Many spoken lectures of Alan Watts, the address again, MEA, Box 303, SOS-809-4965, and we'll repeat the address at the end of the broadcast today. Now here is Alan Watts with the talk, Ghosts. There's an old Cornish litany that runs from ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us. And I like to connect it with another saying, which I heard once from a professor of mathematics, Professor Davis at Northwestern, when he said, it's amazing how many things there are that aren't so. I've been looking again recently at a book which is one of the most important contributions to modern philosophy, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

[01:06]

And despite its complicated-sounding title and the intricacy of some of the reasoning in it, it's basically an extraordinarily simple and extremely cogent piece of reasoning. The thing about it that fascinated me so much, and some others, is the astonishing similarity of Wittgenstein's point of view to that of Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular. This was also noticed by Paul Weinpaul, who's professor of philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who once wrote an article on the subject. But let me quote a passage from the end of the book. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear

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could not then say wherein this sense consisted? There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself. It is the mystical. The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy. And then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other. He would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy. But it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way. He who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless. When he has climbed out through them, on them, over them, he must, so to speak, throw away

[03:23]

the ladder after he has climbed up on it. He must surmount these propositions. Then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. I suppose that last sentence is one of the most often quoted passages in the whole literature of modern philosophy, rather reminiscent of Laozi, saying, those who speak do not know. Those who know do not speak. But as one looks over certain illustrations and images in the passage, the student of Oriental philosophy finds them extraordinarily familiar. The idea of throwing away the ladder after you've climbed up on it. That directly parallels the ancient Buddhist simile of the Buddha's doctrine being a raft to cross a river. To cross from the shore of samsara to the shore of nirvana.

[04:26]

From life lived, in other words, as a vicious circle to the life of liberation. It goes on to say, after you've crossed the river, you don't pick up the raft and carry it with you. You leave it behind. And so in the same way, Zen teachers have often made the remark that all the doctrines that the Buddha taught were nothing in a way but obstacles. The doctrine is sometimes likened to giving a child a yellow leaf to stop it crying for gold. And so in the same way, Wittgenstein suggests that the whole task of philosophy is really to get rid of itself. I mean, in rather the same way, the task of a doctor is to put himself out of business. Of course, he never succeeds because people keep getting sick. But if he was 100% successful, he'd lose all his patients because they wouldn't be ill anymore. And so in the same way, a philosopher of this kind is very rarely out of business because

[05:31]

there are still always people with what we might call intellectual sicknesses, bothered by fantastic and non-existent problems. And so too, we can see another parallel, where he says, the right method of philosophy would be this, to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy. It's just the same thing when the old Zen masters were asked, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism? And one of them answered, three pounds of flax. What has that got to do with philosophy? What has that got to do with things of the spirit? But you see what it is. It's a perfectly ordinary, everyday remark. I know there was another story rather like this. There was an old master called Goso. And one of his students came to him one day and said, how am I getting on in my study

[06:32]

of Zen? Oh, he said, you're all right, but you have a trivial fault. Well, what's that? You've altogether too much Zen. Well, said the student, if one is studying Zen, isn't it the most natural thing in the world to be talking about it? And the master replied, but when it's like an ordinary, everyday conversation, it's somewhat better. Now this may appear at first sight to be a kind of philistinism. If in other words, the most spiritual discourse that one can have is, good morning, how do you do, nice day, isn't it? Does that not reduce all the great speculations of the human intellect, the great quests of human intelligence, to mere prosaic, everyday matters? Well it depends. You know, extremes often have a deceptive resemblance between each other. Very often, parallels have been drawn between the wisest of men and idiots, or between great

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sages and children, or between saints and drunkards. For in rather the same way that the highest and the lowest notes of the musical scale are alike inaudible, and yet extremely different. So in a somewhat similar way, the person who's been through the whole thing, the whole quest of wisdom, the whole study of philosophy, ends up deceptively like a stupid man who never heard of philosophy in his life. You know the Zen saying, when I knew nothing of Buddhism, mountains were mountains and waters were waters. But when I had studied it a great deal, mountains were no longer mountains, and waters were no longer waters. But when I had thoroughly understood the whole thing, and arrived at the abode of peace, mountains were once again mountains, and waters once again waters. Something rather similar happens here. Because you see, what Wittgenstein is really saying is that there is no problem of life,

