The Nature Of Consciousness

Chapter 1

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The Nature Of Consciousness.

by Alan Watts.

I find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter of this seminar is going to be, because it"s too fundamental to give it a t.i.tle. I"m going to talk about what there is. Now, the first thing, though, that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about the basic ideas that, as Westerners living today in the United States, influence our everyday common sense, our fundamental notions about what life is about. And there are historical origins for this, which influence us more strongly than most people realize. Ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use, and of our ideas of logic, and of what makes sense altogether.

And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word "myth" to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word "myth" in a more powerful sense. A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. Now, for example, a myth in a way is a metaphor. If you want to explain electricity to someone who doesn"t know anything about electricity, you say, well, you talk about an electric current. Now, the word "current" is borrowed from rivers. It"s borrowed from hydrolics, and so you explain electricity in terms of water. Now, electricity is not water, it behaves actually in a different way, but there are some ways in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricty, and so you explain it in terms of water. Or if you"re an astronomer, and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved s.p.a.ce, you say, "well, it"s as if you have a black balloon, and there are white dots on the black balloon, and those dots represent galaxies, and as you blow the balloon up, uniformly all of them grow farther and farther apart. But you"re using an a.n.a.logy--the universe is not actually a black balloon with white dots on it.

So in the same way, we use these sort of images to try and make sense of the world, and we at present are living under the influence of two very powerful images, which are, in the present state of scientific knowledge, inadequate, and one of the major problems today are to find an adequate, satisfying image of the world. Well that"s what I"m going to talk about. And I"m going to go further than that, not only what image of the world to have, but how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of the world that we can manage to conceive.

All right, now--the two images which we have been working under for 2000 years and maybe more are what I would call two models of the universe, and the first is called the ceramic model, and the second the fully automatic model. The ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of Genesis, from which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity derive their basic picture of the world. And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact. It is made, as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it. Don"t forget Jesus is the son of a carpenter. And also the son of G.o.d. So the image of G.o.d and of the world is based on the idea of G.o.d as a technician, potter, carpenter, architect, who has in mind a plan, and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan.

So basic to this image of the world is the notion, you see, that the world consists of stuff, basically. Primoridial matter, substance, stuff. As parts are made of clay. Now clay by itself has no intelligence. Clay does not of itself become a pot, although a good potter may think otherwise. Because if you were a really good potter, you don"t impose your will on the clay, you ask any given lump of clay what it wants to become, and you help it to do that. And then you become a genious. But the ordinary idea I"m talking about is that simply clay is unintelligent; it"s just stuff, and the potter imposes his will on it, and makes it become whatever he wants.

And so in the book of Genesis, the lord G.o.d creates Adam out of the dust of the Earth. In other words, he makes a clay figurine, and then he breathes into it, and it becomes alive. And because the clay become informed. By itself it is formless, it has no intelligence, and therefore it requires an external intelligence and an external energy to bring it to life and to bring some sense to it. And so in this way, we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts, as being made, and it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother "How was I made?" or "Who made me?" And this is a very, very powerful idea, but for example, it is not shared by the Chinese, or by the Hindus. A Chinese child would not ask its mother "How was I made?" A Chinese child might ask its mother "How did I grow?" which is an entirely different procedure form making. You see, when you make something, you put it together, you arrange parts, or you work from the outside in, as a sculpture works on stone, or as a potter works on clay. But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction. It works from the inside to the outside. It expands. It burgeons. It blossoms. And it happens all of itself at once. In other words, the original simple form, say of a living cell in the womb, progressively complicates itself, and that"s the growing process, and it"s quite different from the making process.

But we have thought, historically, you see, of the world as something made, and the idea of being--trees, for example-- constructions, just as tables and houses are constructions. And so there is for that reason a fundamental difference between the made and the maker. And this image, this ceramic model of the universe, originated in cultures where the form of government was monarchial, and where, therefore, the maker of the universe was conceived also at the same time in the image of the king of the universe. "King of kings, lords of lords, the only ruler of princes, who thus from thy throne behold all dwellers upon Earth." I"m quoting the Book of Common Prayer. And so, all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way feel related to basic reality as a subject to a king. And so they are on very, very humble terms in relation to whatever it is that works all this thing. I find it odd, in the United States, that people who are citizens of a republic have a monarchial theory of the universe. That you can talk about the president of the United States as LBJ, or Ike, or Harry, but you can"t talk about the lord of the universe in such familiar terms. Because we are carrying over from very ancient near-Eastern cultures, the notion that the lord of the universe must be respected in a certain way. Poeple kneel, people bow, people prostrate themselves, and you know what the reason for that is: that n.o.body is more frightened of anybody else than a tyrant. He sits with his back to the wall, and his guards on either side of him, and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can"t use weapons that way. When you come into his presence, you don"t stand up and face him, because you might attack, and he has reason to fear that you might because he"s ruling you all. And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he"s the one who succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside because they--the criminals, the people we lock up in jail--are simply the people who didn"t make it.

So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him. And so when you design a church, what does it look like? Catholic church, with the alter where it used to be--it"s changing now, because the Catholic religion is changing. But the Catholic church has the alter with it"s back to the wall at the east end of the church. And the alter is the throne and the priest is the chief vizier of the court, and he is making abeyance to the throne, but there is the throne of G.o.d, the alter. And all the people are facing it, and kneeling down. And a great Catholic cathederal is called a basilica, from the Greek "basilikos," which means "king." So a basilica is the house of a king, and the ritual of the church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium.

