Information on the spoken word of Alan Watts, you can write to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, California. Zip code is 94965. We'll repeat the address at the end of today's talk. Now here is Part 2 of the talk on Death and Rebirth. You will, of course, realize that in these past three sessions I've been giving you some very heady stuff, and as a consequence of it you can get a sort of vertiginous feeling. I remember when I was a child being in a sports event which we called an egg and spoon race. The object of it was that each person was given a wooden spoon and a china egg, you

[01:07]

know, the kind you put in chickens' nests to encourage them to lay. And we had to go from start to finish without dropping the egg off the spoon. If you dropped the egg you had to pick it up again on the spoon without using your fingers and carry it on the spoon to the finishing line. Well I was out alone in front and all the other children dropped their eggs. And I turned round and watched the other children picking up their eggs and all the parents and teachers and everybody on the sidelines were urging me to continue so that I would win the race. But for some reason I wouldn't go on without them. Isn't that funny? Now I did call your attention likewise to this phenomenon yesterday, that when you talk into a microphone and you're wearing earphones and there's a delaying circuit so that you

[02:11]

hear your own voice about a second later than you speak, you get into this funny situation of waiting for the other fellow to go on. You get put off. And I pointed out that's the same thing that's happening to you all the time. That something comes at you as if it was from somewhere else altogether. That is what you call the involuntary component or the objective component of your experience. You know what the voluntary is, you seem to be in charge of that, you do that. But then an echo comes back to you and that echo is what you call involuntary. Now, mind you, I'm not saying quite what is a philosophical doctrine called solipsism. Solipsism is the doctrine that only you exist and that everybody else is in your dream.

[03:16]

They don't really exist at all. I always want to imagine a conference of solipsists assembled to argue as to which one of them is really there. We're not doing it that way, you see. But what we are saying, if it can be said at all, is that each one of us is a special expression of everything. Now, everything isn't simply the sum total of all things. Everything, let's face it, can't be talked about or defined for the same reason that you can't bite your own teeth.

[04:17]

So, for want of any better expression, we'll say there is the total energy of the universe. And that energy expresses itself, in fact it expresses all of itself, as each one of us. And each one of us is therefore a unique manifestation of what the universe can do. And each one of us is creating a different universe. And yet they're really all the same. Only, naturally, we wouldn't know what we meant by same unless we knew what we meant by different. So this is it. Now, therefore, you really are in charge of what happens. Only the you that is in charge is not the ego. That is to say, it is not your image of yourself plus, as I explained to you yesterday, the

[05:26]

constant sense of physical tension whereby we are trying to achieve neurological results by muscular effort. Don't forget that. We have this chronic tension in us of clenching your teeth and etc. And it actually, it localizes itself between your eyes, about here. And, with other peoples, it might localize itself here. If you're getting stomach ulcers, for example, it's because you're localizing your chronic tension in here. Other people localize it here. Chinese and Japanese always talk of the psychic center as being in this position. But Westerners think of it here. A little way behind the eyes and halfway between the ears. That's where you are. That only means that is where the center of futile tension is.

[06:26]

So the image of yourself that is the ego is a fraud and the tension is useless. Doesn't achieve any result. It's like you're taking off in a jet airliner and you think you've gone far too far down the runway and are not up in the air yet and you find yourself pulling up at your seatbelt to encourage the plane to get off. Useless. Doesn't do a damn thing. So all these things that we do to pull yourself together, get yourself in your right mind, all these strains and things, they're completely useless. Just like that. So, you see, the whole of what you're experiencing is a happening in which there's no master and no slave. It's not being done to you because there isn't any you separate from it.

[07:29]

You're not in charge of it because there isn't any you separate from it to make it obey. See? It's just one happening and that's the way things go and it's very intelligent. So we say well there's no alternative but to trust it. Well who's going to trust it? There's no one separate from it who ought to trust it or accept it. When a psychiatrist tells you or a psychotherapist tells you that you should accept yourself, you discover that one of the things you have to accept is that there are certain things you don't accept. And how can you deal with that? The whole idea of telling you to accept yourself is simply a gimmick. It's like saying control yourself. Well, if you try hard enough you find that you can't. All right, try hard enough to accept yourself and you find that you can't.

[08:32]

And the reason why you can't is not that you've been confronted with a task that is too difficult but that you've been confronted with a task that is nonsensical. Because there is no you separate from you to accept yourself. As Krishnamurti points out ceaselessly, there is no thinker separate from the thoughts. The so-called thinker is one of the thoughts. The so-called feeler is the feelings. For example, if I say I see a sight, I hear a sound. Is it nonsense? Because if I hear, the sound is already there. If I see, the sight is already there. The seeing and the sight are the same. The see it is raining joke. It's the lightning flashed. What's the difference between the flash and the lightning?

[09:34]

How is the one thing called lightning which does another thing called flash? See, the redundancy in our language. Now that redundancy is due to a phenomenon of echo. What happens is this, that your cortex overlies your fundamental brain. The thalamic center and then the cortex overlies it. The cortex performs the same function in your nervous system that the sounding box in a guitar or a violin does for the string. It echoes it and gives it resonance. That's why when you sing in the bathtub, your voice is better than if you sing in the open air because you've got a resonant chamber. All right, so your cortex enables you to know that you know. When you're happy, it tells you you're happy. Otherwise you wouldn't know. See, when you're sad, it tells you you're sad because it echoes it. But the echo, just like hearing yourself a second later on the microphone, gives you

[10:40]

the impression that you're split, that there are two yous. There aren't, but it gives you that impression. And therefore, because of having that impression, you can be in conflict with yourself. And you can go around holding a club over yourself all the time. And you can get this feeling, therefore, which is all connected with this echo phenomenon of the two sides of experience, what I do and what happens to me. But now I think I've made it clear to you that the division between what I do and what happens to me is arbitrary. It's arbitrary. If you eliminate the false notion of being something else than the universe, then all

[11:48]

that is going on is the universe, the happening. And no one is doing it, because we've got to a pure verb without any noun. So there is the happening. The patterning. It is intelligent. Why? How? Look at a vegetable. Look at the way a plant is organized. The beautiful structure, say, of a fern. You look at a fern or a rose and say, how wonderful it is. God must have made it. Why do you introduce that unnecessary point? It isn't that the rose is a product of intelligence. It is that the rose is itself intelligence. How does intelligence work? It is energy following the line of least resistance.

