"philosophies of asia - alan watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)
There is nothing really important to win, nothing really important to lose, and yet it becomes fantastically interesting, who wins and who loses. And so in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call the different beings in the plot, just like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he is doing, or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama. At first we know it is a drama. We go to a play and we say, "It is only a play,' and the proscenium arch tells us that what happens behind that arch is not for real, just a show. But the great actor is going to make you forget it is just a show. He is going to have you sitting on the edge of your chair; he is going to have you crying; he is going to have you trembling because he almost persuades you that it is real. What would happen if the very best actor was confronted by the very best audience? Why, they would be taken in completely, and the one would confirm the other.
So, this is the idea of the universe as drama, that the fundamental self, the saguna brahman, plays this game, gets involved in being all of us, and does it so darn well, so superbly acted, that the thing appears to be real. And we are not only sitting on the edge of our chair, but we start to get up and throw things. We join in the drama and it all becomes whatever is going on here, you see? Then, of course, at the end of the drama, because all things have to have an end that have a beginning, the curtain goes down and the actors retire to the greenroom. And there the villain and the hero cease to be villain and hero, and they are just the actors. And then they come out in front of the curtain and they stand in a row, and the audience applauds the villain along with the hero, the villain as having been a good villain and the hero as having been a great hero. The play is over and everybody heaves a sigh of relief: "Well, that was a great show, wasn't it?" So the idea of the greenroom is the same as the nirguna brahman; that behind the whole show there are no differentiations of I and thou, subject and object, good and evil, light and darkness, life and death. But within the sphere of the saguna brahman all these differentiations appear because that is out in front that is on the stage, and no good actor when on the stage performs his own personality. That is what is wrong with movie stars. A person is cast to act a role that corresponds to his alleged personality. But a great actor can assume any personality, male or female, and suddenly convert himself right in front of the audience into somebody who takes you in entirely. But in the greenroom he is his usual self. So Hinduism has the idea that as all the conventions of drama go right along with it, that all this world is a big act, lila, the play of the supreme self, and is therefore compared to a dream-to a passing illusion, and you should not, therefore, take it seriously. You may take it sincerely, perhaps, as an actor may be sincere in his acting, but not seriously, because that means it throws you for a loop (although that, of course is involved). We do take it seriously. But, this is one of the great questions you have to ask yourself when you really get down to the nitty-gritty about your own inmost core: Are you serious, or do you know deep within you that you are a put-on?
THE MYTHOLOGY OF HINDUISM
CHAPTER TWO
I want to start out by explaining quite carefully what I mean by mythology. The word is very largely used to mean fantasy, or something that is definite6-ly not fact, and it's used therefore in a pejorative, or put-down, sense. So that when you call something a mythology or a myth, it means you don't think much of it. But the word is used by philosophers and scholars in quite another sense, where to speak in the language of myth is to speak in images rather than to speak in what you might call plain language, or descriptive language. You can sometimes say more things with images than you can say with concepts. As a matter of fact, images are really at the root of thinking. One of the basic waysin which we think is by analogy. We think that the life of human beings might be compared to the seasons of the year. Now, there are many important differences between a human life and the cycle of the seasons, but nevertheless, one talks about the winter of life and the spring of life, and so the image becomes something that is powerful in our thinking. Furthermore, when we try to think philosophically in abstract concepts about the nature of the universe, we often do some very weird things. It is considered nowadays naive to think of God as an old gentleman with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne and is surrounded with winged angels. We say, "Now, no sensible person could possibly believe that God is just like that." Therefore, if you become more sophisticated and you follow Saint Thomas Aquinas, you think of God as "necessary being." If you think with Buddhists you think of God as the undifferentiated void, or as the infinite essence. But actually, however rarefied those concepts sound, they are just as anthropomorphic, that is to say, just as human and in the form of the human mind, as the picture of God as the old gentleman with the white beard, or as d'Lord in the old television show Green Pastures, wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar.
