live from the same root. And so likewise, when Jesus said, my yoke is easy, he was saying really, my yoga is easy. And the word therefore basically denotes the state that would be the opposite of what our psychologists call alienation, or what Buddhists call sakkaya drishti, the view of separateness, the feeling of separateness, the feeling of being cut off from being. And most civilized people do in fact feel that way, because they have a kind of myopic attention, focused on their own boundaries and what is inside those boundaries, and they identify themselves with the inside. And don't realize that you cannot have an

[01:15]

inside without an outside. That would seem, wouldn't it, to be extremely elementary logic, that we could have no sense of being ourselves, of having a personal identity, without the contrast of something that is not ourselves, that is to say, other. But the fact that we don't realize that self and other go together is the root of an enormous and terrifying anxiety. Because what will happen when the inside disappears? What will happen when the so-called I comes to an end, as it seems to? Of course, if it didn't. I mean, if things did not keep moving and changing, appearing and dissolving, the universe would be a colossal

[02:15]

bore. And therefore, you are only aware that things are all right for the moment. I mean, I hope most of the people in this gathering have a sort of genial sense inside them that for the time being, things are going on more or less okay. Some of you may be very miserable, and then your problem may be just a little different, but it's essentially the same one. But you must realize that that sense of life being fairly all right is inconceivable and unfeelable unless there is way, way, way in the back of your mind the glimmer of a possibility that something absolutely, unspeakably awful might happen. It doesn't have to happen. Of course, you'll die one day. But there always has to be the vague apprehension, the hinter-gedanker, that the awful-awfuls are possible. It gives spice to life.

[03:19]

Now these observations are in line with what I'm going to talk about tonight, the intellectual approach to yoga. There are basically certain principal forms of yoga. Most people are familiar with Hatha yoga, which is a psychophysical exercise system, and that's the one you see demonstrated most on television because it has visual value. You can see all these exercises of lotus positions and people curling their legs around their necks and doing all sorts of marvelous exercises. And they're good exercises. The most honest yoga teacher I know is a woman who teaches Hatha yoga and doesn't pretend to be any other kind of guru, and she does it very well. Then there is bhakti yoga. Bhakti means devotion.

[04:24]

And I suppose in general you might say that Christianity is a form of bhakti yoga, because it is yoga practiced through extreme reverence for and love for some being felt more or less external to oneself, who is the representative of the divine. Then there is karma yoga. Karma means action, and incidentally that's all it means. It does not mean the law of cause and effect. When we say that something that happens to you is your karma, all it's saying is it's your own doing. Nobody's in charge of karma except you. Karma yoga is the way of action, of using one's everyday life, one's trade, or an athletic discipline like sailing or surf riding,

[05:31]

or track running, as your way of yoga, as your way of discovering who you are. Then there's raja yoga. That's the royal yoga. And that's sometimes also called kundalini yoga. And that involves very complicated psychic exercises, having to do with awakening the serpent power that is supposed to lie at the base of one's spiritual spine, and raising it up through certain chakras or centers until it enters into the brain. There's a very profound symbolism involved in that, but I'm not going into that. And then finally there are several others. There's mantra yoga. Mantra yoga, which is the practice through chanting, of humming, either out loud or silently, certain sounds which become

[06:34]

supports for contemplation for what is in Sanskrit called jnana. And jnana is the state in which one is clearly awake and aware of the world as it is, as distinct from the world as it is described. In other words, in the state of jnana you stop thinking. That is to say, you stop talking to yourself and figuring to yourself and symbolizing to yourself what is going on. You simply are aware of what is. And nobody can say what it is because, as Korzybski well said, the real world is unspeakable. It's a lovely double take in that. But that's jnana, that's zazen, where one practices to sit

[07:37]

absolutely wide awake with eyes open but not thinking. That's a very curious state, incidentally. I knew a professor of mathematics at Northwestern University who one day said, you know it's amazing how many things there are that aren't so. You know, he was talking about old wives' tales and scientific superstitions and so on. But when you practice jnana, you're amazed how many things there are that aren't so. Because when you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is, that is to say, of what you feel, what you sense, even that saying too much, you suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared.

