20:42]

You cannot have the inside unless you also have the outside and the boundary between them is shared and common. And that's the thing we don't notice, you see. That's what we don't know. Now, why not? I don't know, it may have something to do with the zero-one nature of our whole neurological structure. But I think, on the other hand, that since it is possible for a human being, in some sort of a non-logical way, to be aware of yet some nodes sitting together, One of the things that ever so many people report as a result of LSD experiments is they suddenly realize that something that they have great difficulty explaining to their friends, to their service server, that things don't get better.

[21:58]

They see that Inside implies outside. That self implies other. You wouldn't know you were yourself unless there was something you could fear to be other. You wouldn't know what other meant unless you knew what self means. And the person instantly sees that that's not a separation but a connection. So under that state of consciousness, that is, relieved of the myopic, ignoring qualities of ordinary conscious attention, you become aware of connection. And that's why people start to describe the experience as harmonious. They don't mean harmonious in the sense that it's sweet, but harmonious in the sense of concordant.

[23:04]

reciprocal, related, making sense, fitting, all of a piece, is not the feeling of common innocence. And you become, for example, aware of that all defined forms have fuzzy edges. As if, you know, in order to have a line of particles which is clear, there are the square core particles, as it were, I'm reading social terminology now, which form, as it were, the backbone of this shape. And then along the edges, there are all kinds of little ones that are dancing off, you see, and maybe kind of cops along there, saying, hi-ya, keep it right, keep it right, keep it right, see? And the little things are bouncing, and they're not going to keep it right, quite. But if they didn't have that door out away from the core, the form would have no stone.

[24:08]

Meaning, because they want some revolutionaries in the table, might have to go clean through it. They wouldn't be able to stand up. But those revolutionaries are being kept in line so the table doesn't explode. You see? Now, then when you see that, you suddenly realize that all sorts of human beings, we think of as deviant, or it's wrong, or it's down at the bottom. Look at the scale of society. At the top, there are people living in houses. At the bottom, there are bums in skin row and frightful creatures and awful swans and cow-cows. You suddenly see respect move like this and realize that what we've done is change our level of magnification about people. While we were looking at it like this, we stepped back and looked at it like that. You said, well, J.B., don't they go together? How would you know you were rich if somebody weren't poor?

[25:14]

How would you know you were nice people living in the better districts? Unless the people you know the truth about. How would you talk about? In order to know you were nice people, it's a powerful enough if you put up. You know? So you suddenly start seeing this. And then because of that, you see, you get this impression of an anonymous world. And that that becomes deeper. refuting that self-inclined other. You see then that your self, in some way by polarity, involves everything that you have hitherto defined other than yourself. And that kind of connectedness becomes extraordinarily clear and it's only difficult to talk about.

[26:23]

Because it is the major point screened out in most human thinking. It's not unthinkable. Just as it has been difficult for lay people to understand relativity. Just as it was difficult for people to understand that the world was round. that the planets were not supported in crystal spheres. Bellies, when they were new ideas, were very, very difficult to listen to. They were directly opposed to concepts. Now we are getting accustomed to the relativity idea. So soon it will be possible for everybody to understand this idea at perfect decay. Something that's not almost an idea, but something that is on some tape. was quite comfortable. The go witness, I call it, of things. Well, you see, part of the problem of understanding go witness is not merely that our perceptual framework has been inadequate for it, but also that our way of using our senses

[27:48]

isn't quite accurate. And that is because, as I mentioned yesterday, we have worked out a way of using our consciousness since many thousand years which has specialized in an analytical way of eating things, hence the particles, hence the question for the particles, you see. We found that way of looking very, very profitable as a magical tool, that is to say, as a way of exercising a control over nature. But just as all those species, which in the course of evolution overdid a certain adaptive feature, tend to be quite thin.

[28:52]

A big or two tiger's teeth would grow through its lower jaw. The dinosaur had to have two brains because it was so big. One in its head and the other in its mouth. and the brain didn't always get together. By the Ford Foundation, when they had an office in Pasadena and an office in New York. So, in this commended specialisation in consciousness of captioning, The advantages of it also show up some very serious disadvantages. In other words, to make the effort to sustain this kind of attention, we've had very much to exercise individual separateness.

[30:00]

We've had to rub that in. And always the great task for the teacher in the school is to say to the children, now pay attention. I want your attention. And so we do all sorts of funny things. We shout and wear orange shirts and all sorts of funny things to get your attention. Now, maybe, though, if I were really still called the teacher, I wouldn't try to get your attention. I would get the message over to you without your knowing it, because we communicate with Well, I could listen the whole time. I tried to make friends with my wife while she was asleep. She phoned me to speak with earphones on, with me to music. And I changed the record, put on a record of myself reciting haiku poems.