[08:40]

in the sense in which we ordinarily use that phrase. And that seems an almost astounding affront to our common sense. Life not a problem. We see it as nothing but problems. We regard ourselves in a morning, noon, and night struggle to solve the great problem of existence. And for some people this problem is, why does the universe exist? For other people the problem is, how am I going to get enough to eat? And therefore, when you take it at one extreme or the other, why does the universe exist or how am I going to get enough to eat? Who can say that life is not a problem? And yet here is this audacious suggestion that what we are bothering about is a ghost. It's something that isn't really there. But you know, when we look at the history of science, we find to what an extraordinary sense science has solved problems by dissolving them.

[09:43]

I mean, such things, for example, people have spent years and years and years, hours and hours of thought, trying to invent a mechanical contraption that would be in perpetual motion. Think of the trouble they would save themselves if they'd realized it can't be done. Or they've tried to find a construction for trisecting an angle with a straight edge and compass and it can't be done. And now it's been proved that it can't be done. And how much trouble would have been saved? Or think again of trying to square the circle. Or imagine, for example, people thinking for centuries that the planets revolved about the earth because they were encased in crystalline spheres. Now the funny thing is they knew they were encased in crystalline spheres. Why? You could see right through them. And yet that the whole problem of how the spheres were moved, how there was a primum mobile, an outmost sphere that gave rotation to all the others, it simply disappeared.

[10:47]

The spheres are presumed now not to be there at all. And it's much easier to think of the solar system without the spheres. In the same way, people jolly well knew that the planets revolved about the earth in circles. Perfect circles. And it was a considerable shock when Kepler proved that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. So too, we knew, we were perfectly sure for centuries, that light propagated itself through a mysterious continuum called the aether. And to our astonishment, we found out that there isn't any aether. And in so many ways, just ordinary physical science, you see, is an act of understanding the world more clearly by ceasing to ask misleading questions. And exactly the same sort of thing happens, too, in psychotherapy. One of the characteristics of neurotic behavior, you know, is it's repetitive.

[11:53]

The neurotic personality keeps going through unsuccessful life patterns, again and again and again, and nothing seems to be able to stop it. Now this kind of behavior is exactly what a Buddhist would mean by saṃsāra. The round, or the rat race, of birth and death, that is to say, of life as we ordinarily live it. Because it is a round, it is a vicious circle, for the reason that we keep trying to solve problems that are not simply overwhelmingly difficult, but problems that are not problems at all. They only look like problems. And so when we tackle, you see, impossible questions, I mean, for a simple example, if

[12:54]

you really think it means something to ask, why is a mouse when it spins, and then try and find out, it'll never make any sense till the cows come home. In the same way, Buddhist imagery likened this to looking for the horns of a hare, or the child of a barren woman, or the beard of a eunuch. And thus, things go round and round and never come out, when the question being asked is an absurd question, is a nonsense question. Therefore what brings cure, healing, say to a neurotic personality, is the insight that the problem that he was trying to solve was no real problem at all. Now, take for example, some of the many ghosts which haunt our minds.

[13:57]

We say, for example, that we all have an instinct to survive, and a lot of people thus treat the problem of life as, how am I to survive? And one might almost be a little cautious about relieving people of this problem, lest they should lose the impetus to go on doing their work. But that also, impetus to go on doing your work, is another ghost. We think we are driven, you see. We think that what we do has these mysterious things behind it. Like, for example, people say, we always choose, make our decisions on the basis of a pleasure principle. We always choose in accordance with what we prefer. And of course, when our choice is limited to alternatives, all of which are rather unpleasant, we choose the lesser evil. Now, what does this actually say? We always choose what we prefer is simply another way of saying, we always choose what

[15:03]

we choose. For there is no way of showing what it is that we prefer, except in the fact that we choose it. See, it's very important simply to keep your eye on what is being done, and to describe that. And if you describe it clearly enough, and well enough, you will probably find the ghost of instinct disappeared. Thus, you see, when we talk about an instinct for survival, what is this saying? What is the evidence for the fact that there is an instinct for survival? There is no evidence, except that, in fact, people survive, until they don't. And this is rather odd, because what happens to the instinct for survival when people don't survive? Well, Freud thought he solved this problem by inventing a death wish, a death instinct. But that, too, is something as phony as the survival instinct. And the whole problem is much more simply described if we get rid of both of these ghosts.