[08:40]

So also have disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren't there, because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They're purely conceptual, they're ideas, they're phantoms, ghosts. So when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away. And you find you're in an eternal here and now. And there's nowhere you're supposed to be, there's nothing you're supposed to do, there's nowhere you're supposed to go, because in order to think you're supposed to do something, you have to think. And so it's incredibly important to unthink, at least once a day, for the very preservation of the intellectual life. Because if you do nothing but think, as you're advised by IBM,

[09:49]

and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you've nothing to think about except thoughts. And so you become like a university library, which is a sort of cheese. It has a process in it that is in biology called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells into sub-cells. So a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. And they write books about books about books, and the library swells. You know, it's like an enormous mass of yeast, raising and raising and raising, and that's all that's going on.

[10:51]

I mean it's a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient oriental texts and things like that. It's fun, it's like playing poker, or chess, or doing pure mathematics. But the trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words. So if we stop that temporarily, and get our mind clear of thoughts, we become, as Jesus said, again as children, and get a direct view of the world. Which is very useful once you're an adult. There's not much you can do with it when you're a baby. Because everybody pushes you around. I don't know, they pick you up and sit you there,

[11:59]

they sit you there. And you can't do much, except practice contemplation. Only, you can't tell anyone what it's like. But when, as an adult, you can recapture the baby's point of view, you will know what all child psychologists have always wanted to know, how it is that a baby feels. And the baby, according to Freud at least, has the oceanic experience. That is to say, a feeling of complete inseparability from what's going on. The baby is unable to distinguish between the universe and his or her action upon the universe. And most of us, if we got into that state of consciousness, might be inclined to feel extremely frightened. And beginning to ask, who's in charge?

[13:01]

I mean, who controls what happens next? We would ask that, because we are used to the idea that the process of nature consists of controllers and controllees. Things that do, and things that are done to. This is purely mythological. As you find out when you observe the world without thinking, with a purely silent mind. Now, then you see, Gnana Yoga is the approach to that that is designed for intellectuals. There is an intellectual way to get to this kind of understanding. A lot of people often say to me,

[14:05]

You know, I understand what you're talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it. I don't realize it. And I'm apt to reply, I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually. Because if you did, you would also feel it. Because the intellect, or what I prefer to call the intelligence, is not a sort of watertight compartment of the mind. That goes clickety-clickety all by itself and has no influence on what happens in all other spheres of one's being. For the simple reason we all know, that you can be hypnotized by words. Certain words arouse immediately certain feelings. And by using certain words it's very easy and very rapidly one can change people's emotions.

[15:07]

They're incantations. And the intellect is not something separate off there. But I, the word intellect has become a kind of clickety. A word that represents the intellectual porcupinism of the academic world. Of, as a certain professor said at Harvard at the time Tim Leary was making experiments there, no knowledge is academically respectable which cannot be put into words. Alas for the Department of Physical Education. Alas for the Department of Music and Fine Arts. And that's very important. Because you see, the greatest, one of the greatest intellects of modern times was Ludwig Wittgenstein. And as you read the end of his Tractatus, which was his great book,

[16:12]

he shows you that what you always thought were the major problems of life and philosophy were meaningless questions. And that those problems are solved not by, as it were, giving an answer to them, but by getting rid of the problem through seeing intellectually that it's meaningless. And then you are relieved of the problem. You need no longer lie awake nights wondering what is the meaning of life. What's it all about? Simply because it isn't about anything. It's about itself. And so he ends up saying, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But as a new successor to Wittgenstein, an Englishman called Spencer Brown, who's written a book called Laws of Form. And this, if any of you are mathematically minded, I would