All ideas about the world, whether they be religious, philosophical, or scientific, are translations of the physical world and of worlds beyond the physical into the terms and shapes of the human mind. There is no such thing as a nonanthropomorphic idea. The advantage of d'Lord in talking about these things is that nobody takes it quite seriously, whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be taken seriously. That would be a great mistake, because you would think you understood what the ultimate reality is. So, I am going to use very largely naive mythological terms to discuss these matters. If you are a devout Christian, you must not be offended by this. You will naturally think that you have risen now to a more superior idea of these things than these very simple terms derived from the imagery of the Bible and the medieval church. I shall discuss Hinduism in the same way, and I am going to begin with Hinduism to give you a sort of fundamental account of what it is all about.
I imagine some of you were present at the lecture I gave in the university on religion and art, in which I discussed the view of the world as drama. Now I want to go more thoroughly into this, because the Hindu view of the universe is fundamentally based on the idea of drama, that is to say, of an actor playing parts. The basic actor in this drama is called Brahma, and this word comes from the Sanskrit root bra, which means 44 to swell or expand." The Hindu idea of Brahma, the Supreme Being, is linked with the idea of the self. In you, deep down you feel that there is what you call "I," and when you say "I am," that in Sanskrit is aham. And everybody, when asked what his name is, replies, "I am 1. I am 1, myself." So, there is the thought that in all life, the self is the fundamental thing; it means the center. The Brahma is looked upon as the self and the center of the whole universe, and the fundamental idea is that there is only one self. Each one of us is that self, only it radiates like a sun or a star. So, just as the sun has innumerable rays, or just as you can focus the whole sun through a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one point, or as an octopus has many tentacles, or as a sow has many tits, so, in these ways, Brahma is wearing all faces that exist, and they are all the masks of Brahma. They are not only human faces but also animal faces, insect faces, vegetable faces, and mineral faces; everything is the supreme self playing at being that.
The fundamental process of reality is, according to the Hindu myth, hide-and-seek, or lost and found. That is the basis of all games. When you start to play with a baby, you take out a book and you hide your face behind it. Then you peek out at the baby, and then you peek out the other way, and the baby begins to giggle, because a baby, being near to the origins of things, knows intuitively that hide-and-seek is the basis of it all. Children like to sit in a high chair, to have something on the tray, and "make it gone.' Then somebody picks it up and puts it back, and they make it gone again.
Now then, that is a very sensible arrangement. It is called in Sanskrit lila, and that means "sport" or "play 5 " but the play is hide-and-seek. Now, let's go a little bit into the nature of hide-and-seek. I don't want to insult your intelligence by telling you some of the most elementary things that exist, but, really, everything is a question of appearing and disappearing. For example, if I sit next to the object of my desire and I put my hand on the person's knee and leave it there, after a while they will cease to notice it. But if I gently pat them on the knee because now I'm there and now I'm not, it will be more noticeable. So, all reality is a matter of coming and going. It is vibration, like a wave of positive and negative electricity. It is up and down, and things like wood appear to be solid, much in the same way that the blades of a fastmoving electric fan appear to be solid. So, the vast agitation that is going on in the electrical structure of solid things is a terrific agitation that will not allow the agitation called my hand to go through it.
Other kinds of agitation, like X rays, are so constructed that they can get through. So, everything is basically coming and going. Take, for example, sound. If you listen to sound and slow the sound down, just as when you look with a magnifying glass you find that solid things are full of holes, when you magnify sound you find it is full of silences. Sound is sound-silence. There is no such thing as pure sound, just as there is no such thing as pure something-something always goes together with nothing. Solids are always found in spaces, and no spaces are found except where there are solids. You might imagine there being a space without any solid in it, but you will never, never encounter one, because you will be there in the form of a solid to find out about it. They go together, these things, solid and space. The positive and the negative and the "here we are and here we aren't" all go together in the same way, like the back and front of a coin. You can't have a coin that has a back and no front. The only thing that gets anywhere near that is a Mobius strip, which is a mathematical construct in which the back and the front are the same, but that only shows in a more vivid way how backs and fronts go together. So, the whole thing is based on that.