[12:53]

This is not a straight line. A straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points. It depends what kind of surface you're playing on. So, the world is a water course. And I mentioned to you, I think, Theodos Fenk's book, Sensitive Chaos, where he has produced all these photographs of the patterns of flowing water, and shows you that all physical forms are related to these patterns of water taking the line of least resistance. And we remember, too, that gravity is always falling. So therefore, we would say as a consequence of this, don't worry, relax.

[14:00]

I have just been talking with somebody who is terribly worried about another person who has, shall we say, a psychological problem. And I have been trying to show her that although one might naturally worry because of love and concern, the worrying is not helping the situation. In fact, it is making it worse. Because the person about whom she is worrying is worried that she worries. And feels guilty for causing the suffering of worrying in the other person. Do you see that? It's absurd, you know, but we do this. So, I'm saying to you, forget it. Stop worrying. Not that this is some sort of challenge to your muscles, you know, grind your muscles

[15:09]

so that you stop that thing worrying. But that there simply is no reason to worry. It's like the story of the purely automatic SST plane that takes off from New York for Tokyo will arrive in 40 minutes. And as the takeoff occurs, the voice says, ladies and gentlemen, this aircraft is entirely under automatic control. Everything has been worked out by the most elaborately efficient computers, so that no human error can enter into any process. And therefore, there's absolutely no reason for you to worry. To [...] worry. Well, sir, there isn't.

[16:13]

I mean, what would it be? Now clearly, let's face it. You can get a kind of cancer, say, that will give a bad smell and cause you certain vibratory sensations that will be interpreted as pain. And everybody around you will tell you how miserable you are. They'll wring their hands and come on and pity you, and that'll make it much worse. And they will go through rituals of putting you in a place and defining you as sick when all you are is different. Go and study nature. Just walk out and look at your vegetables, and they've got swellings on them and all kinds

[17:17]

of funny things, and they're eaten by caterpillars. And you know, you go up to a cabbage with a great bunch of caterpillars working on it, or snails on a lettuce, and say, ah, [...] you shouldn't have snails. Well, what do the snails think? See you telling us to get out of here? We've just as much right to live as this lettuce? So, the disease of one organism is the health of another. Which are you? And it entirely depends on how you define yourself. I'm sorry, but this is the case. You don't have to define yourself in the way you've been taught to. Well therefore, as I started out by saying, when you realize that, that you could define

[18:21]

yourself as the whole universe if you had the nerve, then you get to feel a bit vertiginous, like myself out in front in the egg and spoon race. You know, it's up to you to carry on. What do you do? And so this raises the practical questions. I don't know why I say practical. We'll reserve that for a moment and put it over there. But it raises the practical questions of behavior, conduct, ethics. Now, I pointed out that if you resign yourself to the fact that you are nothing at all, that you're as good as dead now, that you'll find you get an enormous access of physical energy. Physical and psychic energy. You'll suddenly feel, why, you know, all this energy I've been wasting on worrying is available for something else. Now, in exactly the same way, that energy can be seen to turn out to be a kind of love.

[19:31]

Supposing at this moment, somebody gave you a check for a million dollars that wouldn't bounce. What would you do? You wouldn't go out and beat somebody up, would you? Your natural inclination, if you got a check for a million dollars right now, would be to give a party. You invite all your friends in and say, live it up, my expense. Because, when we are happy, we want to share it. Because then, just as the cortex, by resonating, tells us what goes on in the thalamic center, so if I'm happy because I suddenly got a million dollars, and I make you happy, this is another form of echoing, of resonating. So I make my happiness echo. That's the joy of singing, you see, in say, a great cathedral.

[20:42]

They let me loose on Grace Cathedral in San Francisco the other day, and I did a magical chant to dedicate the island of Alcatraz to the rivers and the pelicans and the seagulls. And so I could do this chant in this incredible echo space. Beautiful. So in the same way, when there is joy, and there is joy, as Blake said, energy is eternal delight. Energy is joy, and you have this thing, and you know you don't need to use it against itself anymore. You don't need to worry anymore. You can worry, you're perfectly free to worry, therefore you don't need to. See? So you have this thing going, and you say to everybody else, come on around. Now look, also, I'm not going to take care of you all and assume responsibility for you.

[21:45]

Because if I do, I shall be depriving you of the same joy I have. In other words, if you hang on to my energy as if you didn't have your own, you won't have discovered your own secret. So don't expect me to carry the whole burden, but just for the time being I feel so full of delight that I want to include all of you in the party. But the party only works if it awakens you to the fact that you have the same possibility. So we get the principle that in Mahayana Buddhist philosophy is called Jiji Muge. And this is a Japanese term which signifies the mutual interpenetration of all things and events. A Ji means a thing-event.

