"philosophies of asia - alan watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)
CHAPTER FOUR
The inversion, or turning upside down, of the sense of identity, of the state of consciousness that the average person has, is the objective of Buddhistic disciplines. Now, perhaps I can make this clearer to you by going into a little detail as to how these disciplines work. The method of teaching something in Buddhism is rather different from methods of teaching that we use in the Western world. In the Western world, a good teacher is regarded as someone who makes the subject matter easy for the student, a person who explains things cleverly and clearly so you can take a course in mathematics without tears. In the Oriental world, they have an almost exactly opposite conception, and that is that a good teacher is a person who makes you find out something for yourself. In other words, learn to swim by throwing the baby into the water. There is a story used in Zen about how a burglar taught his child how to burgle. He took him one night on a burgling expedition, locked him up in a chest in the house that he was burgling, and left him. The poor little boy was all alone locked up in the chest, and he began to think, "How on earth am I going to get out?" So he suddenly called out, "Fire, fire," and everybody began running all over the place. They heard this shriek coming from inside the chest and they unlocked it, and he rushed out and shot out into the garden. Everybody was in hot pursuit, calling out, "Thief, thief," and as he went by a well he picked up a rock and dropped it into the well. Everybody thought the poor fellow had jumped into the well and committed suicide, and so he got away. He returned home and his father said, "Congratulations, you have learned the art."
William Blake once said, "A fool who persists in his folly will become wise." The method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools persist in their folly, but very rigorously, very consistently, and very hard. Now, having given you the analogy and image, let's go to the specific situation. Supposing you want to study Buddhism under a Zen master-what will happen to you? Well, first of all, let's ask why you would want to do this anyway. I can make the situation fairly universal. It might not be a Zen master that you go to-it might be a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, or a psychoanalyst. But what's the matter with you? Why do you go? Surely the reason that we all would be seekers is that we feel some disquiet about ourselves. Many of us want to get rid of ourselves. We cannot stand ourselves and so we watch television, go to the movies, read mystery stories, and join churches in order to forget ourselves and to merge with something greater than ourselves. We want to get away from this ridiculous thing locked up in a bag of skin. You may say, "I have a problem. I hurt, I suffer, and I'm neurotic," or whatever it is. You go to the teacher and say, "My problem's me. Change me."
Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he will say, "Well, I have nothing to teach. There is no problemeverything's perfectly clear." You think that one over, and you say, "He's probably being cagey. He's testing me out to see if I really want to be his student. I know, according to everybody else who's been through this, that in order to get this man to take me on I must persist." Do you know the saying, "Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined?" There is a double take in that saying.
So, in the same way, anybody who goes with a spiritual problem to a Zen master defines himself as a nut, and the teacher does everything possible to make him as nutty as possible. The teacher says, "Quite honestly, I haven't anything to tell you. I don't teach anything-I have no doctrine. I have nothing whatsoever to sell you." So the student thinks, "My, this is very deep," because this nothing that he is talking about, this nothing that he teaches, is what they call in Buddhism sunyata. Sunyata is Sanskrit for "nothingness," and it is supposed to be the ultimate reality. But if you know anything about these doctrines, this does not mean just ccnothing there at all" or just "blank," but it means "nothing-ness." It is the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things, and that is something very deep and profound. So, he knows that when the teacher said, "I have nothing to teach," he meant this very esoteric no-thing. Well, he might also say then, "If you have nothing to teach, what are all these students doing around here?" And the teacher says, "They are not doing anything. They are just a lot of stupid people who live here."
He knows again this "stupid" does not mean just straight stupid, but the higher stupidity of people who are humble and do not have intellectual pride. Finally, the student, having gone out of his way to define himself as a damn fool in need of help, has absolutely worked himself into this situation. He has defined himself as a nut, and then the teacher accepts him. The teacher says, "Now, I am going to ask you a question. I want to know who you are before your mother and father conceived you. That is to say, you have come to me with a problem, and you have said, 'I have a problem. I want to get one up on this universe.' Now, who is it that wants to get one up? Who are you? Who is this thing called your ego, your soul, your 1, your identity, for whom your parents provided a body? Show me that. Furthermore, I'm from Missouri and I don't want any words and I want to be shown."