Now, once we have this game there are two different things, but they are really the same. The Brahma is what is basic, but the Brahma manifests itself in what are called the dvanva, and that makes the pairs of opposites (duality). Dva is the Sanskrit word for "two," which becomes duo in Latin and dual in English. Two is the basis, and you cannot go behind two, because one has an opposite: the opposite of one is none. Now, what is in common between one and none? No one can sayyou can't mention it. It is called Brahma, and it is sometimes called om. Yet you can't really think of what is in common between black and white, because there is obviously a conspiracy between black and white; they are always found together. Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle, and there is always an agreement underlying this difference; that is what we call implicit, but the difference is explicit. So, the first step in what
you might call the hide phase of the game of hide-andseek is to lose sight of the implicit unity between black and white, yes and no, and existence and nonexistence.
Losing sight of the fundamental unity is called Maya, a word that means many things, but primarily it means "creative power," or "magic," and also "illusion"-the illusion that the opposites are really separate from each other. Once you think that they are really separate from each other you can have a very thrilling game. The game is, "Oh dear, black might win," or "We must be quite sure that white wins." Now, which one ought to win? When you look at this page, you would say the reality here is the writing; that is what is significant. Yet there are many other patterns that you can find in which you are undecided in your mind as to which is the figure and which is the background. It could be a black design on a white sheet, or it could be a white design on a black sheet, and the universe is very much like that. Space, or the background of things, is not nothing, but people tend to be deceived about this. If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say that I have drawn a circle, or a disk, or a ball. Very few people will ever suggest that I have drawn a hole in a wall, because people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together-you cannot have what is "in here" unless you have what is "out there."
All artists, architects, and people concerned with the organization of space think quite as much about the background behind things and containing things as they do about the things so contained. It is all significant and it is all important, but the game is "Let's pretend that this doesn't exist." So, this is the pretending: "Oh, black might win,' or "Oh, white might win." This is the foundation of all the great games that human beings play-ofcheckers, of chess, and of the simple children's games of hide-and-seek.
It is, of course, the tradition of chess that white gets the first move, because black is the side of the devil. All complications and all possibilities of life lie in this game of black and white. In the beginning of the game, the two pairs are divided, that is to say, dismemberedcut, to separate. In the end of the game, when everything comes together, they are re-membered. To dismember is to hide, or to lose. To remember is to seek and to find. In Hindu mythology, Brahma plays this game through periods of time called kalpas, and every kalpa is 4,320,000 years long. For one kalpa he forgets who he is and manifests himself as the great actor of all of us. Then, for another kalpa, he wakes up; he remembers who he is and is at peace. So, the period in which he manifests the worlds is called a manavantara, and the period in which he withdraws from the game is called a pralaya. These go on and on forever and ever, and it never becomes boring, because the forgetting period makes you forget everything that has happened before. For example, although it inherits genes from the most distant past, each time a baby is born it confronts the world anew and is astonished and surprised at everything. As you get old, you become heavy with memories, like a book that people have written on, as if you were to go on writing on a page and eventually the whole thing were to become black. Then, you would have to take out white chalk and start writing that way. Well, that would be like the change between life and death.
In popular Hinduism, it is believed that each of us contains not only the supreme self-the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks out from all eyes and hears through all ears-but also an individualized self. This self reincarnates from life to life in a sort of progressive or a regressive way, according to your karinathe Sanskrit word that means "your doing," from the root kre, "to do." There is a time, then, in which we become involved and get more and more tied up in the toils of the world, and are more subject to desire and to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb. Then, there follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man, a mukti. A mukti is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or liberation, where he has found himself. He knows who he is. He knows that he, deep down in himself (and that you, deep down in yourself) are all the one central self, and that this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion.