A Protestant church is a little different. Basically the same. The furniture of a Protestant church is based on a judicial courthouse. The pulpit, the judge in an American court wears a black robe, he wears exactly the same dress as a Protestant minister. And everybody sits in these boxes, there"s a box for the jury, there"s a box for the judge, there"s a box for this, there"s a box for that, and those are the pews in an ordinary colonial- type Protestant church. So both these kinds of churches which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe decorate themselves, are architecturally constructed in accordance with politcal images of the universe. One is the king, and the other is the judge. Your honor. There"s sense in this. When in court, you have to refer to the judge as "your honor." It stops the people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude. There"s a certain sense to that.

But when you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life, it has limitations. For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit. This idea doesn"t work anymore. Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question "What is matter?" They began that way. They wanted to know, what is the fundamental substance of the world? And the more they asked that question, the more they realized the couldn"t answer it, because if you"re going to say what matter is, you"ve got to describe it in terms of behavior, that is to say in terms of form, in terms of pattern. You tell what it does, you describe the smallest shapes of it which you can see. Do you see what happens? You look, say, at a piece of stone, and you want to say, "Well, what is this piece of stone made of?" You take your microscope and you look at it, and instead of just this block of stuff, you see ever so many tinier shapes. Little crystals. So you say, "Fine, so far so good. Now what are these crystals made of?" And you take a more powerful instrument, and you find that they"re made of molocules, and then you take a still more powerful instrument to find out what the molocules are made of, and you begin to describe atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles. But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff. Because there isn"t any.

What happens is this: "Stuff" is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus. Fuzzy. Stuff--the idea of stuff is that it is undifferentiated, like some kind of goo. And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy. When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern. But when you want to change the level of magnification, and go in closer and closer and closer, you get fuzzy again before you get clear. So everytime you get fuzzy, you go through thinking there"s some kind of stuff there. But when you get clear, you see a shape. So all that we can talk about is patterns. We never, never can talk about the "stuff" of which these patterns are supposed to be made, because you don"t really have to suppose that there is any. It"s enough to talk about the world in terms of patterns. It describes anything that can be described, and you don"t really have to suppose that there is some stuff that const.i.tutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay const.i.tutes the essence of pots. And so for this reason, you don"t really have to suppose that the world is some kind of helpless, pa.s.sive, unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to inform and make into intelligent shapes. So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff--potted clay--but pattern. A self-moving, self-designing pattern. A dance. And our common sense as individuals hasn"t yet caught up with this.

Well now, in the course of time, in the evolution of Western thought. The ceramic image of the world ran into trouble. And changed into what I call the fully automatic image of the world. In other words, Western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature, and got that idea from Judaism and Christianity and Islam. That in other words, the potter, the maker of the world in the beginning of things laid down the laws, and the law of G.o.d, which is also the law of nature, is called the "loggos.?,." And in Christianity, the loggos is the second person of the trinity, incarnate as Jesus Christ, who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine law. So we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws, as if, in other words, the laws of the world were like the rails on which a streetcar or a tram or a train runs, and these things exist in a certain way, and all events respond to these laws. You know that limerick, There was a young man who said "d.a.m.n, For it certainly seems that I am A creature that moves In determinate grooves. I"m not even a bus, I"m a tram."

So here"s this idea that there"s kind of a plan, and everything responds and obeys that plan. Well, in the 18th century, Western intellectuals began to suspect this idea. And what they suspected was whether there is a lawmaker, whether there is an architect of the universe, and they found out, or they reasoned, that you don"t have to suppose that there is. Why? Because the hypothesis of G.o.d does not help us to make any predictions. Nor does it-- In other words, let"s put it this way: if the business of science is to make predictions about what"s going to happen, science is essentially prophecy. What"s going to happen? By examining the behavior of the past and describing it carefully, we can make predictions about what"s going to happen in the future. That"s really the whole of science. And to do this, and to make successful predictions, you do not need G.o.d as a hypothesis. Because it makes no difference to anything. If you say "Everything is controlled by G.o.d, everything is governed by G.o.d," that doesn"t make any difference to your prediction of what"s going to happen. And so what they did was drop that hypothesis. But they kept the hypothesis of law. Because if you can predict, if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved, and you"ve got some regularities in the behavior of the universe, you call that law. Although it may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word, it"s simply regularity.

And so what they did was got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law. And so the conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism. Something, in other words, that is functioning according to regular, clocklike mechanical principles. Newton"s whole image of the world is based on billiards. The atoms are billiard b.a.l.l.s, and they bang each other around. And so your behavior, every individual around, is defined as a very, very complex arrangement of billiard b.a.l.l.s being banged around by everything else. And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is, to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind energy. In say the metaphysics of Ernst Hegel, and T.H. Huxley, the world is basically nothing but energy--blind, unintelligent force. And likewise and parallel to this, in the philosophy of Freud, the basic psychological energy is libido, which is blind l.u.s.t. And it is only a fluke, it is only as a result of pure chances that resulting from the exuberance of this energy there are people. With values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and with love. Just a fluke. Like, you know, 1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters for a million years will eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica. And of course the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia Britannica, they will relapse into nonsense.