The student opens his mouth to answer, but the teacher says, "Uh-uh, not yet; you're not ready." Then he takes him back and introduces him to the chief student of all the so-called Zen monks who live there together, and the chief student says, "Now, what we do here is we have a discipline, but the main part of the discipline is meditation. We all sit cross-legged in a row and learn how to breathe and be still: in other words, to do nothing. Now, you mustn't go to sleep and you mustn't fall into a trance. You have to stay wide awake, not think anything, but perfectly do nothing." During meditation, there is a monk walking up and down all the time with a long flat stick, and if you go to sleep or fall into a trance, he hits you on the back. So instead of becoming dreamy, you stay quite clear, and wide awake, but still doing nothing. The idea is that out of the state of profoundly doing nothing, you will be able to tell the teacher who you really are.
In other words, the question "Who are you before your father and mother conceived you?" is a request for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity. It is as if I were to ask, "Look now, will you be absolutely genuine with me? No deception please. I want you to do something that expresses you without the slightest deception. No more role-acting, no more playing games with me; I want to see you!" Now, imagine, could you really be that honest with somebody else, especially a spiritual teacher, because you know he looks right through you and sees all your secret thoughts. He knows the very second you have been a little bit phony, and that bugs you. The same is true of a psychiatrist. You might be sitting in there discussing your problems with him and absentmindedly you start to pick your nose. The psychiatrist suddenly says to you, "Is your finger comfortable there? Do you like that?" And you know your Freudian slip is showing. What do fingers symbolize, and what do nostrils symbolize? Uh-oh. You quickly put your hand down and say, "Oh no, it is nothing, I was just picking my nose." But the analyst says, "Oh really? Then why are you justifying it? Why are you trying to explain it away?" He has you every way you turn. Well, that is the art of psychoanalysis, and in Zen it is the same thing.
When you are challenged to be perfectly genuine, it is like saying to a child, "Now darling, come out here and play, and don't be self-conscious." In other wor s I could say to you, "If any of you come here tonight at exactly midnight, and put your hands on this stage, you can have granted any wish you want to, provided you don't think of a green elephant." Of course, everybody will come, and they will put their hands here, and they will be very careful not to think about a green elephant. The point is that if we transfer this concept to the dimension of spirituality, where the highest ideal is to be unselfish and to let go of one's self, it is again trying to be unselfish for selfish reasons. You cannot be unselfish by a decision of the will any more than you can decide not to think of a green elephant. There is a story about Confucius, who one day met Lao-tzu, a great Chinese philosopher. Lao-tzu said, "Sir, what is your system?" And Confucius said, "It is charity, love of one's neighbor, and elimination of self-interest." Lao-tzu replied, "Stuff and nonsense. Your elimination of self is a positive manifestation of self. Look at the universe. The stars keep their order, the trees and plants grow upward without exception, and the waters flow. Be like this."
These are all examples of the tricks the master might be playing on you. You came to him with the idea in your mind that you are a separate, independent, isolated individual, and he is simply saying, "Show me this individual." I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan, and he became pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is. On his way to an interview with the master to give an answer to the problem, he noticed a very common sight in Japan, a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden. He swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono. Then he went to the master to give the answer of who he was. He suddenly produced the bullfrog, and the master said, "Mmmmm, too intellectual." In other words, this answer is too contrived. It is too much like Zen. "You have been reading too many books. It is not the genuine thing," the master said. So, after a while, what happens is the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his true self. Not only is there no way of doing it, there is also no way of doing it by not doing it.
To make this clearer, allow me to put it into Christian terms: "Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God." What are you going to do about that? If you try very hard to love God you may ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?" You will find out you are doing it because you want to be right. After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, and if you don't love him, you're going to be in a pretty sad state. So, you realize you are loving him just because you are afraid of what will happen to you if you don't. And then you think, "That is pretty lousy love, isn't it? That's a bad motivation. I wish I could change that. I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart." But, why do you want to change? You realize that the reason you want to have a different kind of motive is that you have the same motive. So, you say "Oh for heaven's sake, God, I'm a mess. Will you please help me out?" Then he reminds you, "Why are you doing that? Now, you are just giving up, aren't you? You are asking someone else to take over your problem. " Suddenly you find you are stuck.