Now, this is a dramatic idea. In drama, we have a convention of the proscenium arch on the stage and we have a convention of onstage and offstage. There is the curtain, or backdrop, in front of which the actors appear, and behind that there is a dressing room, called the greenroom. In the greenroom, they put on and take off their masks. in Latin the word for the masks worn by the players in classical drama is persona. The Latin word per means "through," and sona means "sound"-that through which the sound comes, because the mask had a megaphone-shaped mouth that would "throw" the sound in an open-air theater. So, dramatis personae, the list of the players in a play, is the list of masks that are going to be worn. Insofar as we now speak about the real self in any human being as the person by inquiring, "Are you a real person?" we have inverted the meaning of the word. We have made the "mask" word mean "the real player underneath," and that shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion. The whole point of aplay is for the actor to use his skill to persuade the audience, despite the fact that the audience knows it's at the play, and to have them sitting on the edge of their chairs, weeping or in terror because they think it is real. Of course, the Hindu idea is that the greatest of all players, the master player behind the whole scene, who is putting on the big act called existence, is so good an actor that he takes himself in. He is at once the actor and the audience, and he is enchanted by his playing. So, the word maya, or illusion, also means "to be enchanted." Do you know what to be enchanted is? It is to be listening to a chant and to be completely involved in it-or perhaps amazed. What is it to be amazed? It is to be caught in a maze, or spellbound. And how do you get spellbound and what do you spell? You spell words. So, by the ideas we have about the world and through our belief in the reality of different things and events, we are completely carried away and forget altogether who we are.
There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one of the aspects of the godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive aspect. When Narada came to Vishnu and said, "What is the secret of your maya?" Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. The moment he fell under the water he was born as a princess in a very great family, and went through all the experiences of childhood as a little girl. She finally married a prince from another kingdom and went to live with him in his kingdom. They lived there in tremendous prosperity, with palaces and peacocks, but suddenly there was a war and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed. The prince himself was killed in battle, and he was cremated. As a dutiful wife, the princess was about to throw herself weeping on o the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of suttee or self-sacrifice. But suddenly Narada woke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by his hair by Vishnu, who said, "For whom were you weeping?" So, that is the idea of the whole world being a magical illusion, but done so skillfullyby whom? By you, basically. Not "you" the empirical ego, not "you" who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories that are strung together into what you call "my everyday self." Rather, it is the "you" that is responsible for growing your hair, coloring your eyes, arranging the shape of your bones. The deeply responsible "you" is what is responsible for all this.
So this, then, is in sum the Hindu dramatic idea of the cosmos as an endless hide-and-seek game: now you see it, now you don't. It is saying to everybody, "Of course you worry and are afraid of disease, death, pain, and all that sort of thing. But really, it is all an illusion, so there is nothing to be afraid of." And you think, "Well, but my goodness, supposing when I die there just won't be anything? It will be like going to sleep and never waking up." Isn't that awful, just terrible-nothing, forever? But that doesn't matter. When you go into that period called death, or forgetting, that's just so that you won't remember, because if you did always remember it, it would be a bore. But you are wiser than you know, because you arrange to forget and to die, and keep going in and out of the light. But underneath, at the basis of all this, between black and white, between life and death, is something unmentionable. That's the real you, that's the secret-only you don't give away the show. All of you are now privy to a secret; you are initiates. You know this neat little thing, but you may not have experienced it. You know about it, but you must not give the show away. Don't run out in the streets suddenly and say to everybody, "I'm God," because they won't understand you.
So then, there are people whom we will call farout. They are far out into the illusion, and they are really lost; they are deeply committed to the human situation. Opposite them are the far-in people, who are in touch with the center.
In the ordinary life of the primitive Hindu community, there are four castes: the caste of priests, of warriors, of merchants, and of laborers. Every man who belongs to the Hindu community belongs to one of the four castes, which he is born into. That seems to us rather restrictive, because if you were born the son of a university professor you might much prefer to be a waterskiing instructor, and that would mean a shift in caste from what is called the Brahmana because the professor in Hindu life would come under the priestly caste. But in a time when there were no schools and everybody received his education from his father, the father considered it a duty to educate the boys, the mother considered it her duty to educate the girls, and there was no choice of a boy being something other than his father. He was apprenticed to him while very young, and the child, as you know, naturally takes an interest in what the parents are doing and tends to want to do it, too.