And so in order that that shall not happen, for you and I are flukes in this cosmos, and we like our way of life--we like being human--if we want to keep it, say these people, we"ve got to fight nature, because it will turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it. So we"ve got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it. From outside. And so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature. And we talk about the conquest of s.p.a.ce. The conquest of Everest. And the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer. The rocket--you know, compensation for the s.e.xually inadequate male. So we"re going to conquer s.p.a.ce. You know we"re in s.p.a.ce already, way out. If anybody cared to be sensitive and let outside s.p.a.ce come to you, you can, if your eyes are clear enough. Aided by telescopes, aided by radio astronomy, aided by all the kinds of sensitive instruments we can devise. We"re as far out in s.p.a.ce as we"re ever going to get. But, y"know, sensitivity isn"t the pitch. Especially in the WASP culture of the United States. We define manliness in terms of agression, you see, because we"re a little bit frightened as to whether or not we"re really men. And so we put on this great show of being a tough guy. It"s completely unneccesary. If you have what it takes, you don"t need to put on that show. And you don"t need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature? Because after all, you ARE a symptom of nature. You, as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in exactly the same way an apple grows off an apple tree.

So let"s say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using "apple" as a verb. And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples. And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in. Just as spots on somebody"s skin is symptomatic of chicken pox. Just as hair on a head is symptomatic of what"s going on in the organism. But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths--the ceramic and the automatic--not to feel that we belong in the world. So our popular speech reflects it. You say "I came into this world." You didn"t. You came out of it. You say "Face facts." We talk about "encounters" with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies. And the average person has the sensation that he is a someone that exists inside a bag of skin. The center of consciousness that looks out at this thing, and what the h.e.l.l"s it going to do to me? You see? "I recognize you, you kind of look like me, and I"ve seen myself in a mirror, and you look like you might be people." So maybe you"re intelligent and maybe you can love, too. Perhaps you"re all right, some of you are, anyway. You"ve got the right color of skin, or you have the right religion, or whatever it is, you"re OK. But there are all those people over in Asia, and Africa, and they may not really be people. When you want to destroy someone, you always define them as "unpeople." Not really human. Monkeys, maybe. Idiots, maybe. Machines, maybe, but not people.

So we have this hostility to the external world because of the superst.i.tion, the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory that you, yourself, exist only inside your skin. Now I want to propose another idea altogether. There are two great theories in astronomy going on right now about the origination of the universe. One is called the explosion theory, and the other is called the steady state theory. The steady state people say there never was a time when the world began, it"s always expanding, yes, but as a result of free hydrogen in s.p.a.ce, the free hydrogen coagulates and makes new galaxies. But the other people say there was a primoridial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galazies into s.p.a.ce. Well let"s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.

It"s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it"s dense, isn"t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in s.p.a.ce, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you"re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don"t feel that we"re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you"re not something that"s a result of the big bang. You"re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I"m that, too. But we"ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

And so what I would call a basic problem we"ve got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say separate things, or separate events. That that is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you"re going to have no further problems. I once asked a group of high school children "What do you mean by a thing?" First of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms. They said "It"s an object," which is simply another word for a thing; it doesn"t tell you anything about what you mean by a thing. Finally, a very smart girl from Italy, who was in the group, said a thing is a noun. And she was quite right. A noun isn"t a part of nature, it"s a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world, either. The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. And only when human beings get to working on things--they build buildings in straight lines, and try to make out that the world isn"t really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.

Now then, when you want to get control of something that wiggles, it"s pretty difficult, isn"t it? You try and pick up a fish in your hands, and the fish is wiggly and it slips out. What do you do to get hold of the fish? You use a net. And so the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world. So if you want to get hold of this wiggle, you"ve got to put a net over it. A net is something regular. And I can number the holes in a net. So many holes up, so many holes across. And if I can number these holes, I can count exactly where each wiggle is, in terms of a hole in that net. And that"s the beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world. But in order to do that, I"ve got to break up the wiggle into bits. I"ve got to call this a specific bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle, and this the next bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle. And so these bits are things or events. Bit of wiggles. Which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle. In order to measure and therfore in order to control it. But in nature, in fact, in the physical world, the wiggle isn"t bitted. Like you don"t get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. But you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it. You bite it. But it doesn"t come bitten.

So the world doesn"t come thinged; it doesn"t come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And as I wave and say to you "Yoo-hoo!" the world is waving with me at you and saying "Hi! I"m here!" But we are consciousness of the way we feel and sense our existence. Being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things, our consciousness has been influenced, so that each one of us does not feel that. We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, just something out on the end of it. And therefore we are scared stiff. My wave is going to disappear, and I"m going to die! And that would be awful. We"ve got a mythology going now which is, as Father Maskell.?, put it, we are something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium. And that"s it. And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.

This is what people really believe today. You may go to church, you may say you believe in this, that, and the other, but you don"t. Even Jehovah"s Witnesses, who are the most fundamental of fundamentalists, they are polite when they come around and knock on the door. But if you REALLY believed in Christianity, you would be screaming in the streets. But n.o.body does. You would be taking full- page ads in the paper every day. You would be the most terrifying television programs. The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believed what they teach. But they don"t. They think they ought to believe what they teach. They believe they should believe, but they don"t really believe it, because what we REALLY believe is the fully automatic model. And that is our basic, plausible common sense. You are a fluke. You are a separate event. And you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium, and that"s it, baby. That"s it.