[16:06]

So, in this way, we find that when we try to explain some kind of behavior, some kind of activity, by supposing that there is a motivating force, a sort of incarnate spook behind the whole thing, what has really happened is that we haven't described what's going on sufficiently clearly. Now this comes out in another way. When we try to describe anything at all, and think that we are describing something that, as it were, exists all by itself, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, whose face just hung all by itself in midair. I mean, supposing we have, we draw the Cheshire Cat, and here he is with his big grin, and we try to describe what goes on here.

[17:19]

What is this figure? Well, we get, at first, sidetracked. We are fascinated by the figure. Our attention is riveted upon it, and we think that that is what we are talking about, all by itself, just up there. And we start to talk about its outline, that it's black, and that the cat has little wiggly fur on the top of its head, that it has whiskers, and a big grin, and so on and so forth. But I ask you, let's account for the fact that it's there. I mean, it isn't hanging in the middle of empty space. How does it happen that this black outline is there? Well where is it? And then we have to say, well, it is on a piece of paper. And the piece of paper is so attached to a framework that it stays upright, and could

[18:20]

be drawn on, and is sufficiently firm. And furthermore, it is of such a texture that the ink doesn't just roll off when you put it there. But you see what's beginning to happen, is that I'm beginning to describe, not simply the figure, but the ground of the figure, the environment of the figure. I should also go on to say that the figure got there through the application of a brush with ink on it. And how did the brush get there? Well, you might say, I put it there. Yes, but let's describe that more carefully. What do you mean, I put it there? What does this I word refer to? Well, I is a human organism, and it does things. Wait a minute, wait a minute.

[19:21]

What is this it does things? Describe that more carefully, and what are you going to describe? You're going to describe the organism, aren't you? With all its complex structures. But as you describe those structures, as you describe that organism accurately, you are going to describe another action. You will describe the whole thing, in terms of process. You won't find, as it were, some thing doing the process. As I've often said, we are so bugged by the notion of stuff, you see. Stuff acting, stuff doing things. But all that is, you see, is that the world strikes us as being material until we examine it closely. In other words, a distant nebula in the heavens looks like a solid star.

[20:24]

Until you turn a giant telescope on it, and you make out the clear pattern of a spiral nebula. Or, to the naked eye, a lump of wood looks like a solid and impenetrable mass of continuous matter. But when you start turning powerful microscopes on it, and the instruments of nuclear physics, you begin to find out that this apparently solid lump of wood is a whirring mass of electrical charges going on in relatively enormous spaces. In other words, the concept of stuff is a sensation that we get when we haven't examined things sufficiently closely, or when our instruments are not fine enough to penetrate what we're observing. But when the instruments are fine enough, what we get instead is pattern, and pattern is simply a form of behavior, of activity.

[21:26]

Consider this in another way. Let's go back to the human organism and ask the question, well, what about its shape? How is it that a human organism is contained? All the organs are kept in by the skin. Well, we will describe, of course, the structure of skin, and how it is that it holds together. But then we'll soon find out that we're also talking about the surrounding air, which impinges upon the human skin with a pressure of about 15 pounds per square inch. So that if it weren't there, we'd explode. Now, so the question arises, you know, what is keeping the organism in shape? And we find out that it is not only what is going on inside the skin that keeps it in shape, but also what's going on outside the skin. And when we go on to describe this still more carefully, we discover that it isn't quite

[22:31]

correct to say that it is the air that is doing this, or that it is the organism that is doing this. We begin to describe instead what Dewey and Bentley, in their very fascinating book, Knowing and the Known, call a transaction. Now, that is to say, a buyer can't buy unless somebody is also selling. You can't know anything unless there's something to know. You can't eat unless there's something to be eaten. And this fact, you see, is constantly overlooked. That anything in the world, whether it's inanimate or animate, whatever it may be, is there by

[23:43]

virtue of being in a transactional relationship. Not with something else, but with everything else. In other words, a human being, of course, has ever so many relationships. They're very complicated. And because a person, say we call a doctor, is not only related to his actual work of doctoring, but he may be also a father related to a family, he's a citizen related to a community in other ways than as the doctor, and so on and so forth. And so we begin to imagine him as it were apart from his relationships, as a sort of constant going through all these different relationships, and therefore in some way different from them all. But this, you see, creates a ghost. It creates a being independent of all the different relationships in which he finds himself.