[22:48]

That is to say, any aspect or feature of the world process that you can point out as being particular and peculiar. That's a Ji. Instead of trying to translate it into English, simply absorb the word Ji into your language. It's like a wiggle. You may have difficulty in finding out where a wiggle begins and ends. But supposing, you know, we have a wiggle like that. I do it. Now look, you see, I did this and I identified a wiggle and then we agreed to ignore the fact that my hand fell back to my lap and continued the wiggle and is still wiggling here. But we identified this particular part of the wiggle, see? That's a Ji.

[23:50]

Now Jiji Muge means that between one Ji and another, see, when we said, oh it stops here and I put my hand down. Between one Ji and another there is Mu, which means no, Ge, block. Now that also means that every event that occurs in the universe implies all the other events that occur in the universe, because the universe is all the other events. And they use as an image of this Indra's net of jewels. Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the dawn covered with dew drops. And look in any dew drop and you will see the reflection of all the others. Not only that, but in the reflection of any other dew drop you will see that reflection reflecting all the other reflections forever. Forever. This is the way our brain is structured.

[24:59]

Every neuron contains the possibility of functioning as any other neuron. This is the art of what is called the hologram, whereby you can take a photographic negative, cut out a small square from it. Place that square under laser beams with a certain kind of photography and you will restore the rest of the photograph from which it was cut. Magic, pure and simple magic. Because the crystalline structure in that part of the negative implied the crystalline structure in the rest of it. You will find that your reproduction, your holographic reproduction, is vague at the edges in contradistinction to the original negative. But it will pick up things that just are not there, or we think they're not there. So in exactly the same way, if a scientist, a great anthropologist, in an entirely different

[26:05]

universe from this, were to receive a package containing a human tooth, and he were to study it completely, he would reconstruct the whole of this galaxy from it. Because he would realize that only in the context of such a galaxy could such a tooth exist. So that, therefore, everything implies everything else. That is G. G. Muget. That's how we fit together. And we can consider this in a social way. For example, I am here not merely because I told you that I was coming, but also because in a certain way you invited me. You listen to me, not because I am an authority, but because you say I am.

[27:16]

By the very fact of sitting and listening. So it takes you to create me, as much as it takes me to tell you who you are, namely incarnations of God. Isn't that funny? So then, in this vertiginous situation, where we find we are on our own, comes the great question, well, what to do? But let me first point out, this is the only situation from which you can really do anything. Because you know it's not necessary to do anything at all. If you want to, you can commit suicide, or just sit in the sun and fan yourself. But when we saw that we got all that energy from being willing to be nothing, which is

[28:30]

what we are, what are we going to do with it? Well, I've discussed this at great length with Gary Snyder, who is a great Zen Buddhist aficionado and a poet, and a student of Amerindian culture, and very, very interested in ecology. And he says, the only people who are fit to work for good ecological causes are those who know that it is not necessary to do it. The only people who are fit to survive are those who know it is not necessary to survive. If you think it is necessary to go on living, you are not fit to go on living. Why?

[29:32]

Because you are in a double bind. Life is a spontaneous process that happens, as the Chinese say, zi yan, of itself. If you say to that process, you must happen, you ball it up. It's like saying to someone, you've got to love me, see, I command you to love me. The original double bind, as I explained to you yesterday, is that you are required to do that which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily, which is sheer nonsense. But on the other hand, it seems like nonsense, because of its paradoxical character, to say that you can be creative only if you know you don't have to be. Now, one could have understood this by studying the Christian doctrine of God.

[30:41]

This is extremely funny. You see, there isn't a Christian doctrine of man. If you ask a preacher what a soul is, he won't be able to tell you. He'll mumble and mutter and just avoid the question somehow. If you ask him what God is, he'll have a great deal of information. Now one of the attributes of God is an unusual word, aseity, A-S-E-I-T-Y, aseity. And that is a Latin version of the Chinese zhēng. What is so ase of itself? In other words, God is not the result of anything else. God isn't pushed around. God is the unmoved, that is to say, unpushed mover. And so the Christians are saying that that is the state of reality.

[31:50]

It's an unmoved mover. Nothing pushes it around. So how does it decide what to do? When you are united with God, or realize that you always were, you are in a state of aseity. What do you want to do? Are you going to look over your shoulder and say, please tell me what I'm supposed to do? Well that's like McLuhan saying, you're driving looking in the rear vision mirror. What will you do? Where's the guideline? Why do you think you need a guideline? But look, since we've all found that when we're in this state of joyous finding out

[32:51]

that there's nothing to worry about, we feel in a celebratory mood and would like to resonate it, as we do with our cortexes, with other people. It's pretty obvious that the path is communicate, love each other. Don't you know, you've seen fundamentally that another person can't really injure you. I'm sure some of you have tried this. Sit in front of another person, maybe a total stranger, and look straight into their eyes. Don't be embarrassed, but just look and admire those beautiful jewels. If you do that, you can go on looking.

[33:53]

And you go, as it were, through the eyes, in, [...] to the center of the universe. Or you might do it by holding hands, or by kissing. But you, through that method, you enter the other person's sense organ. And you follow it down, knowing that the other person feels you in just the same way you feel them, down, [...] into the center of the thing. And what do you find at the end of the line, you see? All right, pursue it.

[34:55]

And you find that this system exists, if we intellectualize it, only in terms of the biosphere, the ecosystem of the planet Earth, which in turn exists only in terms of the solar system, which in turn exists only in terms of the galaxy, etc. So that when you really look into the eyes, or touch the hands of another person, you ultimately are looking at your own center. And one of the funniest experiences I ever had was talking to a lady who was a very fine psychotherapist, a very pretty woman of mature years.