Now why does anybody think that way? There"s no reason to, because it isn"t even scientific. It"s just a myth. And it"s invented by people who want to feel a certain way. They want to play a certain game. The game of G.o.d got embarra.s.sing. The idea if G.o.d as the potter, as the architect of the universe, is good. It makes you feel that life is, after all, important. There is someone who cares. It has meaning, it has sense, and you are valuable in the eyes of the father. But after a while, it gets embarra.s.sing, and you realize that everything you do is being watched by G.o.d. He knows your tiniest innermost feelings and thoughts, and you say after a while, "Quit bugging me! I don"t want you around." So you become an athiest, just to get rid of him. Then you feel terrible after that, because you got rid of G.o.d, but that means you got rid of yourself. You"re nothing but a machine. And your idea that you"re a machine is just a machine, too. So if you"re a smart kid, you commit suicide. Camus said there is only one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions. The first one is "Who started it?" The second is "Are we going to make it?" The third is "Where are we going to put it?" The fourth is "Who"s going to clean up?" And the fifth, "Is it serious?"

But still, should you or not commit suicide? This is a good question. Why go on? And you only go on if the game is worth the gamble. Now the universe has been going on for an incredible long time. And so really, a satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that"s worth betting on. That"s very, it seems to me, elementary common sense. If you make a theory of the universe which isn"t worth betting on, why bother? Just commit suicide. But if you want to go on playing the game, you"ve got to have an optimal theory for playing the game. Otherwise there"s no point in it. But the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very funny game, for what they wanted to say was this: all you people who believe in religion--old ladies and wishful thinkers-- you"ve got a big daddy up there, and you want comfort, but life is rough. Life is tough, as success goes to the most hard- headed people. That was a very convenient theory when the European and American worlds were colonizing the natives everywhere else. They said "We"re the end product of evolution, and we"re tough. I"m a big strong guy because I face facts, and life is just a bunch of junk, and I"m going to impose my will on it and turn it into something else. I"m real hard." That"s a way of flattering yourself.

And so, it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world works. In academic circles, no other theory of the world than the fully automatic model is respectable. Because if you"re an academic person, you"ve got to be an intellectually tough person, you"ve got to be p.r.i.c.kly. There are basically two kinds of philosophy. One"s called p.r.i.c.kles, the other"s called goo. And p.r.i.c.kly people are precise, rigorous, logical. They like everything chopped up and clear. Goo people like it vague. For example, in physics, p.r.i.c.kly people believe that the ultimate const.i.tuents of matter are particles. Goo people believe it"s waves. And in philosophy, p.r.i.c.kly people are logical positivists, and goo people are idealists. And they"re always arguing with each other, but what they don"t realize is neither one can take his position without the other person. Because you wouldn"t know you advocated p.r.i.c.kles unless there was someone advocating goo. You wouldn"t know what a p.r.i.c.kle was unless you knew what a goo was. Because life isn"t either p.r.i.c.kles or goo, it"s either gooey p.r.i.c.kles or p.r.i.c.kly goo. They go together like back and front, male and female. And that"s the answer to philosophy. You see, I"m a philosopher, and I"m not going to argue very much, because if you don"t argue with me, I don"t know what I think. So if we argue, I say "Thank you," because owing to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what I mean. So I can"t get rid of you.

But however, you see, this whole idea that the universe is nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it is a putdown theory of the world. People who had an advantage to make, a game to play by putting it down, and making out that because they put the world down they were a superior kind of people. So that just won"t do. We"ve had it. Because if you seriously go along with this idea of the world, you"re what is technically called alienated. You feel hostile to the world. You feel that the world is a trap. It is a mechanism, it is electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught. And you, poor thing, have to put up with being put into a body that"s falling apart, that gets cancer, that gets the great Siberian itch, and is just terrible. And these mechanics--doctors--are trying to help you out, but they really can"t succeed in the end, and you"re just going to fall apart, and it"s a grim business, and it"s just too bad. So if you think that"s the way things are, you might as well commit suicide right now. Unless you say, "Well, I"m d.a.m.ned. Because there might really be after all eternal d.a.m.nation. Or I identify with my children, and I think of them going on without me and n.o.body to support them. Because if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them, I shall teach them to be like I am, and they"ll go on, dragging it out to support their children, and they won"t enjoy it. They"ll be afraid to commit suicide, and so will their children. They"ll all learn the same lessons."

So you see, all I"m trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world that is influencing most people in the United States today is simply a myth. If you want to say that the idea of G.o.d the father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth, in a bad sense of the word "myth," so is this other one. It is just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs. Why? Let"s get this clear. If there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty, well you"ve found it in other people. In other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I said, if it is there, in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things. We are as symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree or the rose of the rose bush. The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological ent.i.ty grows people, and our existence on the Earth is a symptom of this other system, and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of a whole company of other galaxies. Goodness only knows what that"s in.

But you see, when, as a scientist, you describe the behavior of a living organism, you try to say what a person does, it"s the only way in which you can describe what a person is, describe what they do. Then you find out that in making this description, you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. In other words, you cannot talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor, because when I walk, I don"t just dangle my legs in empty s.p.a.ce. I move in relationship to a room. So in order to describe what I"m doing when I"m walking, I have to describe the room; I have to describe the territory. So in describing my talking at the moment, I can"t describe it as just a thing in itself, because I"m talking to you. And so what I"m doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also. So if that is necessary, in other words, in order to describe MY behavior, I have to describe YOUR behavior and the behavior of the environment, it means that we"ve really got one system of behavior. Your skin doesn"t separate you from the world; it"s a bridge through which the external world flows into you, and you flow into it.