What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it, because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, "Whew, what a relief." That is called satori. When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it. So, it isn't there, and when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a new sense of identity. You realize that what you are is the whole world of nature, doing this. Now, that is difficult for many Western people, because it suggests a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces. However, when your own inner sense of identity changes from being the separate individual to being what the entire cosmos is doing at this place, you become not a puppet but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever. This is the same paradox that the Christian knows in the form, "Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it."
Now, I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western world today. We have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of changing the physical universe than have ever existed before. How are we going to use it? A Chinese proverb says that if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. Let us assume that our technological knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are going to use this knowledge? Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it, or people who love the physical world and feet that the physical world is their own personal body? The whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one's extended body. Now, at the moment, the general attitude of our technologists who are exploring space is represented in the phrase "the conquest of space." They are building enormous, shelllike, phallic objects that blast into the sky. This is downright ridiculous, because no one is going to get anywhere in a rocket. It takes a terribly long time to even get to the moon, and it is going to take longer than anybody can live to get outside the solar system, just to begin with. The proper way to study space is not with rockets but with radio astronomy. Instead of exploding with a tough fist at the sky, become more sensitive and develop subtler senses, and everything will come to you. Be more open and be more receptive, and eventually you will develop an instrument that will examine a piece of rock on Mars with greater care than you could if you were holding it in your own hand. Let it come to you.
The whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world will succeed only in destroying the world, as we are doing. We use absurd and uninformed and shortsighted methods of getting rid of insect pests, forcing our fruit and tomatoes to grow, stripping our hills of trees and so on, thinking that this is some kind of progress. Actually, it is turning everything into a junk heap. It is said that Americans, who are in the forefront of technological progress, are materialists. Nothing is further from the truth. American culture is dedicated to the hatred of material and to its transformation into junk. Look at our cities. Do they look as though they were made by people who love material? Everything is made out of ticky-tacky, which is a combination of plaster of paris, papier-mich6 and plastic glue, and it comes in any flavor. The important lesson is that technology and its powers must be handled by true materialists. True materialists are people who love material-who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals and, above all, the earth-and treat it with a reverence that is due one's own body.
INTELLECTUAL YOGA
CHAPTER FIVE
The word yoga, as most of you doubtless know, is the same as our word yoke and the Latin word jungere, meaning "to join. " join, junction, yoke, and union-all these words are basically from the same root. So, likewise, when Jesus said, "My yoke is easy," he was really saying, "My yoga is easy." The word, therefore, basically denotes the state that would be the opposite of what our psychologists call alienation, or what Buddhists call sakyadrishti, the view of separateness or the feeling of separatenessthe feeling of being cut off from being. Most civilized people do in fact feel that way, because they have a kind of myopic attention focused on their own boundaries and what is inside those boundaries. They identify themselves with the inside and do not realize that you cannot have an inside without an outside. That would seem to be extremely elementary logic, wouldn't it? We could have no sense of being ourselves and of having a personal identity without the contrast of something that is not ourselves-that is to say, other.
However, the fact that we do not realize that self and other go together is the root of an enormous and terrifying anxiety, because what will happen when the inside disappears? What will happen when the so-called I comes to an end, as it seems to? Of course, if it didn't, and if things did not keep moving and changing, appearing and dissolving, the universe would be a colossal bore. Therefore, you are only aware that things are all right for the moment. I hope most of the people in this gathering have a sort of genial sense inside of them that for the time being things are going on more or less okay. Some of you may be very miserable, and then your problem may be just a little different, but it is essentially the same one. But you must realize that the sense of life being fairly all right is inconceivable and unfeelable unless there is way, way, way in the back of your mind the glimmer of a possibility that something absolutely, unspeakably awful might happen. It does not have to happen. Of course, you will die one day, but there always has to be the vague apprehension, the hintegedanka, that the awful awfuls are possible. It gives spice to life. Now, these observations are in line with what I am going to discuss: the intellectual approach to yoga.
There are certain basic principal forms of yoga Most people are familiar with batba yoga, which is a psychophysical exercise system, and this is the one you see demonstrated most on television, because it has visual value. You can see all these exercises of lotus positions and people curling their legs around their necks and doing all sorts of marvelous exercises. The most honest yoga teacher I know is a woman who teaches hatha yoga and does not pretend to be any other kind of guru. She does it very well.