[24:45]

When as, strictly speaking, he is inseparable from those relationships. And we can't eliminate them. We can only describe him fully as the entire whole complex. So that in other words, every organism could be called the behavior of the field or environment in which it is found. Now this doesn't mean, on the one hand, that the organism is something pushed around by the environment, and is completely passive and inert, and that everything that it does is simply a response to external stimulus. Because in a way, the organism is part of its environment. After all, it is an object, a process, in nature, in the cosmos, just as much as everything in its environment. There is really no way of separating the two, and saying that one acts upon the other.

[25:52]

That the organism, as it were, shoves around the environment, or that the environment shoves around the organism. Instead of speaking, as it were, in this terminology of doers and done-tos, of attackers and victims, we simplify things considerably, just by confining ourselves to a description of what is happening. And as we do this, we get a peculiarly clarified picture of the world, without all sorts of ghosts. And it is in this way, that we also begin to be able to have some preliminary intuition or sensation of the meaning of the fact that life is not a problem. In other words, not a contest between ourselves and our environment. This conception of life turns out to be basically phony.

[26:55]

In a moment, you'll be hearing another talk by the late Alan Watts. The program for now is Seeing Through the Game, and it's number 350 in the MEA tape catalog. Remember that if you want more information about the spoken word of Alan Watts, you send a self-addressed envelope to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, California, 94965. Here's the late Alan Watts with a talk that he made back in 1960, entitled, Seeing Through the Game. I suppose that some of you have read a very fascinating work that was written many years ago by C.G. Jung, a commentary that he wrote to a translation of a Chinese classic by Richard Wilhelm called, The Secret of the Golden Flower. Now you may remember that in that commentary, he takes up the very fascinating problem of

[28:25]

the dangers inherent in the adoption of Oriental ways of life by Westerners, but more particularly the adoption of Oriental spiritual practices such as yoga. And I remember I learned a great deal from that essay and appreciated it very much in ever so many ways, because even in my own fascination with forms of Oriental philosophy, I've never been tempted to forget that I'm a Westerner. But as I think this essay over, I'm not sure that Jung discouraged the practice of yoga by Westerners for quite the right reasons. I find so often the difficulty in Jung's ideas lies in his theory of history, which is, I

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feel, a hangover from 19th century theories of history encouraged by Darwinism, namely that there's a sort of orderly progression from the ape through the primitive to the civilized man. And of course, naturally at that time, that was all hitched in with the theory of progress. And it was highly convenient for the cultures of Western Europe, which were then one up on everybody else, to consider themselves in the van of progress. And when they visited the natives of Borneo and Australia and so on, to be able to feel that they were perfectly justified in appropriating their lands and dominating them, because they were giving them the benefits of the last word in evolution. And therefore, under the influence of that sort of theory of history, which is felt in

[30:32]

the work of both Freud and Jung, one gets the feeling of there being a kind of progressive development of human consciousness. And Jung is charitable enough to assume that because the Chinese and Indian civilizations are immeasurably older than ours, they've had the possibility of far more sophistication in psychic development, even though he feels, and probably rightly, that there are things they can learn from us. But the reason why he discourages the Westerner from the practice of yoga is that he says this is a discipline for a far older culture than ours, which along certain lines has progressed much further and has learned certain things that we haven't mastered at all yet. And thus he points out that when somebody embraces Vedanta or Theosophy or any yoga school in the West and tries to master a discipline of concentration in which they

[31:41]

have to oust from their consciousness all wandering thoughts, he says that this for a Westerner may be a very dangerous thing indeed, because just exactly what the Westerner may need to do is to allow free reign to his wandering thoughts and his imagination and his fantasy, because it's only in this way that he can get in touch with his unconscious, and that his unconscious will not leave him in peace until he gets in touch with it. He assumes the members of Oriental cultures have done this long before they went in for yoga practice. Now I don't think this is quite true, but I do think there are other reasons why Western people need to exercise a good deal of discrimination and caution in adopting Eastern disciplines and ways of life. In other words, it's rather like the problem of taking medicine.

