Speaker 1: So this particular seminar is devoted to the subject of
Speaker 1: flow and its relation to meditation. And therefore I have
Speaker 1: to talk first about certain characteristics of energy, because this
Speaker 1: world is energy E equals mc squared, and if there
Speaker 1: is nothing except energy, we cannot of course say what
Speaker 1: energy is, because if everything is energy, then there is
Speaker 1: no class of events or things outside energy, and you
Speaker 1: can only describe something that you can put into a class,
Speaker 1: that is to say, something that you can put into
Speaker 1: an intellectual box. But although you can't describe energy, or
Speaker 1: you can't even describe reality, every body knows perfectly well
Speaker 1: what it is. You simply feel it, and you feel
Speaker 1: energy in terms of a multiplicity of vibrations. And those
Speaker 1: vibrations can of course be measured as we measure light, sound, heat, weight,
Speaker 1: and so forth. But we cannot experience all the vibrations
Speaker 1: of energy at the same time. That would be the
Speaker 1: same sort of confusion as if you slam down all
Speaker 1: the notes on the piano at once, or plucked all
Speaker 1: the strings of a harp at.
Speaker 2: The same time.
Speaker 1: What we do, therefore, is we select. First of all,
Speaker 1: our senses are selective. The eye does not record the
Speaker 1: whole spectrum of light vibrations. The ear does not receive
Speaker 1: the whole spectrum of sound vibrations. They restrict themselves to
Speaker 1: a narrow band, and beyond that we select in various
Speaker 1: other ways. There are certain vibrations which we consider noteworthy
Speaker 1: and important and worth paying attention to, and others which
Speaker 1: we overlook as being insignificant and unimportant and us A
Speaker 1: child will very often select experiences that adults deem ridiculous,
Speaker 1: because a child has not yet been taught how to
Speaker 1: select according to our preconceived notions of what should be
Speaker 1: picked out. And so children will cherish rubbish, for example,
Speaker 1: which adults think should be thrown away. They will notice
Speaker 1: features of people faces which are not supposed to be noticed.
Speaker 1: They will do all lots of funny things like that.
Speaker 1: And furthermore, a child will be taught which of these
Speaker 1: vibrations are good and which are bad, and the bad
Speaker 1: ones are of course to be avoided if possible, but
Speaker 1: inevitably they come up, because if you have a good
Speaker 1: bad valuation of these various spectra, if you're going to
Speaker 1: have the good end of the spectrum, you also got
Speaker 1: to have the bad end, no matter how far you
Speaker 1: succeed in making life comfortable and pleasurable. You are looking
Speaker 1: at it with a scale, and at this end of
Speaker 1: the scale are the things called good. Therefore, at this
Speaker 1: end of the scale things called bad. Now, you may
Speaker 1: push the scale in the direction of good, you see,
Speaker 1: but there's always going to be a bad end, because
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be a good end if there weren't a
Speaker 1: bad end. Sometimes we feel the scale is going this way,
Speaker 1: and then we say things are getting worse and worse,
Speaker 1: because that's the way the scale's moving.
Speaker 2: But there's always the good end of it.
Speaker 1: So that when you're starving in a concentration camp, there
Speaker 1: are always certain events to which you look forward and
Speaker 1: which sort of brighten things up. You simply cannot have
Speaker 1: a continuous experience of life in which everything is completely bad,
Speaker 1: or an experience of life in which everything is completely good.
Speaker 1: But we are under the illusion that that could be arranged,
Speaker 1: and it gives us a great deal of trouble being
Speaker 1: under that illusion. Anyhow, it makes sense, Indeed, in a
Speaker 1: very literal sense, it makes sense that we should be selective.
Speaker 1: Just in the same way as where we play the
Speaker 1: piano or play the harp, we pick out all these
Speaker 1: vibrations in different orders, and that's the fun of it,
Speaker 1: that's the game of existence. However, you can get hung
Speaker 1: up on your game. You can get into a fixed,
Speaker 1: rigid feeling that those vibrations which you were taught to
Speaker 1: select when you were a child, and that's the way
Speaker 1: you find out how to select, it's what people tell you. You
Speaker 1: can get hung up onto the idea that that way
Speaker 1: of selecting things is the way, and that there are
Speaker 1: not possible alternatives. And furthermore, that you could get into
Speaker 1: a state of consciousness where you could experience all vibrations
Speaker 1: simply as vibrations and not deem them either good or bad.
Speaker 1: And that would be the point of view which Buddhists
Speaker 1: speak of as seeing the suchness of things.