[17:21]

most firmly recommend. It's just being published in the United States. And he makes this comment after Wittgenstein. He says, true, there are certain things of which one cannot speak. For example, you cannot describe music. That's why most of the reports of music critics in the newspapers seem completely absurd when they are trying to convey in words how a certain artist performed. And they borrow words from all other kinds of arts and try and make some show of being clever about it. But there is no way in which the music critic, in words, can make you hear the sound of the concert. But by writing certain instructions on paper telling you certain things to do, those sounds can be reproduced. So musical notation is essentially a set of

[18:30]

instructions telling you certain things to do, and if you do them, you will get an experience which is ineffable and beyond words. This is Spencer Brown pointing out that all mathematics is basically a set of instructions, like describe a circle, drop a perpendicular. And so if you follow certain instructions, then you will understand certain things that cannot be described. And that, of course, that is what yoga is all about. All mystical writing really is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe the universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows that cannot possibly be done, the very word mysticism is from the Greek root muin, which means silence. Mum's the word. Shut up. I should talk.

[19:34]

But that's it. Be quiet. See? Then you'll understand. Because the instructions are listen. Listen. See? Or even look. Stop, look, and listen. That's yoga. And see what's going on. Only, don't say, don't say, that'll spoil it. It's like somebody came to a Zen master and said, the mountains and hills and the sky, are not all these the body of Buddha? The master said, yes, but it's a pity to say so. Now, by reading, those of you who are mathematically hip, Spencer Brown's book, Laws of Form, you can go through an intellectual process that is very close indeed to jnana yoga.

[20:43]

I was so impressed with it, John Lilly turned me on to it, as a matter of fact, that I went over to England specially to see this fellow. And he's quite remarkable. Youngish man, adept at all sorts of things. He, if he were a black magician, he would be a real danger to society. But he's not. The point of the book is, he starts out with the instruction, draw a distinction. Any distinction you want. Between something and nothing, between the inside and the outside, what have you. Any distinction, just draw a distinction. Then he takes you through a process of reasoning, where he shows you that once you have made that step, all the laws of mathematics, physics and biology and electronics follow inevitably.

[21:49]

And he draws them out. He gets you into the most complicated electronic circuitry systems that necessarily follow from your having drawn a distinction. Once you've done that, the universe as we know it is inevitable. After that, he says, I haven't told you anything you didn't already know. At every step, when you saw that one of my proofs, one of my theorems was correct, you said, oh, of course. Why? Because you knew it already. And then at the end of it, where he's shown you, as it were, the nature of your own mind, he raises the question, was this trip really necessary? So now he takes us in a re-entry job and says, you see, what has happened through all this mathematical process, and also in the course of your own complicated lives,

[22:57]

where you've been trying to find out something, of course, that you already knew, what has been happening is the universe has taken one turn. That's the meaning of uni-verse. It has taken a turn on itself, to look at itself. Well, you see, when anything looks at itself, it escapes itself. As the snake swallowing its tail, as the dog chasing its tail, as trying to grab this hand like that, it gets some of it, but it doesn't get it. And so he makes the amazing remark, naturally, as our telescopes become more powerful, the universe must expand in order to escape them. Now you will say, this is subjective idealism in a new disguise. This is Bishop Berkeley all

[24:01]

over again, saying that we create the universe out of our own minds. Well, unfortunately, it's true. And if you take mind to mean brain, physical brain, physical nervous system, and go and listen to Karl Pribram's lectures at Stanford, you will find him saying the same in neurological terms. It's the structure of your nervous system which causes you to see the world that you see. Or read J.Z. Young's book, Doubt, Uncertainty, and Science, where all this is very clearly explained. It's the same old problem in new language, only it's a more complicated language, a more sophisticated, up-to-date, scientifically respectable language. But it's the same old thing. But that's yoga, you see. Yoga union means that you do it.