Then there is karma yoga. Karma means "action," and incidentally, that is all it means. It does not mean the law of cause and effect. When we say that something that happens to you is your karma, all we are saying is that it is your own doing. Nobody is in charge of karma except you. Karma yoga is the way of action, of using one's everyday life, one's trade, or an athletic discipline (like sailing or surfing or track running) as your way of yoga, and as your way of discovering who you are.
Then there is raja yoga. That is the royal yoga, and that is sometimes also called kundalini yoga. It involves very complicated psychic exercises having to do with awakening the serpent power that is supposed to lie at the base of one's spiritual spine and raise it up through certain chakras or centers until it enters into the brain. There is a very profound symbolism involved in that, but I am not going into that.
Mantra yoga is the practice of chanting or humming, either out loud or silently, certain sounds that become supports for contemplation, for what is in Sanskrit called jnana. jnana is the state in which one is clearly awake and aware of the world as it is, as distinct from the world as it is described. In other words, in the state of jnana, you stop thinking. You stop talking to yourself and figuring to yourself and symbolizing to yourself what is going on. You simply are aware of what is and nobody can say what it is, because as Korzybski well said, "The real world is unspeakable." There's a lovely double take in that. But that's inana, that's zazen, where one practices to sit absolutely wide awake with eyes open, without thinking.
That is a very curious state, incidentally. I knew a professor of mathematics at Northwestern University who one day said, "You know, it's amazing how many things there are that aren't so." He was talking about old wives' tales and scientific superstitions, but when you practice jnana, you are amazed how many things there are that aren't so.
When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is-that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense-even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the socalled differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren't there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you're in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you're supposed to do something you have to think.
It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you're advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts-it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words.
If we stop that temporarily and get our mind clear of thoughts, we become, as Jesus said, "again as children" and get a direct view of the world, which is very useful once you are an adult. There is not much you can do with it when you are a baby, because everybody pushes you around; they pick you up and sit you there. You can't do much except practice contemplation, and you can't tell anyone what it is like. But when, as an adult, you can recapture the baby's point of view, you will know what all child psychologists have always wanted to know-how it is that a baby feels. The baby, according to Freud at least, has the oceanic experience, that is to say, a feeling of complete inseparability from what's going on. The baby is unable to distinguish between the universe and his or her action upon the universe. Most of us, if we got into that state of consciousness, might be inclined to feel extremely frightened and begin to ask, "Who's in charge? I mean, who controls what happens next?" We would ask that, because we are used to the idea that the process of nature consists of controllers and controllees, things that do and things that are done to. This is purely mythological, as you find out when you observe the world without thinking, with a purely silent mind.
Now then, jnana yoga is the approach that is designed for intellectuals. There is an intellectual way to get to this kind of understanding. A lot of people say to me, "You know, I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it. I don't realize it." I am apt to reply, "I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it."
The intellect, or what I prefer to call the intelligence, is not a sort of watertight compartment of the mind that goes clickety, clickety all by itself and has no influence on what happens in all other spheres of one's being. We all know that you can be hypnotized by words. Certain words arouse immediately certain feelings, and by using certain words one can change people's emotions very easily and very rapidly. They are incantations, and the intellect is not something off over there. However, the word intellect has become a kind of catchword that represents the intellectual porcupinism of the academic world.
A certain professor at Harvard at the time Tim Leary was making experiments there said, "No knowledge is academically respectable which cannot be put into words." Alas for the department of physical education. Alas for the department of music and fine arts. That is very important, because one of the greatest intellects of modern times was Ludwig Wittgenstein. And as you read the end of his Tractatus, which was his great book, he shows you that what you always thought were the major problems of life and philosophy were meaningless questions. Those problems are solved not by, as it were, giving an answer to them but by getting rid of the problem through seeing intellectually that it is meaningless. Then you are relieved of the problem. You need no longer lie awake nights wondering what is the meaning of life, and what it is all about, simply because it isn't about anything. It's about itself, and so he ends up saying, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
A new successor to Wittgenstein, an Englishman named Spencer-Brown, has written a book called Laws of Form, and if any of you are mathematically minded I would firmly recommend it. He makes this comment about Wittgenstein: "True, there are certain things of which one cannot speak. For example, you cannot describe music." That is why most of the reports of music critics in the newspapers seem completely absurd. They are trying to convey in words how a certain artist performed, and they borrow words from all other kinds of art and try to make some show of being clever about it.