So, it was based on that, and although it seemsprimitive to our way of thinking, that is the way it was. When a man attained the age of maturity in the middle of his life, and had raised a son old enough to take over the family business, he abandoned caste. He became an upper outcast, called a sannyasi and he went outside the village, back to the forest. So there are two stages of life: grihasta, or "householder," and vanaprastha, or "forest dweller." We came out of the forest and we formed civilized villages. The hunters settled down and started agriculture. Then they formed into castes, and every man, as it were, had a function: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief-but those are all parts, those are big acts. Who are you really, behind your mask?
So, in the middle of life it is considered up to you to find out who you are. You are going to die in a few years. Before you die, wake up from the illusion so that you won't be afraid of death. When you become vanaprastha you go to a guru, and the guru teaches you yoga, which is the art of waking up. In other words, to remember, as distinct from dismember, is to find out again that our separateness is maya, or in "seeming" only-it is not the fundamental reality. We are all one. Now, how does the guru teach you that? He does it mostly by kidding you. He has a funny look in his eye, as if to say, "Brahma, old boy, you can't fool me." The basic question that all gurus ask their students is, "Who are you?" The great guru of modern times was Sri Ramana Maharshi. Wealthy philosophical ladies from the United States used to go to ask him, "Who was I in my former incarnation?" because they wanted to find out they were Cleopatra, or something like that. He would say, "Who asked the question? Who is it that wants to know? Find out who you are." Well, if you want to find out who you are, you get into a very funny mix-up because it is like trying to bite your teeth. "Who is it that wants to know who I am? If only I could catch that thing.' And the guru really says, "But now, let's get going on this, let's concentrate, you see and get that thing." So, he has people meditating on their own essence, and all the time he is looking at them with a funny look in his eye. They think, "Oh dear, that guru, he knows me through and through. He reads all my secret and impure thoughts. He realizes my desires and how badly I concentrate." But really, the guru is laughing himself silly inside, because he sees that this is the Brahma being quite unwilling to wake up, or not really ready. Suddenly there comes a shock-the moment when you realize the truth about that thumb you were catching. You say, "Oh dear, it's, after all, the same hand," and there is a shock of recognition. Suddenly you wake up and exclaim, "Of course!" Now, that moment is moksha, or liberation. We have many names for it, but no very clear names. In the West we call it mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, or something of that kind. We find it very difficult to express it in our religious language because we would have to say at that moment, "I have at last discovered that I am the Lord God." We put people in asylums who discover this, if this is the way they express it, because it really is for us the one sure sign of being completely out of your head. Whereas in India when somebody says "I am the Lord God," they say, "Well, naturally. Congratulations, at last you found out."
Our idea of the Lord God, as we shall see, is different from the Hindu idea. You notice that Hindu images of the divinities usually have many arms, and that is because they are conceived of as sort of cosmic centipedes. The centipede does not think how to use each leg, just as you don't think how to use every nerve cell in your nervous system. They just seem to use themselves; they work automatically. Well, many things working automatically together is the Hindu idea of omnipotence, whereas our idea is more technical. The person in supreme control would have to know how he does every single thing. You would ask, "God, how do you create rabbits?" as if he doesn't just pull them out of hats like a stage magician but actually knows in every detail down to the last molecule or subdivision thereof how it is done and could explain it.
Hindus would say that if you ask God, "How do you make a rabbit?" he would say, "That is no problem at all-I just become it." "Well, how do you become it?" "Well, you just do it, like you open your hand or close it. You just do it. You don't have to know how in words." What we mean by understanding and explaining things is being able to put them into words. We do that first by analyzing them into many bits. In the same way, when you want to measure the properties of a curve, which is complicated, in order to say how that curve is shaped, you have to reduce it to tiny points and measure them. So you put a grid of graph paper across, and by telling the position on the graph of where the curve is at every point, you get an accurate description of what that curve is, or how it is, in scientific terms. That is what we mean when we talk about understanding things, but obviously there is another sense of "to understand." You understand how to walk even if you can't explain it, because you can do it. Can you drive a car? Yes. How do you drive a car? If you could put it into words, it might be easier to teach people how to do it in the first place, but one understands and learns many things about driving a car that are never explained in words. You just watch somebody else do it, and you do the same thing.