[31:05]

And I turned up the volume and found that the girl was picking me up. Then I woke her up and said, tell me how you're doing. I hope she would recite one that I wrote automatically. Anyway, now, in the great human development of specializing with their conscious attention and therefore the kind of controls that go with it. We have neglected the other faculty and significantly seen a great deal of phytotherapeutic thinking descending from Freud

[32:06]

We speak of the two aspects of man as the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious mind, and that seems to be an extraordinarily paradoxical expression. How could you have a mind with this unconscious? Well, the terminology is not satisfactory. And furthermore, although Jung is quite different in the two-step, and in some way God actually has put him, for his conception of the unconscious, apparently to me he's definitely something rather unintelligent. A complex of blind forces. The animal in us. The primitive in us.

[33:09]

And even in Samyulian thinking, I'm thinking of first psychic energy, Vajrasattva, it's a great discussion about the root of our nature. There is a sort of primordial ground full of reptilian creatures that live by what is called in the Hindu philosophy, the law of the star, the Mahatmyaya. where he can be eaten and broke and calculate and eat and calculate and eat and go on and go on and so on. This is somehow, you see, the idea that this thing is fundamental for life. It goes with the same idea, you see, that the fundamental energy of the universe, metaphysically speaking, is near energy. It's in some way good. So it did, you know, without any characteristic quality or anything like that, you see. But that was, we came out of the psychology that then required a put-down notion of the nature of the universe, the reaction against the idea of the token of God.

[34:28]

You can look, though, at the unconscious or, as interesting, non-conscious functioning of the human organism, and while you may not approve of some of this from the kind of British standpoint, nevertheless, you must admit that such an organisation that all the neurologics which begin to defy our intellectual logic, then, is remarkable to say the least. And what we should, we shouldn't call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact, it's all highly conscious. It's aware, let's say, it's sensitive, it's responsive. But it doesn't seem to require particular awareness.

[35:45]

It doesn't require attention. It works without that. But if we are somehow not with this kind of awareness, we are living an awful lot. If we act as a society, that events are indeed distinct from each other, then we've got to do one of two things. on the one hand we've got to say this event in particular is the cause of the trouble or else we're going to say yeah the events are so related to each other by causality that you can't blame anyone alone because what caused it to be the way it is

[37:02]

But you see, in either case, the difficulty in the problem is created by treating the events as really separate. So then if, to go back to what I might call the ecological scene, you isolate a given event and say, look, this is the thing. You just change this. you'll find that this specific bacteria is knocked out by this specific drug. All right, knock it out. And then you get rid of this condition. And this works beautifully for a time. Until suddenly new problems start coming up. You're keeping too many people alive. The world is becoming cluttered with people. Or, then what are you going to do?

[38:09]

All right, now, the specifically here, you see, that's the next thing. We're going to interfere there, and we're going to make it possible for people to go out making love, but not so many people come out as a result of it. Well, in time, that's going to create some trouble, too. who just doesn't know what it will finally do to people to interfere with the fundamental reproductive cycles. I mean, it will get by. We'll muddle through it. We'll muddle through everything else. But you've got to keep going. Once you start moving in and interfering with a certain type of nature, you've got to jump in somewhere else and somewhere else and somewhere else and somewhere else until you are in the situation of the sorcerer's apprentice. And you can't build that You can't say, oh, well, that's not interfering at all. Because then you suddenly discover that your existence is interference. To be is to interfere.

[39:11]

Because everything you do affects everything else. And even if you step up and spill, and don't know the muscle, and don't even whittle the thought, you're still interfering. After all, you're free in air. You're exerting a certain weight on the planet. All kinds of bacteria are buzzing in and out of you all the time. Just like you're an old tree, out with the earth, come around, and things fly in and out of you, and so on. Here I tell you. And the tiny little interference, it's like sitting in a room. And now they're incredible, aren't they? Why? See, what the moral of the whole thing is very simple. The moral of the whole thing is, you see, that you as an event are not really different from all other events. There is just one event.

[40:14]

And that's what's going on. That's what really is you. Totally, you can't admit it. Because the game we're playing in this culture won't allow you to do that. Because it would be tantamount to saying, I am God. And with our conception of God. That's the very socially destructive thing to say. Because when a person says, I am God, We said, OK, I'll do that great with you. And he put on a dark suit. But when anybody tells Don Garland about the assumption that he said he ought to be denigrated, I'm gone, and all you can push is bow down, not for respect, you see.

[41:24]

Or, then they say, there's a comeback to that. You haven't been able to bow down for respect. You are a new God to fallen earth. Because God is supposed to know how everything is done. Now, in India, there are gods that work differently. of their god, because all the gods in India are really one. They don't know how they're doing things. They don't have to know. Just like you don't have to know how you open and close your mouth. You just do it. You don't have to know how to grow hair. You just grow it until you die. And then you can say, well, I've always got not growing any hair, but with a lot of thought. The Hindu god, you see, he'd represent a category of ten arms, say, Shiva, or Kama, with one thousand arms.