[35:57]

And she was looking at me and saying, yes, I understand what you say intellectually, but I still don't really know it. And it was the funniest thing because the expression on the face belied what the eyes said to me. In the eyes I could see the original Mother Goddess. It was looking straight at me. But the facial expression was saying, what, me? So, you know, look at yourself in the mirror. Or listen to the sound of your own voice. That's what mantra chanting is for. And wonder, you know, what is this here going on?

[37:00]

Wowee. So that you can overcome self-consciousness and its problems by pushing it to an extreme. Become as self-conscious as possible. That was the point that we brought up this morning when somebody raised the question about I and me, and thinking about what I really is. Or Tennyson saying his name to himself over again. Become as self-conscious as you can possibly get. And then suddenly you will see the whole secret of yourself as a function of universe. Then, there follows, as I've suggested, the compassionate feeling to other people. The sense that we've got a glorious thing that we may just as well share and celebrate together. And this seems to me to be the only possible foundation we can get out of this for an ethic.

[38:10]

Now we know we've got one hell of an ethical problem for the simple reason there are too many people. When I was going for a walk with Selig Morganrath, who lives around Big Sur, we came across a sorrel plant covered with the most luscious fat green fly. They were really prospering. That was progress. The next day there was nothing but gray dust because they'd eaten the whole weed and they themselves had perished. And Selig said, that can happen to us. So when we, say, get densely overpopulated, we begin to consider what people we can define as non-human so as to get rid of them. When one gets rid of people, one always has to define them first as not being true human beings.

[39:16]

Watch out for that. So that we say an insane person has no soul and therefore doesn't really feel it if we murder him. Like an animal or a plant we define as having no soul so we can kill it. They don't really feel it. Their feelings are purely mechanical. It's like you had an automatic man which made protests when you hit it on the head but you say well they're purely automatic. There's nobody in here who feels it. But there always is someone inside, everything, even the plants, that feels it. When the Arabs have a crazy person in their village, instead of saying he's not human, they say treat him with respect because his soul has gone to Allah. Isn't that interesting? When in India you get a person who is called must, which is their equivalent of crazy, they say be very careful.

[40:18]

This is a specially enchanted being. Epileptics used to be thought of as bewitched and therefore somebody you treat with great respect. Even in these densely overpopulated countries. In Japan, which has always been overpopulated, what they have done, until we came in and messed the whole thing up, is they learn to live together by being incredibly polite. You learn, you live in a house where the walls offer no protection against sound. Everybody knows who farts, who burps, who's making love to who, but they have a tacit agreement to hear but not listen. To see but not look. This is called in Sanskrit upeksha. Upeksha means, in religious context, equanimity.

[41:24]

In a political context it means overlooking. You pretend you didn't see. And this is a very necessary virtue. If we are going to be put together densely. Because what it does, upeksha, is it creates space. Now look, we saw earlier that the gravitational fields of falling stars is all right because there's so much space that the chances of their colliding are minimal. Now let's take another population, instead of stars, let's take flies. Flies constitute, well, perhaps not in the city but at any rate in the countryside, flies

[42:35]

constitute a continuous liquid of beings. If you get a fly trap, like a big stinky, which attracts all the flies and kills them, it's just like making a hole in the middle of the ocean. Simply more and more flies come and fill it up. And you become a vortex to which the liquid flows. So don't do it. So you get more flies passing through you just because you have a fly trap. But in the state of nature the flies have their territory, see, like birds or anything else and they stay at a certain volume. A certain volume of flies is always in the air, just as a certain volume of stars is in space. And in order to function it has to have enough space. Whatever that may be.

[43:37]

So in the same way, in order for you and I to function, we have to have enough space. Now supposing things develop to the point where we don't have enough what we call physical space. Supposing it so comes that three of us have to live in one room. Then we create extra space by politeness, by courtesy, by ritual. And that eases the situation. This is what the Japanese have done for centuries. And that's what we have to learn because we are all going to be overcrowded in a very short time. Now therefore certain other things flow from this. In creating the space of politeness there are certain groups of people who in one way

[44:47]

or another are at a disadvantage. Like women, like negroes, who have in fact not been accorded the same rights as the dominant male white controllers of the scene. These problems can be made impossible. When the persecuted group gets self-conscious in such a way as to interpret even a friendly advance as an offense.

[45:48]

Now I know some far out women's lib characters for whom woman is a dirty word, like nigger. And there is nothing that I as a man can say to conciliate. Because it's intensely important to them that they be irreconcilable to the system. And there are black panthers who take the same attitude. Say you're a whitey and you can't help it. Don't come on to me like you're anything else than a whitey. Don't pretend. Don't pretend. We don't need you. And there can come a point where the women can say to the men, you're a man, you can't

[46:57]

help it, we don't need you. How ridiculous. You see? Because how would you know you were white unless there were black people? How would you know who you were a man unless there were women? So somewhere along the line there's got to be a big laugh about this absolutely ridiculous notion that is can exist without isn't. That the night can exist without the day. Something can exist without nothing. So let's take an intermission. You've been listening to the late Alan Watts with a talk entitled Death and Rebirth Part 2. That's 917B in the Alan Watts tape catalog and if you'd like that catalog you send a self-addressed envelope, large size if possible, to MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94965, California.

[48:01]

That's MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94965. Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from the neighborhood. Hop a flight to Miami Beach on a Hollywood. I'm taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line.

[49:06]

I'm in a New York state of mind. As I have you, hey baby, near me. Bright are the stars that shine. Dark is the sky. I know this love of mine ain't gonna never, [...] never die. And I love him. Bright are the stars that shine.