In this way, then, the Hindu and the Western ideas of God are somewhat different. So, when the Hindu realizes that he is God, and that you are too, he sees the dance of God in everybody all around him in every direction. He does not assume certain things that a Western person might assume if they had the same experience. For example, you know the difference between what you do voluntarily and what happens to you involuntarily. When I see someone else move at the far end of the room, it comes to me with a signal attached to it; that experience is involuntary. When I move, it comes to me with a voluntary signal attached to it. Nevertheless, both experiences are states and changes in my nervous system, but we do not ordinarily realize that. When we see somebody else doing something, we think that it is outside our nervous system. It isn't at all; it is happening in our own brain. Now, if you should discover that it is happening inside you, it might just as well come to you with a voluntary signal attached to it. You could say, "I've got the feeling that I'm doing everything that everybody else is doing. Everything that I see and that I am aware of is my action."
Now, if you misunderstood that, you might think that you were able to control everything that everybody else does, and that you really were God in that kind of technical sense of God. You have to be careful what sort of interpretations you put on these experiences. It is one thing to have an authentic experience of the stars. It is quite another thing to be able to describe accurately their relative positions. It is one thing to have an experience of cosmic consciousness, or liberation, but quite another thing to give a philosophically or scientifically accurate account of it. Yet this experience is the basis of the whole Hindu philosophy. It is as if one comes into the world in the beginning having what Freud called the "oceanic consciousness" of a baby, but the baby does not distinguish, apparently, between experiences of itself and experiences of the external world. Therefore, to the baby, it is all one. Furthermore, a baby has for a long time been part of its mother and has floated in the ocean of the womb. So it has the sense from the beginning of what is really to an enlightened person totally obviousthat the universe is one single organism.
Our social way of bringing up children is to make them concentrate on the bits and to ignore the totality. We point at things, give them names, and say, "Look at that." But children very often ask you what things are, and you realize you do not have names for them. They point out backgrounds, and the shape of spaces between things, and say, "What's that?" You may brush it aside and say, "Well, that's not important. That doesn't have a name." You keep pointing out the significant things to them, and above all what everybody around the child does is to tell the child who he is, and what sort of part he is expected to play-what sort of mask he must wear. I remember very well as a child that I knew I had several different identities, but I knew that I would probably have to settle for one of them; the adult world was pushing me toward a choice. I was one person with my parents at home, another person altogether at my uncle's home, and still quite another person with my own peer group. But society was trying to say, "Now make up your mind as to who you really are." So I would imitate some other child whom I had admired. I would come home and my mother would say, "Alan, that's not you, that's Peter. Be yourself now." Otherwise, you are somehow phony, and the point is not to be phony but to be real.
However, this whole big act is phony, but it is a marvelous act. A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip. He is what we would call committed, and yet he is freed by becoming completely committed and knowing that the world is an act. There isn't anybody doing it. We like to think things stand behind processes, and that things "do" the processes, but that is just a convention of grammar. We have verbs and nouns, and every noun can obviously be described by a verb. We say "the mat." We can also say 14 the matting." Likewise, we can say "cating" for "cat." When we want to say, "The cating is sitting," however, we say, "The cat sits," using a noun and a verb-whereas it is all verb; it is all a big act. But remember, you mustn't give the show away.