Just, for example, as a whirlpool in water, you could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape you have a definite form. All right? Here is a flow of water, and suddenly it does a whirlpool, and it goes on. The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it. The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and exactly the same way, the whole universe is doing each one of us, and I see each one of you today and I recognize you tomorrow, just as I would recognize a whirlpool in a stream. I"d say "Oh yes, I"ve seen that whirlpool before, it"s just near so-and-so"s house on the edge of the river, and it"s always there." So in the same way when I meet you tomorrow, I recognize you, you"re the same whirlpool you were yesterday. But you"re moving. The whole world is moving through you, all the cosmic rays, all the food you"re eating, the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything is just flowing right through you. When you"re wiggling the same way, the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you.

But the problem is, you see, we haven"t been taught to feel that way. The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it--aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us. Otherwise we"re going to go out of our heads. We"re going to commit suicide, collectively, courtesy of H-bombs. And, all right, supposing we do, well that will be that, then there will be life making experiments on other galaxies. Maybe they"ll find a better game.

ALAN WATTS: THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, part 2 of 3 Originally broadcast on KSAN radio, San Francisco Well now, in the first session this afternoon, I was discussing two of the great myths or models of the universe, which lie in the intellictual and psychological background of all of us. The myth of the world as a political, monarchial state in which we are all here on sufferance as subject to G.o.d. In which we are MADE artifacts, who do not exist in our own right. G.o.d alone, in the first myth, exists in his own right, and you exist as a favor, and you ought to be grateful. Like your parents come on and say to you, "Look at all the things we"ve done for you, all the money we spent to send you to college, and you turn out to be a beatnik. You"re a wretched, ungrateful child." And you"re supposed to say, "Sorry, I really am." But you"re definitely in the position of being on probation. This arises out of our whole att.i.tude towards children, whereby we don"t really acknowledge that they"re human. Instead, when a child comes into the world, and as soon as it can communicate in any way, talk language, you should say to a child, "How do you do? Welcome to the human race. Now my dear, we are playing a very complicated game, and we"re going to explain the rules of it to you. And when you have learned these rules and understand what they are, you may be able to invent better ones. But in the meantime, this is the thing we"re doing."

Instead of that, we either treat a child with a kind of with a kind of "blah-blah-blah" att.i.tude, or "coochy-coochy-coochie," y"know? and don"t treat the thing as a human being at all--as a kind of doll. Or else as a nusiance. And so all of us, having been treated that way, carry over into adult life the sense of being on probation here. Either the G.o.d is somebody who says to us "coochy- coochy-coochie," or "blah-blah-blah." And that"s the feeling we carry over. So that idea of the royal G.o.d, the king of kings and the lord of lords which we inherit from the political structures of the Tigres-Euphrates cultures, and from Egypt. The Pharoah, Amenhotep IV is probably, as Freud suggested, the original author of Moses" monotheism, and certainly the Jewish law code comes from Hammarabi in Chaldea. And these men lived in a culture where the pyramid and the ziggurat--the ziggurat is the Chaldean version of the pyramid, indicating somehow a hierarchy of power, from the boss on down. And G.o.d, in this first myth that we"ve been discussing, the ceramic myth is the boss, and the idea of G.o.d is that the universe is governed from above.

But do you see, this parallels--goes hand in hand with the idea that you govern your own body. That the ego, which lies somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes in the brain, is the governer of the body. And so we can"t understand a system of order, a system of life, in which there isn"t a governer. "O Lord, our governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world."

But supposing, on the contrary, there could be a system which doesn"t have a governor. That"s what we are supposed to have in this society. We are supposed to be a democracy and a republic. And we are supposed to govern ourselves. As I said, it"s so funny that Americans can be politically republican--I don"t mean republican in the party sense--and yet religiously monarchial. It"s a real strange contradiction.

So what is this universe? Is it a monarchy? Is it a republic? Is it a mechanism? Or an organism? Becuase you see, if it"s a mechanism, either it"s a mere mechanism, as in the fully automatic model, or else it"s a mechanism under the control of a driver. A mechanic. If it"s not that, it"s an organism, and an organism is a thing that governs itself. In your body there is no boss. You could argue, for example, that the brain is a gadget evolved by the stomach, in order to serve the stomach for the purposes of getting food. Or you can argue that the stomach is a gadget evolved by the brain to feed it and keep it alive. Whose game is this? Is it the brain"s game, or the stomach"s game? They"re mutual. The brain implies the stomach and the stomach implies the brain, and neither of them is the boss.

You know that story about all the limbs of the body. The hand said "We do all our work," the feet said "We do our work," the mouth said "We do all the chewing, and here"s this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn"t do a thing. He didn"t do any work, so let"s go on strike." And the hands refused to carry, the feet refused to walk, the teeth refused to chew, and said "Now we"re on strike against the stomach." But after a while, all of them found themselves getting weaker and weaker and weaker, because they didn"t realize that the stomach fed them.