[50:35]

Dark is the sky. I know this love of mine ain't gonna never, [...] never die. And I love him. And I said I love him. I just love him. I just love him. And I, I just love him. And ooh, I love him. I just love, love, love, love him.

[51:41]

And ooh, I love him. And ooh, I love him. And ooh, ooh, ooh.

[52:48]

And ooh, ooh, ooh. Come on, baby, light my fire. Don't you know it's all right? I said come on, baby, light my fire. And ooh, ooh, ooh. I just love, love, love, love him. I love him. My, how the time goes by.

[54:08]

My, how the time goes running by. Oh, while the stars start to glisten and we sit here and listen to the hoot owls cry. Oh, are you feeling it too? Oh, love me like I love you. Oh, while the clocks are forgotten and a cloud made of cotton drifts across the sky. And meanwhile the moon gets yellower.

[55:16]

And meanwhile the moon gets mellower. And by now I should be leaving you. But somehow there ain't no leaving you. Why? There's that look in your eye. So I sit here and sigh. My, how the time goes by. My, how the time goes by. My, how the time goes by.

[56:47]

And meanwhile the moon gets yellower. And meanwhile the moon gets mellower. And by now I should be leaving you. But somehow there ain't no leaving you. Why? There's that look in your eye. So I sit here and sigh. My, how the time goes by. My, oh, my, oh, my, how the time goes by. If it's the last thing I do.

[58:04]

I'll make you mine. Baby, the first thing is you. And my desire. Just like the stars guard the moon. Above me. That's how God I love. So, baby. Love me, please love me. And if it's the last thing I do. I'm gonna hold your hand.

[59:15]

And though I won't say a word. I know. I know, I know you'll understand. We'll build a dream just for two. And then I'm gonna show love, try to make it come true. If it's the very last thing I do. If it's the very last thing I do.

[60:23]

I want to talk to you about this afternoon. And some of the aesthetic principles underlying both Chinese and Japanese arts. And they're deriving from these Taoistic and Buddhistic philosophies that have inspired them. And to speak about them fairly technically. In the language of Taoism, there are certain words used which are the foundations of their aesthetic ideas. One of these words is the uncarved block. And another is unbleached silk. And as I already intimated in talking to you about the Taoist view of the relationship of man and nature. The Taoists make a distinction between the natural and the artificial.

[61:26]

And seem to be all on the side of the natural and rather against the artificial. Although you must be cautioned against taking this too seriously. Too literally. You might say of course that the distinction between the artificial and the natural is an artificial distinction. Because really and truly a human building is no more nor less artificial than a bird's nest. But, the Taoists use a kind of art and a kind of poetry which you could call indicative. That is to say, while understanding that everything that man does is natural. Some things that he does are more natural than others. That is to say, they look more natural. They go that way. And so, the idea of unbleached silk means silk in the raw, raw silk, natural silk.

[62:31]

And so in the same way, the uncarved block is the sort of stone that would be selected for a Chinese or Japanese garden. Chinese stones tend, as I see it, to be rather more elaborate. Rather more fussy than Japanese stones. And I think that in the art of Bonseki, which means growing rocks, the Japanese are a bit more sophisticated than the Chinese. Although this doesn't often happen. But the Japanese are masters at growing rocks. So, this rock that you would find in a Japanese garden is the uncarved block. Even though it may have been, what has happened really, it's what we call in the West an objet trouvé. Where the artist, instead of making something, selects it. He finds a glorious thing and shares his finding with other people and that finding is a work of art. And you see, that is connected with the whole thought

[63:35]

in this tradition of aesthetics in the Far East. That superb art is a work of nature. It is not something imposed upon nature, even though, as you've seen in many Japanese gardens, that there is very complex espalier work on trees and that an enormous amount of pruning and trimming is done. And in fact, the discipline of the garden is amazingly complicated and requires a great deal of care. But the object always is, through the discipline of the art, to make the garden seem more natural than it would look if you left it to itself. You understand that? It's to work upon nature with skill and craft, but to move in the direction in which nature is already going.

[64:35]

So that the uncarved block may be extended into a sculpture. But what the carver, to make the block uncarved, even when the sculpture is finished, what the sculptor is going to ask the block in the first place is what do you want to become? In other words, along what lines have you already started in the direction of the sculpture? And I will cooperate with you and bring it to completion. So that's the principle, really, you see, that underlies Judo. Judo means the gentle way, the gentle Tao. And it is the art of going along with nature. It is also called Wu-Wei or Mu-Yi in Japanese. And not doing nothing, literally, not being... Because after all, it's man's nature to act.

[65:37]

You can't do nothing, literally. But to act Mu-Yi without... Really, it is to act without feeling that your actions are separate from nature. When you feel that everything you do is simply part of the course of things, then the way in which you do things is changed. You wouldn't think so. It isn't logical that it should be. But nevertheless, if you really feel that you can't deviate from the Tao, that it lies behind everything that you do, your type of action and your style of behavior will in fact be changed. And it will tend to be in the direction of your seeming to other people, in some ways,

[66:38]

to be more passive than you might ordinarily be. And the difficulty here is that Westerners, when they hear about Buddhism and Taoism and this sort of thing, they interpret it one-sidedly as passivity. And don't see that what sometimes looks like passivity is cleverness. As businessmen often know, if you leave letters unanswered for a month, when you return to them, many of them have already answered themselves. And sometimes when you sit and do nothing, you avoid making very serious mistakes, which would have arisen if you had acted prematurely, if you had done something about it. I've practiced this inactivity of this kind for many years, and I've always been accused of being lucky. Because when I should have done something,