ECO-ZEN
CHAPTER THREE
I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this, and when he came in he used to be silent. He would look at the audience, gaze at Leveryone there for a particularly long time, and everybody would begin feeling vaguely embarrassed. When he had gazed at them for a long time he would say, "WAKE UP, you're all asleep! And if you don't wake up, I won't give any lecture." Now, in what sense are we asleep? The Buddhist would say that almost all human beings have a phony sense of identity-a delusion, or a hallucination as to who they are. I am terribly interested in this problem of identity. I try to find out what people mean when they say the word 1. I think this is one of the most fascinating questions: "Who do you think you are?" Now, what seems to develop is this: most people think that I is a center of sensitivity somewhere inside their skin, and the majority of people feel that it is in their heads. Civilizations in different periods of history have differed about this-Some people feel that they exist in the solar plexus. Other people feel that they exist in the stomach. But in American culture today, and in the Western culture in general, most people feel that they exist in their heads. There is, as it were, a little man sitting inside the center of the skull who has a television screen in front of him that gives him all messages from the eyeballs. He has earphones on that give him all messages from the ears, and he has in front of him a control panel with various dials and buttons, which enable him to influence the arms and legs and to get all sorts of information from the nerve ends. And that is you. So, we say in popular speech, "I have a body," not "I am a body." I have one because I am the owner of the body in the same way as I own an automobile. I take the automobile to a mechanic and, occasionally, in the same way, I take my body to the mechanic-the surgeon, the dentist, and the doctor-and have it repaired. It belongs to me, it goes along with me, and I am in it.
For example, a child can ask its mother, "Mom, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?" That seems to be a perfectly simple and logical question for a child to ask, because of the presumption that your parents gave you your body and you were popped into it-maybe at the moment of conception or maybe at the moment of birth-from a repository of souls in Heaven, and your parents simply provided the physical vehicle. So, that age-old idea that is indigenous, especially to the Western world, is that I am something inside a body, and I am not quite sure whether I am or am not my body; there is some doubt about it. I say, "I think, I walk, I talk," but I don't say, "I beat my heart," "I shape my bones," and "I grow my hair." I feel that my heart beating, my hair growing, and my bones shaping is something that happens to me, and I don't know how it is done. But other things I do, and I feel quite surely that everything outside my body is quite definitely not me.
There are two kinds of things outside my body. Number one is other people, and they are the same sort of thing that I am, but also they are all little men locked up inside their skins. They are intelligent, have feelings and values, and are capable of love and virtue. Number two is the world that is nonhuman-we call it nature, and that is stupid. It has no mind, it has emotions maybe, like animals, but on the whole it's a pretty grim dog-eat-dog business. When it gets to the geological level, it is as dumb as dumb can be. It is a mechanism, and there is an awful lot of it. That is what we live in the middle of, and the purpose of being human is, we feel, to subjugate nature, and to make it obey our will. We arrived here, and we don't feel that we belong in this world-it is foreign to us: in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, "I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made." All around us today we see the signs of man's battle with nature. I am living at the moment in a marvelous house overlooking a lake, and on the other side of the lake the whole hill has suddenly been interrupted with a ghastly gash. They have made level lots for building tract homes of the kind you would build on a flat plain. This is called the conquest of nature, and these houses will eventually fall down the hill because the builders are causing soil erosion and they are being maximally stupid. The proper way to build a house on a hillside is to do it in such a way as to effect the minimum interference with the nature of the hill. After all, the whole point of living in the hills is to live in the hills. There is no point in converting the hills into something flat and then going and living there. You can do that already on the level ground. So, as more people live in the hills, the more they spoil the hills, and they are just the same as people living on the flat ground. How stupid can you get? Well, this is one of the symptoms of our phony sense of identity, of our phony feeling that we are something lonely, locked up in a bag of skin and confronted with a world, an external, alien, foreign world that is not us.
Now, according to certain of these great ancient philosophies, like Buddhism, this sensation of being a separate, lonely individual is a hallucination. It is a hallucination brought about by various causes, the way we are brought up being the chief of them, of course. For example, the main thing that we're all taught in childhood is that we must do that which will only be appreciated if we do it voluntarily. "Now darling, a dutiful child must love its mother. But now, I don't want you to do it because I say so, but because you really want to." Or "You must be free." This also is seen in politics"Everybody must vote." Imagine, you are members of a democracy, and you must be members of the democracy-you are ordered to. You see, this is crazy. Also "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Is that a commandment or a joke? However, if you suggest that the Lord is joking, most people in our culture are offended, because they have a very moronic conception of God as a person totally devoid of humor. But the Lord is highly capable of joking, because joking is one of the most constructive things you can do. So, when you are told who you are, and that you must be free, and furthermore that you must survive, that becomes a kind of compulsion, and you get mixed up. Of course, it is very simple to get mixed up if you think you must do something that will only be required of you if you do it freely.