Speaker 2: That is zen is to dig.
Speaker 1: Whatever vibration happens and feel it simply as something going.
Speaker 1: When we are little babies, we don't know how to
Speaker 1: interpret these vibrations because the world is something like.
Speaker 2: A raw schap plot.
Speaker 1: It is a wiggly patterning of energy, and the energy
Speaker 1: is the same as the patterning. There is no kind
Speaker 1: of stuff called energy which is formed into patterns. Just
Speaker 1: there's no kind of stuff called matter which is formed
Speaker 1: into things. The things the shapes are the matter you
Speaker 1: see matter simply. The word matter is the same as
Speaker 1: the word meter. Does it matter? Does it amount to anything?
Speaker 1: That is to say, is it solid? We say something
Speaker 1: solid really amounts to something because you can't shove your
Speaker 1: finger through it, and it might shove itself through you.
Speaker 1: That matters. I mean, it measures up. It's important. But
Speaker 1: it isn't made of some kind of stuff. It's simply
Speaker 1: an intense concentration of energy, and it always is on
Speaker 1: the move. Everything is flux. Like you see a candle
Speaker 1: burning and you say there's a flame. Now, a flame
Speaker 1: is a noun, but if I say the candle is burning,
Speaker 1: I'm using a verb, and that's a little bit I
Speaker 1: think more accurate. Because the flame is a stream of
Speaker 1: hot gas, and it moves with tremendous rapidity, so there
Speaker 1: is no as it were, gas permanently in the flame.
Speaker 1: It keeps running, but the shape stays for a while.
Speaker 1: In the same way, an eddy or whirlpool in water
Speaker 1: may stay constantly in the same place in a stream
Speaker 1: for years, although the water is passing through it all
Speaker 1: the time. But every time we come back and sit
Speaker 1: on that particular bank of the stream, we see the
Speaker 1: same old whirlpool as in the near Niagara Falls. Well,
Speaker 1: we are just the same as that. We are like flames,
Speaker 1: like whirlpools, and we are a stream, a very complex stream,
Speaker 1: consisting not only our electrical energy, which constitutes our nuclear shapes,
Speaker 1: but we are also a stream of water, milk, cereal vegetables, leaf, steak, medicine, vitamins, heat,
Speaker 1: cosmic rays. Heaven only knows all these things are pouring
Speaker 1: through us all the time. But we recognize each other
Speaker 1: because the way in which it's playing, the way in
Speaker 1: which this energy is dancing, keeps a fairly consistent form,
Speaker 1: and we recognize those forms, and we say John Doe,
Speaker 1: Mary Smith.
Speaker 2: But eventually, of course it gives out the form does
Speaker 2: what we call get old.
Speaker 1: Although we have ideas about that. You see, again, according
Speaker 1: to the way we've been brainwashed, we say, well, getting
Speaker 1: old isn't so good, but it's very beautiful. If you
Speaker 1: get your head right, that's a very grand.
Speaker 2: Thing to do.
Speaker 1: You can completely readjust your thinking about this, just as
Speaker 1: we accept the beautifully colored leaves in autumn, and as
Speaker 1: we say we like a well aged whiskey or a
Speaker 1: mature cheese. See, it's all the same kind of a thing.
Speaker 2: So then.
Speaker 1: If you've been brainwashed into certain fixed opinions or life long,
Speaker 1: there is some importance perhaps into becoming more flexible, especially
Speaker 1: when a certain set of opinions that we call a
Speaker 1: culture or a way of life shows clear evidence of
Speaker 1: not working or of criminy. We're in that situation today,
Speaker 1: the situation where we see that the view of the
Speaker 1: universe which is fundamental to Western civilization, the Jewish picture
Speaker 1: of the world, the Christian picture the world, even the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century materialistic picture of the world, all these things
Speaker 1: are not working. And people get terribly anxious when their
Speaker 1: basic view of how you should play the harp of
Speaker 1: life is not holding up. And therefore, under such circumstances
Speaker 1: we have to readjust our consciousness and reset and find
Speaker 1: perhaps a new way of plucking the strings or of
Speaker 1: structuring the world. But in order to do that, we
Speaker 1: have to pass through an intermediate state.
Speaker 2: In which we.
Speaker 1: Learn to experience the vibrations without putting values on them,
Speaker 1: experiencing them without describing them, naming them, or trying to
Speaker 1: fit them into some system of concepts good and bad,
Speaker 1: high class and low class, refined or crude or whatever,
Speaker 1: healthy or sick. We have to take right off all
Speaker 1: this thing and learn to have what is called in
Speaker 1: zen moushin, meaning no mind.