[32:45]

You know, if you don't feel very well and you go to a friend's medicine cabinet and you sort of look it over and see bottles of medicine in there, and you say, I'm sick, I need medicine, so you take some medicine. Any medicine will do. Well, it won't. And according to what's the matter with you, so the medicine has to be prescribed. And I don't think that the things which some of the Eastern disciplines are designed to cure are quite the same things that we need. Now, it's fundamental to my view of the nature of such forms of discipline as Buddhism and Taoism, that there are ways of liberation from a specific kind of confinement. That is to say, there are ways of liberation from what I sometimes called the social hypnosis. In other words, every culture, every society, as a group of people in communication with

[33:56]

each other, has certain rules of communication. And from culture to culture these rules differ in just the same way that languages differ. And a culture can hold together on very, very different kinds of rules. I won't say any kinds of rules, but very different kinds of rules, always provided that the members agree about them, whether they are forced to agree, whether they agree tacitly, or whatever the reason may be. And these rules are, in a way, very much like the rules of a game. In other words, take a game like chess. You can have the kind of chess we play with an eight-square board, or you can have a kind of chess that the Japanese play with a nine-square board. Doesn't make any difference, so long as you both play on the same board and by the same rules. But since this is, chess is a game, and in the same way the development of human cultures

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is also, in a way, a game, that is to say, it's 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. That's the same as the fun of a game. The fun of a game is it has a certain interest. But it doesn't follow that the rules of the game correspond to the actual structure of human nature, or to the laws of the universe. But because in every culture it's necessary to impress upon especially its younger members that these rules jolly well have to be kept, they are usually, in some way or other, connected with the laws of the universe and given some sort of divine sanction. And there are indeed cultures in which the senior members of the group realize that that's

[36:05]

a hoax, that that's as if it's made up and is done to terrify the young. And when they become senior members of the culture themselves, they see through the thing, but they don't let on, they keep it quiet. They don't let out to those who are supposed to be impressed that this was really a hoax to get them to behave. Well anyway, after a great deal of careful study, I've come to the conclusion that 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 make it possible for those who have the determination to be free from the social hypnosis. In other words, if you were a member of the culture of India, at almost any time between

[37:07]

maybe 900 BC and 1800 AD, it would be for you a matter of common sense about which everybody agreed, that you were under the control of a process called Karma. Not exactly a law of cause and effect, but a process of cosmic justice, whereby every fortune that occurred to you would be the result of some action in the past that was good, and every misfortune that occurred to you would be the result of some action in the past that was evil. And furthermore, that this action in the past might not have been done in this present life, but in a former life. It was simply axiomatic to those people that they were involved in a long, long process

[38:09]

of reincarnation, reaping the rewards and punishments, and there was not only the possibility of being reincarnated again in the human form, but if you were exceedingly good you might be born in one of the heavens, the paradises, and if you were exceedingly bad you might be born for an insufferable period of years, not forever, in a purgatory. And the purgatories of the Hindus and Buddhists are just as ingeniously horrible as those of the Christians. Well of course, everybody knows, I mean anybody seems to have any sense, that all this imagination of post-mortem courts of justice is a way of telling people, well if the secular police don't catch you, the celestial police will catch you, and therefore you had better behave. And it's an ingenious device for encouraging ethical conduct.