[25:05]

In a sense, you are God. Tattvamasi is the Upanishad saying. You are making it. So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their disciples and say, I am God. I have realized. See? But the important thing is that you are. You. Whether I am or not is of no consequence to you whatsoever. I could get up and say, I have realized. I'd put on a turban and yellow robe and whatever, and say, come and have darshan. I'm guru. You need the grace of guru in order to realize, and so on, and let it be a wonderful hoax. Be like picking your pockets and selling you your own watch. But the point is, you are. And what are we saying when we say that?

[26:14]

We are obviously saying something very important. Alas, and alack, there is no way of defining it. That is to say, going any further into words about it. See, when a philosopher hears such a statement as Tattvamasi, you are it, or there is only the eternal now, the philosopher says, yes, I don't see why you're so excited about it. What do you mean by that? And that he asks that question because he wants to continue in a word game. He doesn't want to go on into an experiential dimension. He wants to go on arguing because that's his trip. And all these great mystical statements mean nothing whatsoever. They're ultimate statements. Just as, you know, the trees and the clouds and the mountains and the stars have no meaning,

[27:25]

because they're not words. Words have meaning because they're symbols, because they point to something other than themselves. But the stars, like music, music, only bad music has any meaning. Classical music never has a meaning. And to understand it, you must simply listen to it and observe its beautiful patterns, go into its complexity. So, you get, when your mind, that is to say, your verbal systems, get to the end of their tether, that is to say, when they arrive at the meaningless statement, here is the critical point. And the method of Jnana Yoga is to exercise one's intellect to its limits so that you get to the point where you have no further questions to ask.

[28:31]

You can do this in philosophy study, if you've got the right kind of teacher, who shows you that all philosophical opinions whatsoever are false. Or at least, if not false, extremely partial. You can see how the nominalists cancel out the realists. You can see how the determinists cancel out the free willists. How the behaviorists cancel out the vitalists. And then how the logical positivists cancel out almost everybody. And then how someone comes in and says, yes, but logical positivists have concealed metaphysics, which indeed they do. And then you get in an awful tangle and there's nothing for you to believe. And if you get seriously into the study of theology and comparative religion,

[29:37]

exactly the same thing can happen to you. You can't even be an atheist anymore. That is also shown to be a purely mythological position. And so you feel a kind of intellectual vertigo, which is called in a Zen Buddhist poem, above, not a tile to cover the head, below, not an inch of ground to stand on. Well, where are you then? Well, of course, you always were. You've discovered you're it. And that's very uncomfortable, because you can't grab it. See here, I've discovered that whatever it is that I am, that's not something inside my head. It is just as much out there as it is in here, but whatever it is, I cannot get hold of it.

[30:37]

Well, that gives you the heebie-jeebies. You get butterflies in the stomach, anxiety, traumas, and all kinds of things. But this was all explained by Shankara, the great Hindu commentator on the Upanishads, the great master of the non-dualistic doctrine of the universe, when he said, that which knows, which is in all beings the knower, is never an object of its own knowledge. So, therefore, to everyone who is in quest of the supreme kick, the great experience, the vision of God, whatever you want to call it, liberation, liberation, when you think that you're not it,

[31:41]

any old guru can sell you on a method to find it. And that may not be a bad thing for him to do, because, as Blake said, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. And a clever guru is a person who leads you on. Here, kitty, [...] kitty. I've got something very good to show you. Yeah, you just wait. Oh, but you've got to go through a lot of stages yet. You say, ha, [...] ha. Can I get that? Oh, I want to get that. You know, all the time it's you. I was talking with a Zen master the other day, and he said, you should be my disciple. I looked at him and said, who was Buddha's teacher? And he looked at me in a very odd way and said, ha, [...] ha. So he burst into laughter, and he gave me a piece of clover, ha, [...] ha.

[32:52]

So, you see, so long as you can be persuaded that there's something more that you ought to be than you are, you've divided yourself from reality, from the universe, from God, or whatever you want to call that, the tat and tat vamasi. And you will find constantly, if you were interested in anything like this, in psychoanalysis, in gestalt therapy, in sensitivity training, in any kind of yoga, or what have you, that there will be that funny sensation of what I'll call spiritual greed that can be aroused by somebody indicating to you, there are still higher stages for you to attain.