Speaker 2: That means not no.
Speaker 1: Consciousness, but no conceptions, no fixed ideas, no one sided
Speaker 1: view of things. It's really easy to do that, but
Speaker 1: everybody wants to try and make it difficult.
Speaker 2: People are.
Speaker 1: Compulsively complicated, and so you might say in an inverse way,
Speaker 1: there is a certain difficulty in not the becoming compulsively complicated,
Speaker 1: because that requires a certain kind of intelligence, not what
Speaker 1: we call intellectuality in the ordinary way, not verbal intelligence,
Speaker 1: because that's not the only kind of intelligence. It requires
Speaker 1: organic intelligence. And that's the intelligence that you have in
Speaker 1: your organism that is responsible for your fantastically beautiful nervous system,
Speaker 1: or your veins, or your elementary tract or your glands,
Speaker 1: and for the color of your eyes. But we are
Speaker 1: not ordinarily aware of being in any way responsible for that.
Speaker 2: That's something that seems to happen.
Speaker 3: To us, just as for example, we always think of
Speaker 3: gravity as something that just happens and on the whole
Speaker 3: is not a very good thing.
Speaker 1: In a way, mankind has been engaged in a struggle
Speaker 1: against gravity. He thinks the bird. He looks at the
Speaker 1: bird with envy, and tries to conquer the sky, you see,
Speaker 1: by fosse of some kind, to get up into the air.
Speaker 1: You know, in aeronautical theory, we don't yet know how
Speaker 1: bees fly. Bees theoretically can't fly, but they do. And
Speaker 1: the reason for the magnificent flight of birds and bees
Speaker 1: is that they are not fighting gravity, because actually everything
Speaker 1: in this universe is falling.
Speaker 2: The Earth is falling, but it falls in a circle.
Speaker 1: The Sun is fall and it falls around some other
Speaker 1: star way way off. Every object is moving because it's
Speaker 1: falling responding to gravity. And gravity is the nature of energy.
Speaker 1: Energy is gravity because energy invariably takes the line of
Speaker 1: least resistance. When you experience using energy not taking the
Speaker 1: line of least resistance, you are not really using energy.
Speaker 1: You are using force. And force and energy are different.
Speaker 1: Force is the unintelligent use of energy. It is not
Speaker 1: following the easy cause. As so, when you force a
Speaker 1: key in a lock, you're liable to bend the key
Speaker 1: or break the lock.
Speaker 2: It does no good.
Speaker 1: Sometimes, indeed, yes we use strength. But there's a funny
Speaker 1: little old man. Some of you know called Suzuki Roshi,
Speaker 1: who amazes very strong young men at his ability to
Speaker 1: move rocks, and they swear he moves them by leaning
Speaker 1: on them. It's uncanny what he does when he works
Speaker 1: in the building the garden at Tasahara. That's judo, you see,
Speaker 1: and zen very often involves the study of j judo,
Speaker 1: meaning the gentle way of finding out how the rock
Speaker 1: will respond to gravity and helping it along those lines
Speaker 1: with your own gravity. That is to say, with your
Speaker 1: weight you use muscle, you see very sparingly, but you
Speaker 1: use your weight in the right place, and that moves
Speaker 1: all sorts of things. So in life, in all one's doings,
Speaker 1: have the sense of that everything you do is falling.
Speaker 1: Even when you are climbing the stairs, you are falling up.
Speaker 1: And you will discover a very interesting thing that people
Speaker 1: who know this in a natural way. People who haven't
Speaker 1: been taught know it naturally.
Speaker 2: Babies know it.
Speaker 1: Many of our American Indians know this, and you will discover,
Speaker 1: for example, they don't make a noise when they walk.
Speaker 1: So many people when they walk.
Speaker 2: You get done.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: They must be something wrong with him, because if you
Speaker 2: walked like that in a forest, everything would run away
Speaker 2: or run after you or something. You'd believe they'd know
Speaker 2: you were there.
Speaker 1: And in the forest, you must be anonymous. You must
Speaker 1: be one with the forest. So it instead of the
Speaker 1: expert in Taoism entering the forest, he does not disturb
Speaker 1: a blade of grass. Entering the water, he doesn't make
Speaker 1: a ripple. And you can watch some of those south
Speaker 1: Sea island swimmers dive. They seem to go into the
Speaker 1: water like a knife, making no splash. You see, we
Speaker 1: like when we die, you know, shop on the end
Speaker 1: of the spring water, go zooming up and then flip
Speaker 1: over and in a jackknife way and come down splash, with.