[39:12]

Now, but remember that for a person brought up in that climate of feeling where everybody believes this to be true, it seems a matter of sheer common sense that it's so. And it's very difficult for a person so brought up, not to believe that that is the state of affairs. Take an equivalent situation in our own culture. It's still enormously difficult for most people to believe that space may not be Newtonian space, that is to say, a three-dimensional continuum which extends indefinitely forever. The idea of a four-dimensional curved space seems absolutely fantastic and can't even be conceived by people unversed in the mathematics of modern physics. Or again, as I've often pointed out, it's very difficult for us to believe that the

[40:17]

forms of nature are not made of some stuff called matter. That's a very unnecessary idea from a strictly scientific point of view, but it's awfully difficult for us to believe it. To believe, in other words, that there isn't this underlying stuff. And not so long ago, it was practically impossible for people to conceive that the planets did not revolve about the Earth encased in crystalline spheres. And it took a very considerable shaking of the imagination when astronomers began to point out that this need not necessarily be so. All right, so now let's go back to the problem of somebody living in the culture of ancient India. Here it is, it's a matter of common sense, you see, that he's going to be reborn. Now, there's some, perhaps exceedingly intelligent person who, for one reason or another, discovers

[41:29]

that this idea is not so. After all, when you get such disciplines as Vedanta and Buddhism, they say that the ultimate goal of the discipline is release from the rounds of rebirth, and incidentally also, which is fundamental to it, release from the illusion that you are a separate individual confined to this body. But so far as both of these things are concerned, they also say that the person who is liberated from the round of rebirth, as well as from the illusion of being an ego, sees, when he is liberated, that the process of rebirth, and the whole cosmology of reincarnation, and karma, as well as the individual ego, are in a way illusions.

[42:31]

That is to say, he sees that they are maya. And I would like to translate maya at this moment, not so much illusion, as a playful construct, a social institution. So, he sees, you see, that those things are not so. They are only pretended to be so. And you see, he ceases to believe in karma and reincarnation, and all that, in exactly the same way that a modern agnostic no longer believes in the resurrection of the body at the day of judgment. I know this to be so, because although you will get very many Hindus and Buddhists who say that they believe in reincarnation, and come over here and teach it as part of the doctrine of Vedanta or Buddhism, the most sophisticated and the most profound, I'll

[43:39]

say perhaps profound rather than sophisticated Buddhists that I have known, have said that they don't believe in it literally at all. And so, I could say that those who do believe in it, believe in it simply because it's part of their culture, and they've not yet been able to be liberated from it. And so it seems to me very funny indeed, when Western people who become interested in Vedanta or Buddhism, that is to say, in forms of discipline to liberate Hindus and Chinese people from certain social institutions, Western people adopt it, and then also adopt the ideas of reincarnation and karma from which these systems were designed to liberate

[44:44]

them. Of course they adopt them because they feel it's consoling that one will go on living, and that wasn't the point at all. Or that it explains something, that why one suffered in this life was not because the universe was unjust, but because you committed some misdeed in the past. And so, Westerners who take up the Oriental doctrines in that spirit, unfortunately, take up the very illusions from which these doctrines were supposed to be ways of deliverance. Now that may be difficult to see, just because so many practicing Hindus and Buddhists say they believe in reincarnation and this whole process of the cycles of karma and so on, and they, after all, are practicing it and they should know.

[45:50]

Well now look here, there's a certain good reason why they shouldn't. Of course, I'm making an exception of the Indian or Chinese who's been educated in Western style. And he ceases to believe, maybe, in the cosmologies of his own culture, but he's not liberated in the Buddhist sense because in receiving a Western education he's become a victim of our social institutions instead, and he's just exchanged, as it were, one trouble for another. But when you take the situation as it stands, or as it did stand in India, isolated from Western culture, obviously no society can tolerate within its own borders the existence of a way of liberation, a way of seeing through its institutions, without feeling that such

[46:52]

a way constitutes a threat to law and order. Anybody who sees through the institutions of society and sees them for, as it were, creative fictions, in the same way as a novel or a work of art is a creative fiction. Anybody who sees that, of course, could be regarded by the society as a potential menace. But then you may ask, well, if Buddhism and Vedanta and so on were indeed ways of liberation, how could Indian or Chinese society or Burmese society have tolerated their presence? Well, the answer lies simply in the much misunderstood esotericism of these disciplines. In other words, that those who taught them, the masters of these disciplines, made it incredibly difficult for uninitiated people to get in on the inside. And their method of initiating them, in a way, was to put them through trap after trap

[48:00]

after trap to see if they could find their way through. In other words, such a master would not dream of beginning by disabusing the neophyte and saying, well, you know, all these things you heard from your father and mother and teachers and so on were fairy tales. Oh, no, indeed. He would do what is called in Buddhism exercise the use of upaya, the Sanskrit word meaning skillful devices or skillful means, sometimes described as giving a child a yellow leaf to stop it crying for gold. After all, when you approach one of these ways of liberation from the outside, it looks like something