So there is the possibility then that we are not in the kind of system that these two myths delineate. That we are not living in a world where we ourselves, in the deepest sense of self, are outside reality, and somehow in a position that we have to bow down to it and say "As a great favor, please preserve us in existence." Nor are we in a system which is merely mechanical, and which we are nothing but flukes, trapped in the electrical wiring of a nervous system which is fundamentally rather inefficiently arranged. What"s the alternative? Well, we could put the alternative in another image altogether, and I"ll call this not the ceramic image, not the fully automatic image, but the dramatic image. Consider the world as a drama. What"s the basis of all drama? The basis of all stories, of all plots, of all happenings--is the game of hide and seek. You get a baby, what"s the fundamental first game you play with a baby? You put a book in front of your face, and you peek at the baby. The baby starts giggling. Because the baby is close to the origins of life; it comes from the womb really knowing what it"s all about, but it can"t put it into words. See, what every child psychologist really wants to know is to get a baby to talk psychological jargon, and explain how it feels. But the baby knows; you do this, this, this and this, and the baby starts laughing, because the baby is a recent incarnation of G.o.d. And the baby knows, therefore, that hide and seek is the basic game.

See, when we were children, we were taught "1, 2, 3," and "A, B, C," but we weren"t set down on our mothers" knees and taught the game of black and white. That"s the thing that was left out of all our educations, the game that I was trying to explain with these wave diagrams. That life is not a conflict between opposites, but a polarity. The difference bewteen a conflict and a polarity is simply--when you think about opposite things, we sometimes use the expression, "These two things are the poles apart." You say, for example, about someone with whom you totally disagree, "I am the poles apart from this person." But your very saying that gives the show away. Poles. Poles are the opposite ends of one magnet. And if you take a magnet, say you have a magnetized bar, there"s a north pole and a south pole. Okay, chop off the south pole, move it away. The piece you"ve got left creates a new south pole. You never get rid of the south pole. So the point about a magnet is, things may be the poles apart, but they go together. You can"t have the one without the other. We are imagining a diagram of the universe in which the idea of polarity is the opposite ends of the diameter, north and south, you see? That"s the basic idea of polarity, but what we"re trying to imagine is the encounter of forces that come from absolutely opposed realms, that have nothing in common. When we say of two personality types that they"re the poles apart. We are trying to think eccentrically, instead of concentrically. And so in this way, we haven"t realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center. They imply each other, so that you wouldn"t know the one without the other.

Now I"m not saying that that"s bad, that"s fun. You"re playing the game that you don"t know that black and white imply each other. Therefore you think that black possibly might win, that the light might go out, that the sound might never be heard again. That there could be the possibility of a universe of pure tragedy, of endless, endless darkness. Wouldn"t that be awful? Only you wouldn"t know it was awful, if that"s what happened. The point that we all forget is that the black and the white go together, and there isn"t the one without the other. At the same time, you see, we forget, in the same way as we forget that these two go together.

The other thing we forget, is that self and other go together, in just the same way as the two poles of a magnet. You say "I, myself; I am me; I am this individual; I am this particular, unique instance." What is other is everything else. All of you, all of the stars, all of the galaxies, way, way out into infinite s.p.a.ce, that"s other. But in the same way as black implies white, self implies other. And you don"t exist without all that, so that where you get these polarities, you get this sort of difference, that what we call explicitly, or exoterically, they"re different. But implicitely, esoterically, they"re one. Since you can"t have the one without the other, that shows there"s a kind of inner conspiracy bewteen all pairs of opposites, which is not in the open, but it"s tacit. It"s like you say "Well, there are all sorts of things that we understand among each other tacitly, that we don"t want to admit, but we do recognize tacity there"s a kind of secret between us boys and girls," or whatever it may be. And we recognize that. So, tacitly, all of you really inwardly know--although you won"t admit it because your culture has trained you in a contrary direction--all of you really inwardly know that you as an individual self are inseparable from everything else that exists, that you are a special case in the universe. But the whole game, especially of Western culture, is to coneal that from ourselves, so that when anybody in our culture slips into the state of consciousness where they suddenly find this to be true, and they come on and say "I"m G.o.d," we say "You"re insane."

Now, it"s very difficult--you can very easily slip into the state of consciousness where you feel you"re G.o.d; it can happen to anyone. Just in the same way as you can get the flu, or measles, or something like that, you can slip into this state of consciousness. And when you get it, it depends upon your background and your training as to how you"re going to interpret it. If you"ve got the idea of G.o.d that comes from popular Christianity, G.o.d as the governor, the political head of the world, and you think you"re G.o.d, then you say to everybody, "You should bow down and worship me." But if you"re a member of Hindu culture, and you suddenly tell all your friends "I"m G.o.d," instead of saying "You"re insane," they say "Congratulations! At last, you found out." Becuase their idea of G.o.d is not the autocratic governor. When they make images of Shiva, he has ten arms. How would you use ten arms? It"s hard enough to use two. You know, if you play the organ, you"ve got to use your two feet and your two hands, and you play different rhythms with each member. It"s kind of tricky. But actually we"re all masters at this, because how do you grow each hair without having to think about it? Each nerve? How do you beat your heart and digest with your stomach at the same time? You don"t have to think about it. In your very body, you are omnipotent in the true sense of omnipotence, which is that you are able to be omni-potent; you are able to do all these things without having to think about it.