[67:41]

and been up and at it, I just went and sat and did nothing. And then when it turned out all right, this is terrible. Just look. No, I know you haven't said that. That's why I'm still married to you. Yeah, it's all right. But anyway, this is so, isn't it? So, this tendency to look inactive and to go in the direction, in the arts, of a kind of primitivity, which we know in the word shibui. The quality called shibui in Japan is a certain kind of sophisticated primitivity. Listen to these contradictions, these paradoxes. The sophisticated primitivity, controlled accident,

[68:42]

where you see man and nature are really collaborating. Man as the controller, the reasoner, the logical being, and yet at the same time, not ruining life by making it all logic and all control. To have logic and to have control, that is to say, in short, to have order, you have to have randomness. Because where there is no randomness, order cannot manifest itself. Well now, in the vocabulary of Japanese aesthetics, there are a number of terms which you should understand thoroughly and which are basic.

[69:50]

The first is sabi. And that goes along with something that rhymes with it, wabi. So often Japanese people speak of wabi-sabi or sabi-wabi as a kind of mood of the art, of a certain art feeling or a zen taste. And then there is aware, which I've mentioned in passing, as another kind of mood. There is yugen. There is furyu. Such words which designate the basic moods of painting and poetry and so on. Now to begin with sabi, the basic feeling of sabi is loneliness. One of the great paintings

[70:52]

that illustrates sabi is the lonely crow on a tree branch. It is the feeling of the hermit. It is the feeling which the garden artist tries to create when in a crowded country he wants to give you the sensation of being way off in a mountain landscape. So this sense, you see, of solitariness, of being able to wander off on your own, is sabi and is a thing, of course, that any sane person has to have. One has to have privacy. You have to have a space in which to be alone so as not to become a rubber stamp. You see, it's often thought that Eastern philosophy is against individuality.

[71:54]

And this is not true. The unity of man and the universe is not a loss or a merging of personality in something impersonal. It's more like the fact that when individuality, when personality, is known and experienced as an expression of the whole cosmos, then the person becomes more individual, not less individual. But he becomes individual in a non-strident way, in a way that has in it the spirit of the uncarved block and the unbeached silk. And so one of the qualities of this is solitariness. The great Chinese poem, which has sabi in it preeminently, is asking for the master. I asked the boy beneath the pines.

[72:58]

He says the master's gone alone, herb gathering somewhere on the mount, cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown. So all the whole idea, you see, of zen, that wherever you stand, if you realize zen, you create a mountain. Everywhere is the mountain solitude, even in the middle of an uproar. This is sabi. And for this reason, then, an enormous amount of the subject matter of Far Eastern painting and poetry is solitude, the love of solitude. Now there is next wabi. This is a more difficult idea. Let's imagine that you are feeling very bad about something. You're depressed.

[73:58]

The world is too much with you. Just, you're sick of life. And then, quite surprisingly, you notice a small weed growing underneath it. Beneath a hedge. And this weed is really, after all, not just to be dismissed as a weed, but some rather lovely design there is in the nature of this plant. Or supposing you are bothered by financial uproar, wars, politics, and everything like that, and you are sitting on a beach, and you become aware of the water endlessly crossing pebbles. And you get a sense that this goes on forever and ever and ever. It is long before you were thought of.

[75:00]

Long before all human history, empires, schemes, and so on, and will endure long after. But if something strikes you that is very simple, very ordinary, like the water on the pebbles, or like the little weed under the hedge, that suggests a kind of amazing eternal reliability of nature. KSA in San Francisco, 1995. That, in a very humble form, goes on and on and on, and whatever human beings may do, this everlasting sanity persists. Now, that strange flip from the mood of depression to the mood of a certain consolation in this weed is wobbly. Now, don't let me be too dictatorial. I'm trying to explain these things through examples, rather than through trying to give you philosophical definitions.

[76:03]

It's better to give examples than to pin it down with abstract terminologies. Wobbly comes out in the haiku very much. A brushwood gate and for a lock this snail. This is wobbly. This is all there is. The path comes to an end among the parsley. Which has a touch of you again, but also wobbly, because the parsley is just... Well, everybody has parsley in the garden. Now, next, this word aware, A-W-A-R-E, is very much connected with the Buddhist feeling

[77:06]

for the transience of life. That everything is change, and nothing at all can be held on to or possessed. This feeling of transience is at the root of the philosophy of poverty that exists in Buddhism, and it has a curious difference in it from the Christian philosophy of poverty, as, say, explained by St. Francis of Assisi. It's cognate to it, it's like it, but a little subtle difference. Somehow one feels in the Christian emphasis on poverty that poverty contrasts with richness as good to evil. In other words, poverty is unpleasant, but it's something you ought to share with the poor who live unpleasant lives. So if you are to expiate your sins,

[78:09]

well, you ought to be poor and to live roughly. And so, for this reason, in Buddhism, one would not say so much poverty as one would say simplicity. Not going without, not clinging to things because it's good for you, but because it is actually the happiest way to live. Because nothing is more terrifying than the state of chronic anxiety which one has if you are subject to the illusion that something or other in life could be held on to and safeguarded, and nothing can. So the acceptance of everything flowing away is absolutely basic to freedom,

[79:09]

to being an unsui, a cloud water person who drifts like cloud and flows like water. But in this, we mustn't take ourselves too ridiculously. I mean, naturally all human beings have in them a certain clinging. See, you can't let go totally. You wouldn't be human if you did. You can't be just a leaf on the wind or just a ball in a mountain stream, to use a Zen poetic phrase. Because if you were that, you wouldn't be human. Just as I pointed out that a person with no emotions who has completely controlled his emotions is a stone Buddha. So a person who would be completely let go would also be some kind of an inanimate object. So Zen very definitely emphasizes being human,