[49:06]

very, very fantastic. Here you are, literally, going to be released from a literally true and physical cycle of endless incarnations in heavens and hells and all kinds of states. And therefore, naturally, to do that, what an undertaking that must be. What a wonderful extraordinary person you've got to become. And so the neophyte is ready for almost anything. And the teacher, because the fundamental problem in this whole thing is for him to get rid of the illusion, you see, that he's a separate ego. If there's no separate ego or sort of soul, then there's nothing to be reincarnated. So all the teacher really, he has all kinds

[50:08]

of complicated ways of doing it, but all that he really says to him is, well now, if you will look deeply into your ego, you will find out that it is a non-ego, that your self is the universal self, as he might say if he were a Vedantist. Or if he were a Buddhist, he might say if you look for your ego, you won't find it. So look for it, and see, and really go into it. And so he gets the man meditating, and trying by his ego to get rid of his ego. Well that is a beautiful trap, it can last forever, until one sees through it. In other words, this is like trying to, you know, sweep the darkness out of a room with a broom. Or it's like, it's worse than that. Lao Tzu, Zhuang Tzu rather, had a nice figure for it.

[51:15]

Beating a drum in search of a fugitive. That's to say, you know, when the police go out, because they've had a telephone call that there's a burglar, they come racing to the house with a siren full blast, and the burglar hears it and runs away. Because, of course, to try and get rid of the ego, for one's advantage in some ways, is an egotistic enterprise, and you can't do it. And so of course the student gets to the point where he begins to realize that everything he does to get rid of his ego, is egotistic. And this is the kind of trap in which the teacher gets him, until of course he comes to the point of seeing that his supposed division from himself into, say, I and me, the controlling

[52:18]

part of me and the controlled part of me, the knower and the known, and all that, is phony. There is no way of standing aside from yourself, in other words, and as it were changing yourself in that way. But he discovers this finally. At the same time, he discovers, almost at the last minute you might say, the fallacy, or rather the fantasy nature, the game-like nature, of the system of cosmology which has existed to, as it were, underpin or give the basic form of the social institutions of his particular culture or society. In other words, you may put it in another way, one of the basic things which all social rules

[53:24]

of convention conceal, is what I would call the fundamental fellowship between yes and no. Say, in the Chinese symbolism of the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin, you know you've seen that symbol of them together like two interlocked fishes. Well, the great game, I mean, the whole pretense of most societies, that these two fishes are involved in a battle. There's the up fish and the down fish, the good fish and the bad fish. And there's out for a killing, and the white fish is one of these days going to slay the black fish. But when you see into it clearly, you realize that the white fish and the black fish go together. They're twins. They're really not fighting each other, they're dancing with each other. That, you see, though, is a difficult thing to realize. In a set of rules in which yes and no are the basic and formally opposed terms, when it is explicit in a set of rules

[54:30]

that yes and no, or positive and negative, are the fundamental principles, it is implicit but not explicit that there is this fundamental bondage or fellowship between the two. The fear is, you see, that if people find that out, they won't play the game anymore. I mean, supposing a certain social group finds out that its enemy group, which it's supposed to fight, is really symbiotic to it. That is to say, the enemy group fosters the survival of the group by pruning its population. We'd never do to admit that. We'd never take advantage of the enemy, just as George Orwell pointed out in his fantasy of the future in 1984, that a dictatorial government has to have an enemy, and if there isn't one, it has to

[55:31]

invent one. And by this means, by having something to fight, you see, having something to compete against, the energy of society to go on doing its job is stirred up. And what the Buddha or Bodhisattva type of person fundamentally is, is one who's seen through that, who doesn't have to be stirred up by hatred and fear and competition to go on with the game of life. The voice of the late Alan Watts. I thought they were going to come on the tape there and tell you what I will tell you, which is that if you want a catalogue of Alan Watts' taped lectures, you can acquire that by writing M.E.A. Box 303, Sausalito, California. Now it's time for part four of our serialization of The Secret Garden by Frank

[56:30]

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