When I was a child, I used to ask my mother all sorts of ridiculous questions, which of course every child asks, and when she got bored with my questions, she said "Darling, there are just some things which we are not meant to know." I said "Will we ever know?" She said "Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven, G.o.d will make everything plain." So I used to imagine on wet afternoons in heaven, we"d all sit around the throne of grace and say to G.o.d, "Well why did you do this, and why did you do that?" and he would explain it to us. "Heavenly father, why are the leaves green?" and he would say "Because of the chlorophyll," and we"d say "Oh." But in he Hindu universe, you would say to G.o.d, "How did you make the mountains?" and he would say "Well, I just did it. Because when you"re asking me how did I make the mountains, you"re asking me to describe in words how I made the mountains, and there are no words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I made the mountains any more than I can drink the ocean with a fork. A fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it, but it"s of no use for imbibing the ocean. It would take millions of years. In other words, it would take millions of years, and you would be bored with my description, long before I got through it, if I put it to you in words, because I didn"t create the mountains with words, I just did it. Like you open and close your hand. You know how you do this, but can you describe in words how you do it? Even a very good physiologist can"t describe it in words. But you do it. You"re conscious, aren"t you. Don"t you know how you manage to be conscious? Do you know how you beat your heart? Can you say in words, explain correctly how this is done? You do it, but you can"t put it into words, because words are too clumsy, yet you manage this expertly for as long as you"re able to do it."

But you see, we are playing a game. The game runs like this: the only thing you really know is what you can put into words. Let"s suppose I love some girl, rapturously, and somebody says to me, "Do you REALLY love her?" Well, how am I going to prove this? They"ll say, "Write poetry. Tell us all how much you love her. Then we"ll believe you." So if I"m an artist, and can put this into words, and can convince everybody I"ve written the most ecstatic love letter ever written, they say "All right, ok, we admit it, you really do love her." But supposing you"re not very articulate, are we going to tell you you DON"T love her? Surely not. You don"t have to be Heloise and Abyla to be in love. But the whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless it"s in the newspaper. So when we"re at a party, and it"s a great party, somebody says "Too bad we didn"t bring a camera. Too bad there wasn"t a tape recorder. And so our children begin to feel that they don"t exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers, and the fastest way to get your name in the paper is to commit a crime. Then you"ll be photographed, and you"ll appear in court, and everybody will notice you. And you"re THERE. So you"re not there unless you"re recorded. It really happened if it was recorded. In other words, if you shout, and it doesn"t come back and echo, it didn"t happen. Well that"s a real hangup. It"s true, the fun with echos; we all like singing in the bathtub, because there"s more resonance there. And when we play a musical instrument, like a violin or a cello, it has a sounding box, because that gives resonance to the sound. And in the same way, the cortex of the human brain enables us when we"re happy to know that we"re happy, and that gives a certain resonance to it. If you"re happy, and you don"t know you"re happy, there"s n.o.body home.

But this is the whole problem for us. Several thousand years ago, human beings devolved the system of self-consciousness, and they knew, they knew.

There was a young man who said "though It seems that I know that I know, What I would like to see Is the I that sees me When I know that I know that I know."

And this is the human problem: we know that we know. And so, there came a point in our evolution where we didn"t guide life by distrusting our instincts. Suppose that you could live absolutely spontaneously. You don"t make any plans, you just live like you feel like it. And you say "What a gas that is, I don"t have to make any plans, anything. I don"t worry; I just do what comes naturally."

The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seash.o.r.e, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we"re worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence. When we lost this thing that the cats and the flowers have, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation and so on, and then we worry. Once you start thinking about things, you worry as to if you thought enough. Did you really take all the details into consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And by jove, the more you think about it, the more you realize you really couldn"t take everything into consideration, becauase all the variables in every decision are incalculable, so you get anxiety. And this, though, also, is the price you pay for knowing that you know. For being able to think about thinking, being able to feel about feeling. And so you"re in this funny position.

Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage? What has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness, a certain kind of reflexive consciousness--being aware of being aware. Being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols, such as words, such as numbers. You put, as it were, two lives together at once, one representing the other. The symbols representing the reality, the money representing the wealth, and if you don"t realize that the symbol is really secondary, it doesn"t have the same value. People go to the supermarket, and they get a whole cartload of goodies and they drive it through, then the clerk fixes up the counter and this long tape comes out, and he"ll say "$30, please," and everybody feels depressed, because they give away $30 worth of paper, but they"ve got a cartload of goodies. They don"t think about that, they think they"ve just lost $30. But you"ve got the real wealth in the cart, all you"ve parted with is the paper. Because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth. It represents power, potentiality, whereas the wealth, you think oh well, that"s just necessary; you"ve got to eat. That"s to be really mixed up.

So then. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death--or shall I say, death implies life--you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but FEEL yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of G.o.d. G.o.d is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. G.o.d in Indian mythology is the self, "Satchitananda." Which means "sat," that which is, "chit," that which is consciousness; that which is "ananda" is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy. Wowee! And all those stars, if you look out in the sky, is a firework display like you see on the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for celebration; the universe is a celebration, it is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee.