Speaker 2: The great commotion all over the place. They just fall.
Speaker 1: We'll just cut the water. So they are following the
Speaker 1: line of least resistance. Now the thing, the warning here
Speaker 1: it is again to do with preconceptions. When we think
Speaker 1: of following the line of least resistance, what would it
Speaker 1: be like to do that.
Speaker 2: We have a notion in our minds that that would
Speaker 2: mean becoming.
Speaker 1: Droopy, improvident, feckless, or as we would say, behaving like
Speaker 1: an animal. Well, now animals are much better behaved than
Speaker 1: we are, much better.
Speaker 2: We are the.
Speaker 1: World's greatest predators. Even sharks don't fly out of the
Speaker 1: water to heat does or catch birds. They stay in
Speaker 1: the water. And if you really observe animal behavior, you
Speaker 1: will see that although they have fights, and although they
Speaker 1: eat other things like we do, they are very, very
Speaker 1: orderly in their behavior. And there are very few species
Speaker 1: of animals which practice torture on their own species, very few.
Speaker 1: But human beings are impossible. They are so fouled up
Speaker 1: by the confusion of their concepts with their organic life,
Speaker 1: which never can come to any reason, because you cannot,
Speaker 1: for example, arrange a compromise between black and white, and
Speaker 1: white are abstract conceptions.
Speaker 2: In nature.
Speaker 1: There is no black and there is no white. There
Speaker 1: are colors, and both the black and the white worlds
Speaker 1: are discolored worlds. So the line of least resistance Lautsa
Speaker 1: says of water, water seeks the low level which men abhor.
Speaker 1: Nothing in the world is weaker than water, and yet
Speaker 1: it can overcome the hardest things. And when you watch
Speaker 1: water flowing over dry ground, you see it moving along,
Speaker 1: and then it suddenly puts out a lot of finger
Speaker 1: and then only one of those fingers continues, because that's
Speaker 1: found out it's feeling out the path, and it gradually
Speaker 1: goes down and down, and if it gets into a
Speaker 1: place where it forms into a pool, it waits there
Speaker 1: and then it rises, and then it finds a place
Speaker 1: where it can go over and it goes on. So
Speaker 1: the use of energy is the same. That then is
Speaker 1: a secret in the art of meditation, which means that
Speaker 1: you don't force things. You don't try to meditate, because
Speaker 1: what meditation consists of, essentially, is being aware without conceptualizing.
Speaker 1: In other words, learning to get rid of the verbal
Speaker 1: chatter that goes on constantly inside one's head, and that
Speaker 1: I call thinking temporarily stop that. It isn't that thinking
Speaker 1: is bad. It's only that thinking all the time is bad.
Speaker 1: That would be like talking all the time and never
Speaker 1: listening to anyone else. So the problem for many people,
Speaker 1: you see, is how to stop thinking, because it's become
Speaker 1: a habit. It's a nervous quick to think all the time,
Speaker 1: and so we create endless problems by doing this. Because
Speaker 1: people who have various miseries, they lie awake nights thinking
Speaker 1: about them. That means they are chattering to themselves.
Speaker 2: Over and over and over and over and over.
Speaker 1: Again about their problems and don't know how to stop it.
Speaker 1: So in the course of this weekend, we are going
Speaker 1: to explore experimentally various ways of me enabling our awareness
Speaker 1: or our minds to be quiet. You know, Tim Leary
Speaker 1: made the famous remark that to come to your senses,
Speaker 1: you must go out of your mind, where mind means
Speaker 1: certain fixed thought patterns, certain fixed valuations of how one
Speaker 1: ought to select experience. And Ronald Lang, in his book
Speaker 1: The Politics of Experience, has pointed out that we have
Speaker 1: an etiquette concerning what experiences are legitimate in just the
Speaker 1: same way that we have an etiquette as to what
Speaker 1: gestures are legitimate. You know, you're not supposed to put
Speaker 1: out your tongue with people, except in Tibet. It's a
Speaker 1: remark of respect. You're not disposed to cock a snoop
Speaker 1: at people. You're not supposed to be what they call
Speaker 1: an exhibitionist. You're not supposed to do all sorts of
Speaker 1: things that are taboo gestures. See.
Speaker 2: Well, in exactly the same way, there are taboo experiences
Speaker 2: which you really aren't allowed to have. And if you.