[80:16]

being perfectly human as its ideal. And so to be perfectly human, one must have not a state of absolute detachment, but a state of detachment which contains a little bit of resistance, a certain clinging still. They say in India of Jivan Mukta, a man who is liberated in this world, that he has to cultivate a few mild bad habits in order to stay in the body. Because if he were absolutely perfect, he would disappear from manifestation. And so the yogi, great yogi, maybe he smokes a cigarette or has a bad temper occasionally. It's something that keeps him human. And that little thing is very important. It's like the salt in a stew. It grounds him. Well, this is another way of saying

[81:19]

that even a very great sage, a great Buddha, will have in him a touch of regret that life is fleeting. Because if he doesn't have that touch of regret, he's not human, and he is incapable of compassion towards people who regret very much that life is fleeting. So the mood aware is that touch of regret, of nostalgia, of... Do you know that poem which speaks of the feeling of the banquet hall deserted? Here it is, there's been a great banquet, you know, and all the guests have gone home and there are empty glasses and dirty plates and crushed napkins and all sorts of things all over. And somehow the echo of voices and merriment is still there. And so this mood, aware, comes up.

[82:21]

So even a very great person should feel that, because the price otherwise is not to be human. So for this reason, Buddhist and Taoist poetry is not unemotional. It's not dehumanized. And so somehow speaks very much to us as people, and does not have in it the feeling that we ought instead to turn into saints or supermen. That's the humane thing about this philosophy of life.

[83:25]

The next word, a special term, is furyu. Furyu means literally wind flow. Fu is the character for wind, ryu means flowing. And the dictionaries translate it elegance, and this won't do. Furyu, first of all you must remember that the word wind is used in Chinese and Japanese alike to indicate atmosphere. The atmosphere of a place. So when a person has, say, a certain school of poetry or philosophy, it's called the family wind. That means that the atmosphere, the slant, the attitude of this particular school.

[84:29]

So that meaning of wind, atmosphere, comes into the expression furyu. And furyu is like this. Here is a man fishing, and he's sitting in the evening in the twilight on the edge of a river, and with his fishing rod in a lonely little boat tied up by the bank. Now if this man is fishing with his mind intent simply on catching fish, this is not furyu. But if he's also digging the atmosphere, it's furyu. To flow with the wind. You see, to dig the atmosphere. American offers the most beautiful possibilities of translation in our incomparable slang for some oriental ideas.

[85:33]

Furyu is there to get with it, to flow with it. And not again, you see, in the sense of the merely passive leaf flowing on the wind. But furyu has in it, you see, a touch of self-consciousness. Like that man fishing. Now you would think if you studied Taoist philosophy that this would be very bad. Zhuangzi somewhere says that a comfortable belt is one that you don't feel. And you're unaware of it. That's not the most comfortable belt. Like comfortable shoes. Would you be completely unconscious of comfortable shoes? No. Something better than comfortable shoes are shoes that you know are comfortable. So in the same way, the self-consciousness

[86:37]

adds something to life. It's one thing to be happy and not know it. It's another thing to be happy and to know it. It's like one's voice in the shower room or bathtub has more resonance than one's voice in the open air. And that's why temples and cathedrals and resonating boxes for guitars and drums and things are created. To give this little quality of echo. For all echo is a certain kind of feedback which enables you to reflect upon what you are doing and to know that you know. So one might say that ordinary people are Buddhas, but they don't know it. And the Buddha is one who knows he's a Buddha. Only, they don't let you settle for this comfortably and easily because really to know is also defined as not to know.

[87:41]

In the Upanishads it is said that if you think that you know what Brahman is, you have yet some study to be done. For those who know Brahman do not know Brahman and those who do not know Brahman really know. Now all this paradoxical language is intended to keep you confused so that you can't say I've got it. So, but this position you see is not one-sided. There is something about being human, about being self-conscious, you see, that is not a mistake of nature, not a completely evil fall into self-awareness. But self-awareness, although it creates all kinds of problems, because through self-awareness we, the human being is in some sense a self-frustrating mechanism.

[88:42]

He knows that he's going to die and the price of being able to control the future is to know that in the long run you won't be able to and worry about that. But also with self-consciousness goes the possibility of resonance, of realization, of becoming enlightened, liberated, and knowing it and therefore able to enjoy it. So, Furryu adds this to the dimension of going with it, something more than the mere passivity of going with, but knowing that you're going. Now, but it does at the same time, it isn't entirely wrong that the dictionaries have translated it elegance. If you could say Furryu is style,

[89:50]

when we say somebody really has style. Now, but this designates a particular kind of style. It is the style of what one might call the elegant poor man, the aristocratic bum, the rich pauper, you see. Now you find that a good deal in the things that we've been seeing. We've gone to many temples where nobody really owns anything and yet in a way they're luxurious. This is Furryu. The next word, Yugen. F-U-R-Y-U, Furryu.

[90:58]

I have spoken about Yugen, but I haven't told you the basic symbol of Yugen is the flower which grows from a rock. And so there is something about that which is improbable, mysterious, contradictory, that a flower could come out of a rock. But Yugen more than any other of these terms defies translation. The two characters which I shall draw for you shortly are rather interesting. One, the first character, Yu, shows the basic form of a mountain. And then the mountain is combined with characters indicating dark, darkness.