[42:29]

And if they were asked, how do you use so many arms at once? They would say, I never need to think about it, I just use them. But you see, when we say, how do you know What the question we're asking from our Western background is, can you put it into words? Can you explain how you do it? And what we mean by explain is translate into language. Well, does all that say to you yet? I guess I can explain how I do it, but it would take forever. because I would have to explain this and how that goes with that and that goes with that and that goes with that and finally we get somewhere near explaining how I created the universe but after all why sit around and talk about it forever and ever when you can actually do it so when from the Hindu point of view God

[43:37]

is regarded not as know-it-all, in the sense of knowing in words how the trip is done, and not necessarily as someone to be peculiarly singled out for reference. But the Hindu does the same, Godhead, as in everybody. And so, as a matter of fact, when meeting in the street, The Hindu doesn't in a way practically acknowledge that his neighbour is God, because he makes the salutation. And that is honour to fit in you. And if so, likewise it cannot. I mean, it's that Chinese shake hands with themselves. They don't. They're making the same gesture of reverence and respect to another colour. I was, you're it too. We shake hands. And that's quite clear that the right hand doesn't contain the sword.

[44:46]

The tazza beside doesn't, it's a physical body contact that's pleasing to it. Here then you see is the view of the individual no longer separated from everything that happens by being defined as an individual event. Now watch how this happens. In childhood, you see, is the moment at which this particular game lay on us. Because every child, as we were discussing in the discussion period this morning, is as soon as possible taught to identify himself and his property.

[45:57]

What is, who Tommy is and what belongs to Tommy and so on. And so what the child is told is that you are, in the eyes of your friends and parents and so on, you are responsible. You are a separate, independent source of actions. And if we like what you do, we'll give you goodies, and if you don't like what you do, we'll blame you about it. Now, let's think about this situation for a moment. People say to the child, you are free. You are an independent source of action. But the implication is, and I told you it better be. You see? It's saying, it's the paradox. You must be free. Now, the way she puts the must on is that It's very difficult, practically impossible for an individual human to resist social conditions.

[47:03]

For example, you could play a game. You could send two people out of the room. And then the teacher says to the rest of the group, now when these people come back, we're going to set out two chairs here. And we don't know which one of them will sit in which chair. But everybody, the one who sits in that chair, we will agree with everything he says. But the one who sits in that chair, we will disagree with everything he says. And you may find that the person who sits in the agreed chair is a very inarticulate kind of stumbling person. And the person who sits in the disagreed chair is very keen-minded and very articulate. So within a few minutes of this conversation, provided the two don't know the rules of the game, the inarticulate guy in the agreed chair will be making a very good conversational scene with the group. The articulate lie in the disagreed share is going to be stammering and flustered because the group exercises such power in controlling any behavior of any one of its members.

[48:20]

Now, if this is true of an adult, just think what it is for a child. There is no way in which a child could resist the definition of itself as a free and independent being. You see, just because this definition is not true, for that very reason it is made to seem to be true. The child cannot resist the conditioning. The conditioning is defining him as free by the very technique through which he is not free. Do you want that people grow up with Jews? And so that is why there is a huge problem, and it's why there's no sense of something being wrong. Why they're all blocked in some way. This curious definition, which takes, of course, the classical form of a double bind, down if you do and down if you don't,

[49:27]

So, when the child is isolated in this way, he feels voluntary, but at the basis of being voluntary, he's involuntary. He feels involuntary. I mean, but things happen to him. And yet, they can kill him. It's brutal, you see. Also, by virtue of being defined in this way, he doesn't belong. This was all part of the game, because when the children came into existence, you know, people said, Little children should be seen and not heard.

[50:37]

Yeah, all right, we'll wait and see. You know, if that child does something wrong and says it's sorry. No, it's not enough to say you're sorry. We'll see whether you're really sorry over the next few days. Will you repeat this time the first day of your game? And, you know, the child. I don't know what's going on here. He doesn't really know what sort of a game this is, but the child is made to feel on to blame. Maybe, maybe, maybe, if you don't care. And so, coupled with this, coupled with the definition of himself as being separate, it is therefore a very deep and important toggle planted against the recognition which the child has intuitively at the beginning. That his life, individuality, body, or whatever you want to call it, is inseparable from all this.

[51:47]

That it's simply a hoax that himself is the so-called ego, But what myself and yourself really is, is that works. It includes all galaxies or whatever. Only, just as when you take a chicken and you put it deep on a chalk line, the chicken can't get off the line. So you could make a person's awareness of self myopic. You could say, now listen, you're you, see? And it's called challenge. And that's that. And you better be you, because we want you in a class. We want you in a ball. Get the game. And so, although however much you may have a sneaking suspicion in the back of your mind, and who doesn't, you know? You have a sneaking suspicion in the back of your mind that all goes not well with the

[52:54]

But somehow or other, you have a very funny memory of having always been around. And everybody knows that nobody would agree. There's a little Latin poem that says, Officially, not even any truth about the past. Unanticipated. A carriage with four horses may be driven through. There is a seed at this day. Nobody may admit to being who they really are. You are. God? But in reality, everybody knows it.

[53:58]

But it's part of not admitting this, a very important element in the fully automatic market game of the universe and our common sense that we now have. But this is quite inadmissible. There really is nothing behind it all.

[54:19]

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