These are the sort of influences, then, that cause human beings all over the world to feel isolated-to feel that they are centers of awareness locked up in bags of skin. Now, this sensation of our identity can be shown and demonstrated to be false by some of the disciplines of our own science. When we describe a human being or any other living organism from a scientific point of view, all that means is that we are describing it carefully. We are going to describe very carefully what a human being is and what a human being does. We find that as we go on with that description, we can't describe the human being without describing the environment. We cannot say what a human being is doing without also saying what the world around him is doing.
Just imagine for a moment that you couldn't see anything except me. You couldn't see the curtain behind me, or the microphone. You could only see me, and that is all you could see. What would you be looking at? You wouldn't see me at all, because you wouldn't see my edges, and my edges are rather important for seeing me. My edges would be identical with the edge of your eyesight, with that vague oval curve which is the field of vision. What you would be looking at would be my necktie, my nose, my eyes, and so on, but you wouldn't see my edges. You would be confronted with a very strange monster, and you wouldn't know it was a human being. To see me you need to see my background, and therein lies a clue of which we are mostly ignorant. In Buddhist theory, the cause of our phony sense of identity is called avidya, meaning "ignorance," although it is better to pronounce it "ignorance." Having a deluded sense of identity is the result of ignoring certain things. So, when you look at me, I cause you to ignore my background, because I concentrate attention on me, just like a conjurer or stage magician misdirects your attention in order to perform his tricks. He talks to you about his fingers and how empty they are, and he can pull something out of his pocket in plain sight and you don't notice it-and so magic happens. That's ignorance-selective attention-focusing your consciousness on one thing to the exclusion of many other things. In this way we concentrate on the thingsthe figures-and we ignore the background. So, we come to think that the figure exists independently of the background, but actually they go together. They go together just as inseparably as backs go with fronts, as positives go with negatives, as ups go with downs, and as life goes with death. You cannot separate it. So there is a sort of secret conspiracy between the figure and the background: They are really one, but they look different. They need each other, just as male needs female, and vice versa. But we are, ordinarily, completely unaware of this.
So then, when a scientist starts carefully paying attention to the behavior of people and things, he discovers that they go together, and that the behavior of the organism is inseparable from the behavior of its environment. So, if I am to describe what I am doing, am I just waving my legs back and forth? No, I am walking. In order to speak about walking, you have to speak about the space in which I am walking-about the floor, about the direction, left or right, in relation to what kind of room, stage, and situation. Obviously, if there isn't a ground underneath me, I cannot very well walk, so the description of what I am doing involves the description of the world. And so, the biologist comes to say that what he is describing is no longer merely the organism and its behavior. He is describing a field, which he now calls the organism/environment 5 and that field is what the individual actually is. Now, this is very clearly recognized in all sorts of sciences, but the average individual, and indeed the average scientist, does not feel in a way that corresponds to his theory. He still feels as if he were a center of sensitivity locked up inside a bag of skin.
The object of Buddhist discipline, or methods of psychological training, is, as it were, to turn that feeling inside out-to bring about a state of affairs in which the individual feels himself to be everything that there is. The whole cosmos is focused, expressing itself here, and you are the whole cosmos expressing itself there, and there, and there, and there, and so on. In other words, the reality of my self fundamentally is not something inside my skin but everything, and I mean everything, outside my skin, but doing what is my skin and what is inside it. In the same way, when the ocean has a wave on it, the wave is not separate from the ocean. Every wave on the ocean is the whole ocean waving. The ocean waves, and it says, "Yoo-hoo, I'm here. I can wave in many different ways-I can wave this way and that way." So, the ocean of being waves every one of us, and we are its waves, but the wave is fundamentally the ocean. Now, in that way, your sense of identity would be turned inside out. You wouldn't forget who you were-your name and address, your telephone number, your social security number, and what sort of role you are supposed to occupy in society. But you would know that this particular role that you play and this particular personality that you are is superficial, and the real you is all that there is.
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