[92:08]

You see, in the character for mountain, which is simply like this, there are these things here that are the valleys, and the dark is put in the valley, you see, in each case. Now, you get, so, the idea of the deep valley. There's a poem which says, the wind drops, but the petals keep falling. The bird calls, and the mountain becomes more mysterious. Little sounds emphasizing silence. Little motions emphasizing stillness. This quality, you see, is in this word, Yu. Gen is in Chinese, shuan, which means the original deep, deep, mysterious darkness out of which everything arises.

[93:11]

The depth. Jakob Böhmer would say, ungrund, the, in the book of Genesis, and darkness covered the face of the deep, or the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Those waters of chaos, the primeval blackness, which is the same blackness as your head. You know, how your head appears invisible to your eyes. That is gen. It is darker than darkness because it isn't, it is blacker than black, you see. It is practically nothingness. It's so mysterious. So when you put these two characters together, you get yu gen. And so, yu gen is first of all suggestiveness.

[94:14]

I was looking around one of the temples a few days ago where I noticed that you couldn't figure out how big it was, or it didn't seem to have any limits. Because always every wall, say, of a room seemed to be a screen which led to something else beyond. And at the back of every garden there seemed to be a little gate that led to some other courtyard. And everything led into something else. And I said to the priest, I don't know whether I'm going to go exploring or not, or just leave it alone and think that, well, here I left Kyoto and I never did find out what was through that little gate. And so what? Oh, forever there will be magic behind there, which I didn't define, I didn't draw in. And so this whole temple was done that way.

[95:19]

All sorts of suggestions of little avenues disappearing, like a mountain path winding up among the trees. Where does it go? True, if you follow it. You'll eventually go up out of Kyoto here and get down to Otsu. And who knows, you'll find yourself back in the suburbs. But there is the sense with that disappearing mountain path, like we've got going up here, that it goes to the place. And everybody has in the back of their minds an image of the place that you want to go to. Or some, not really an image though, it's always slightly indefinite. There's the certain feeling of there ought to be somewhere the thing I've always wanted. We get disappointed, of course, because as we get older we feel that perhaps that doesn't exist at all. That one just has to put up with the second best or with something. Half a loaf is better than no bread. But still, I find that

[96:24]

far eastern art is very, very full of hints about what is sometimes called Horaisan. Horaisan is the magical island somewhere out in the Pacific, which is the paradise island. And all these Chinese paintings of wonderful floating pagodas and terraces with scholars sitting around drinking wine and so on, are hints of the paradise world. And that somewhere then these little steps lead up to that thing. And you've seen these steps. Japan is full of them. As you just go along on the train, you look up the hills and there are arches, torii, steps disappearing into the hills, all of which suggest the feeling somehow there is that thing. So Yugen, as it were, comes round full circle to Sabi. The wonderful lonely place

[97:30]

at the end of the road where there won't be any mother-in-law to bother you. That sort of dreadful social difficulty. But the solitude which befits a bearded old gentleman Now, of course, you see, all these things are our symbols. On one level, they're very human and they reflect our perhaps childish and immature desires to be really alone, to have that paradise thing. And realistic people say, well, you ought not to bother yourself or fool yourself with such fantasies. And nowadays I find that we feel very guilty about thinking of paradise, of horizon, or whatever it is,

[98:32]

the enchanted garden. We think, nah-ah. Reality is what you read about in the newspapers and you've got to face it. And everything is unpleasant, basically. I know there's the hard-boiled school of zoologists, for example, who insist that birds hate flying. You know, everybody has always envied a bird and wanted to be able to glide along with wings, you know. And so there comes up somebody who's usually some wretched academician who says, no, we've discovered by measurements that birds loathe flying. And you must feel very satisfactory when you've found that out because you've smashed an ideal. Oh, for the wings of a dove. How far away would I roam? In the wilderness, build me a nest and remain there forever at rest. I'm quoting the Psalms. But apparently doves just hate this chore of flying. Now, it is just in the same way

[99:39]

as it's ridiculous to try to be so inhuman as never to feel any regrets about the passing of time and of life and so on. It's likewise inhuman not to have the paradise fantasy of the mysterious place round the corner, just over the crest of the hill, just behind the island in the distance. You see? Because that place is really the big joke. That's you. That's why you have found that at the end of the line, when you get through the last torii and up the last stairway, you are liable to be confronted with a mirror. And so everybody is seeking, [...] seeking for that thing that you've got to have, you see?

[100:42]

Well, you've got it. But nobody's going to believe this. But there it is, that the real thing that you are is the paradise land that you're looking for at the end of the line. And it's far, far more reliable than any kind of an external scene which you could love and cling to and hold on to. Of course, the whole fascination of life is that that seems perfectly incredible. So, I think these terms are the crucial ones. Let me repeat them briefly.

[101:46]

You've got, firstly, the uncarved block and the unbleached silk. These are the prototypes. Then you have the flip from disillusion with everything to the sudden recognition of how faithful the weeds are. How the sparrows chirping in the eaves suddenly take your mind away from important and dreadful business. Aware the regret of the passing of life

[102:47]

which somehow makes that very passing beautiful. For you, getting with it and living with style, that is to say, with rich poverty, elegant simplicity, you again have the aesthetic equivalent of... Well, let me put it this way. There was a philosopher by the name of Van der Leeuw who once said that the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. That's you again. And that mystery, that deep, deep, ever so deep thing

[103:49]

which is before all worlds is you, the unrecognized self. So let's have a brief intermission. You've been listening to... ...

[107:19]

... [...]

[108:26]

... [...]

[109:50]

... [...]

[111:42]

... [...]

[112:46]

... [...]

[114:15]

... [...]

[115:16]

... [...]

[116:31]

... [...]

[117:39]

... [...]

[118:36]

@Text_v004
@Score_JH