And then they say, "But, however, there"s no point in just sustaining bliss." Let"s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great. But now let"s have a surprise. Let"s have a dream which isn"t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don"t know what it"s going to be." And you would dig that, and come out of it and say "That was a close shave, now wasn"t it?" Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would have. Of playing that you weren"t G.o.d. Because the whole nature of the G.o.dhead, according to this idea, is to play that he"s not. The first thing that he says to himself is "Man, get lost," because he gives himself away. The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, for instance as in basketball; you"re always getting rid of the ball. You say to the other fellow "Have a ball." See? And that keeps things moving. That"s the nature of life.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not G.o.d in a politically kingly sense, but G.o.d in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you"re all that, only you"re pretending you"re not. And it"s perfectly OK to pretend you"re not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama. When you come into the theater, there is an arch, and a stage, and down there is the audience. Everybody a.s.sumes their seats in the theater, gone to see a comedy, a tragedy, a thriller, whatever it is, and they all know as they come in and pay their admissions, that what is going to happen on the stage is not for real. But the actors have a conspiracy against this, because they"re going to try and persuade the audience that what is happening on the stage IS for real. They want to get everybody sitting on the edge of their chairs, they want you terrified, or crying, or laughing. Absolutely captivated by the drama. And if a skillful human actor can take in an audience and make people cry, think what the cosmic actor can do. Why he can take himself in completely. He can play so much for real that he thinks he really is. Like you sitting in this room, you think you"re really here. Well, you"ve persuaded yourself that way. You"ve acted it so d.a.m.n well that you KNOW that this is the real world. But you"re playing it. As well, the audience and the actor as one. Because behind the stage is the green room, offscene, where the actors take off their masks. Do you know that the word "person" means "mask"? The "persona" which is the mask worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama, because it has a megaphone-type mouth which throws the sound out in an open-air theater. So the "per"--through--"sona"--what the sound comes through--that"s the mask. How to be a real person. How to be a genuine fake. So the "dramatis persona" at the beginning of a play is the list of masks that the actors will wear. And so in the course of forgetting that this world is a drama, the word for the role, the word for the mask has come to mean who you are genuinely. The person. The proper person. Incidentally, the word "parson" is derived from the word "person." The "person" of the village. The "person" around town, the parson.

So anyway, then, this is a drama, and what I want you to is-- I"m not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it; I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities. I"m not trying to prove it, I"m just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, this means that you"re not victims of a scheme of things, of a mechanical world, or of an autocratic G.o.d. The life you"re living is what YOU have put yourself into. Only you don"t admit it, because you want to play the game that it"s happened to you. In other words, I got mixed up in this world; I had a father who got hot pants over a girl, and she was my mother, and because he was just a h.o.r.n.y old man, and as a result of that, I got born, and I blame him for it and say "Well that"s your fault; you"ve got to look after me," and he says "I don"t see why I should look after you; you"re just a result." But let"s suppose we admit that I really wanted to get born, and that I WAS the ugly gleam in my father"s eye when he approached my mother. That was me. I was desire. And I deliberately got involved in this thing. Look at it that way instead. And that really, even if I got myself into an awful mess, and I got born with syphilis, and the great Siberian itch, and tuberculosis in a n.a.z.i concentration camp, nevertheless this was a game, which was a very far out play. It was a kind of cosmic masochism. But I did it.

Isn"t that an optimal game rule for life? Because if you play life on the supposition that you"re a helpless little puppet that got involved. Or you played on the supposition that it"s a frightful, serious risk, and that we really ought to do something about it, and so on, it"s a drag. There"s no point in going on living unless we make the a.s.sumption that the situation of life is optimal. That really and truly we"re all in a state of total bliss and delight, but we"re going to pretend we aren"t just for kicks. In other words, you play non-bliss in order to be able to experience bliss. And you can go as far out in non-bliss as you want to go. And when you wake up, it"ll be great. You know, you can slam yourself on the head with a hammer because it"s so nice when you stop. And it makes you realize how great things are when you forget that"s the way it is. And that"s just like black and white: you don"t know black unless you know white; you don"t know white unless you know black. This is simply fundamental.

So then, here"s the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there the central self, you can call it G.o.d, you can call it anything you like, and it"s all of us. It"s playing all the parts of all being whatsoever everywhere and anywhere. And it"s playing the game of hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest-out adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself. And when you"re ready to wake up, you"re going to wake up, and if you"re not ready you"re going to stay pretending that you"re just a "poor little me." And since you"re all here and engaged in this sort of enquiry and listening to this sort of lecture, I a.s.sume you"re all in the process of waking up. Or else you"re pleasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation with waking up which you"re not serious about. But I a.s.sume that you are maybe not serious, but sincere, that you are ready to wake up.

So then, when you"re in the way of waking up, and finding out who you are, you meet a character called a guru, as the Hindus say "the teacher," "the awakener." And what is the function of a guru? He"s the man that looks you in the eye and says "Oh come off it. I know who you are." You come to the guru and say "Sir, I have a problem. I"m unhappy, and I want to get one up on the universe. I want to become enlightened. I want spiritual wisdom." The guru looks at you adn says "Who are you?" You know Sri-Ramana-Maharshi, that great Hindu sage of modern times? People used to come to him and say "Master, who was I in my last incarnation?" As if that mattered. And he would say "Who is asking the question?" And he"d look at you and say, go right down to it, "You"re looking at me, you"re looking out, and you"re unaware of what"s behind your eyes. Go back in and find out who you are, where the question comes from, why you ask." And if you"ve looked at a photograph of that man--I have a gorgeous photograph of him; I look by it every time I go out the front door. And I look at those eyes, and the humor in them; the lilting laugh that says "Oh come off it. Shiva, I recognize you. When you come to my door and say "I"m so-and-so," I say "Ha-ha, what a funny way G.o.d has come on today.""

So eventually--there are all sorts of tricks of course that gurus play. They say "Well, we"re going to put you through the mill." And the reason they do that is simply that you won"t wake up until you feel you"ve paid a price for it. In other words, the sense of guilt that one has. Or the sense of anxiety. It"s simply the way one experiences keeping the game of disguise going on. Do you see that? Supposing you say "I feel guilty." Christianity makes you feel guilty for existing. That somehow the very fact that you exist is an affront. You are a fallen human being. I remember as a child when we went to the serves of the

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