[34:01]

You should meet my guru. So, you might say then now, to be truly realized, you have to get to the point where you're not seeking anymore. So then you begin to think, well, we will now be non-seekers. You know, like disciples of Krishnamurti, who, because he says he doesn't read any spiritual books, they can't read anything but mystery stories. You know, becoming spiritually unspiritual. Well, you find that that too is what is called in Zen, legs on a snake. It's irrelevant. You don't need not to seek, because you don't need anything.

[35:06]

And I mean, it's like crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after you. And the great master of this technique was a Buddhist scholar, lived about 200 AD, called Nagarjuna. He invented a whole dialectic. He had a whole school called Mathyamika, where the, as it were, leader of the students would simply destroy all their ideas. Absolutely abolish their philosophical notions. And they'd get the heebie-jeebies. And he would, they see, he didn't have the heebie-jeebies. He seemed perfectly relaxed in not having any particular point of view. Well, he said, teacher, how can you stand it? We have to have something to hang on to. Who does?

[36:12]

Who are you? And eventually you discover, of course, that it's not necessary to hang on to anything. To rely on anything. There's nothing to rely on, because you're it. It's like the universe. It's like asking the question, where is the universe? And by that I mean the whole universe. Whereabouts is it in space? Everything in it is falling around everything else, but there's no concrete floor underneath for the thing to crash. Because the space. You can think of infinite space if you like. You don't have to think of curved space. The space that goes out and out and out forever and ever and has no end. What is that? Of course, it's you.

[37:16]

What else could it be? Only the universe is delightfully arranged. So that as it looks at itself, in order not to be one-sided and prejudiced, it looks at itself from an uncountable number of points of view. We thus avoid solipsism, as if I were to have the notion that it's only me that's really here, and you're all in my dream. Of course, that point of view cannot really be disputed, except by imagining a conference of solipsists arguing as to which one of them was the one that was really there. Now you see, if you understand what I'm saying with your intelligence,

[38:21]

and then take the next step and say, but I understood it now, but I didn't feel it, then next I raise the question, why do you want to feel it? You say, I want something more, because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it. There is nothing to pursue because you're it. And if you don't know that, you always were it. And if you don't know that, in other words, to put it in Christian terms or Jewish terms, if you don't know that you're God from the beginning, what happens is that you try to become God by force. Therefore, you start being violent and obstreperous and this and that and the other. All our violence, all our competitiveness, all our terrific anxiety to survive, is because we didn't know from the beginning that we were it.

[39:27]

Well then you would say, if we did know from the beginning, as in fact you did, when you were a baby, but then everybody says, well nothing would ever happen. But it did happen, didn't it? And some of it's pretty messy. But what people don't realize is they say, well, take the Hindus. It's basic to Hindu religion that we are all God in disguise and that the world is an illusion. All that is a sort of half-truth. But if that is the case, if Hindus, and really awakened Hindus, by the knowledge of their union with the Godhead, would simply become inert,

[40:36]

why then Hindu music, the most incredibly complex, marvelous technique, when they sit and play, they laugh at each other. They're enjoying themselves enormously with the very complicated musical games. But when we come and the symphony orchestra gets up, everybody dresses in evening dress, the most serious expression, and all the audience is down, and then it's like it's in a kind of church. And there's none of that terrific zest where the drummer, the tabla player, laughs at the sarod player as they compete with each other in all kinds of marvelous improvisations. So if you do find out, by any chance, who you really are, you, instead of becoming merely lazy, you know, you start laughing. And laughing leads to dancing.

[41:39]

And dancing needs music. And we can play with each other, for a change. We'll now have an intermission of about five minutes, in case any of you have to leave, and after that we'll gather again in case you'd like to ask questions. So...

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