Speaker 1: Start having tabo experiences, they're going to put you in
Speaker 1: the nuthouse. They're going to call you a.
Speaker 2: Schizophrenic, a psychotic, a paranoid, a psychopath, and all sorts.
Speaker 1: Of bad names, because you see, these are the new,
Speaker 1: up to date forms of heresy.
Speaker 2: And just as a heresy was a taboo form of
Speaker 2: religious belief at.
Speaker 1: One time, nobody takes religion seriously today, so we don't.
Speaker 2: Have the inquisition anymore.
Speaker 1: The not having an po is a function of not
Speaker 1: taking religion seriously. If we did take it seriously, we'd
Speaker 1: have an inquisition because we would think it was terribly
Speaker 1: important that we saved people from going to hell, I
Speaker 1: mean the kind of religion in which you have heaven
Speaker 1: and hell. So today though, what we take seriously is
Speaker 1: people's psychiatric state. See, so you can, in other words,
Speaker 1: be imprisoned without due process of law, confined under unspeakable circumstances,
Speaker 1: and literally torture for your own good, just as the
Speaker 1: inquisitors of the Catholic Church tortured heretics for their own good.
Speaker 1: It's the same old thing all over again, only it
Speaker 1: keeps changing its place in the spectrum, you see, so
Speaker 1: that we suddenly are unaware where we are doing things
Speaker 1: like that, So we are watching the beginnings of a
Speaker 1: psychiatric revolution represented by people like Thomas Sass Ronald Lang,
Speaker 1: to break up what they call psychiatric fascism and to
Speaker 1: ask for due rights for the so called insane. Just
Speaker 1: as earlier in history the Protestants and religious libertarians were
Speaker 1: asking for due rights for freedom of religion, we will
Speaker 1: need a new magne carta for freedom of consciousness. And
Speaker 1: of course all the brue haha going on about psychedelic
Speaker 1: chemicals and marijuana and so on is a religious fight.
Speaker 1: It's all the same kind of thing as quarrels that
Speaker 1: we had in the past over sacraments, who had the
Speaker 1: true sacrament, whether this Catholic formula was the right way
Speaker 1: of transforming the sacrament, or whether the Protestant formula wasn't
Speaker 1: just as good, and all that kind of thing. It's
Speaker 1: all happening all over again, and it's just wonderful to
Speaker 1: see the repetitious patterns in man's history, sometimes rather depressing
Speaker 1: too so.
Speaker 2: Then, in meditation, the real art of.
Speaker 1: It is to be free from concepts, but that implies
Speaker 1: something else. Very difficult for Americans to understand that you
Speaker 1: are not meditating when you are meditating for a purpose.
Speaker 1: When you're doing it because you think it's good for you,
Speaker 1: because you think you're going to improve yourself. You can't
Speaker 1: improve yourself or anybody else for that matter, just as
Speaker 1: you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstrap.
Speaker 2: And when you give up trying to improve yourself.
Speaker 1: You have all that energy available for things that can
Speaker 1: actually be done. So when there's no thought about self improvement,
Speaker 1: about going somewhere, about achieving a different state of consciousness,
Speaker 1: but being simply here, that's the only place you can be, actually,
Speaker 1: because when you remember the past, your memories are present experiences.
Speaker 1: When you anticipate the future, your anticipations are present experiences.
Speaker 2: There's nowhere else to be.
Speaker 1: Where's your hurry?
Speaker 2: So the art of meditation is essentially.
Speaker 1: Relaxing the verbal commentary on the world that constantly goes
Speaker 1: on coming to center, which is the present or coming
Speaker 1: to center in the sense that gravity teaches you to
Speaker 1: center yourself. Am of the windows here, he was asked,
Speaker 1: why do Tibetan but it's his prayer wheels. Isn't that superstition?
Speaker 1: And he said, no, this is a method of center.
Speaker 1: This little ball on the end of a chain revolves
Speaker 1: around the prayer wheel, just in the same way as
Speaker 1: the Earth goes around the sun. And when you get
Speaker 1: the neck of getting this thing going and keeping to that,
Speaker 1: it does things to me. You don't have to think
Speaker 1: about it. It's a kinesthetic experience.
Speaker 2: And you just keep it moving. Tlok.
Speaker 1: Otherwise, the one wind, the prayer tape in the center. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this isn't prayers. It's a sutra. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: set of montrums, or of symbolic sounds, and you know
Speaker 1: you can keep us going in the day. And it's
Speaker 1: a gas because of what it does to your consciousness.