But there is no way in which the music critic, in words, can make you hear the sound of the concert. By writing certain instructions on paper telling you certain things to do, those sounds can be reproduced though, so musical notation is essentially a set of instructions telling you certain things to do, and if you do them, you will gain an experience that is ineffable and beyond words. Spencer-Brown points out that all mathematics is basically a set of instructions, like "describe a circle, drop a perpendicular." So, if you follow certain instructions, then yod will understand certain things that cannot be described, and that, of course, is what yoga is all about.
All mystical writing, really, is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe the universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows that cannot possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek root muin, which means "silence." Mum's the word; shut up. I should talk, but that's it. Be quiet. Then you will understand because the instructions are to listen. Listen, or even look. Stop, look, and listen-that is yoga-and see what is going on. Only don't say, because that will spoil it. Somebody came to a Zen master and said, "The mountains and hills and the skyare not all these the body of Buddha?" And the master said, "Yes, but it's a pity to say so."
For those of you who are mathematically hip, by reading Spencer-Brown's book Laws of Form, you can go through an intellectual process that is very close indeed to jnana yoga. As a matter of fact, I was so impressed with it that I went over to England especially to see this fellow. He is quite remarkable, a youngish man adept at all sorts of things.
In the book, he starts out with the instruction to draw a distinction, any distinction you want, between something and nothing, between the inside and the outside, or what have you. Then he takes you through a process of reasoning in which he shows you that once you have made that step, all the laws of mathematics, physics, biology, and electronics follow inevitably. He draws them out and he gets you into the most complicated electronic circuitry systems that necessarily follow from your having drawn a distinction. Once you have done that, the universe as we know it is inevitable.
After that he says, "I haven't told you anything you didn't already know. At every step when you saw that one of my theorems was correct, you said, 'Oh, of course.' Why? Because you knew it already." And then at the end of it, where he has shown you, as it were, the nature of your own mind, he raises the question, "Was this trip really necessary?"
So now he takes us in the reentry and says, "You see, what has happened through all this mathematical process, and also in the course of your own complicated lives where you have been trying to find out something that you already knew, is the universe has taken one turn." That is the meaning of universe; it has taken a turn on itself to look at itself. Well, when anything looks at itself it escapes itself, as the snake swallowing its tail, as the dog chasing its tail, as we try to grab this hand with that. It gets some of it, but it doesn't get it, and so he makes the amazing remark, "Naturally, as our telescopes become more powerful, the universe must expand in order to escape them." Now, you will say this is subjective idealism in a new disguise. This is Bishop Berkeley all over again saying that we create the universe out of our own minds. Well, unfortunately it is true, if you take mind to mean "physical brain" and "physical nervous system." If you listen to Karl Pribram's lectures at Stanford, you will find him saying the same thing in neurological terms. It is the structure of your nervous system that causes you to see the world that you see. Or read J. Z. Young's book Doubt and Certainty in Science, where all this is very clearly explained. It is the same old problem in new language, only it is a more complicated language, a more sophisticated, up-to-date, scientifically respectable language. It is the same old thing, but that is yoga. Yoga, or union, means that you do it. In a sense, you are God, tat tvam asi, as the Upanishads say, "You are making it."
So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their disciples and say, "I am God. I have realized." But the important thing is that you are realized. Whether I am or not is of no consequence to you whatsoever. I could get up and say "I am realized," and put on a turban and yellow robe and say "Come and have darsban, I'm guru, and you need the grace of guru in order to realize," and it would be a wonderful hoax. It would be like picking your pockets and selling you your own watch. But the point is, you are realized. Now, what are we saying when we say that? We are obviously saying something very important, but alas and alack, there is no way of defining it, nor going any further into words about it. When a philosopher hears such a statement as tat tvam asi, "You are it," or "There is only the eternal now," the philosopher says, "Yes, but I don't see why you are so excited about it. What do you mean by that?"
Yet he asks that question because he wants to continue in a word game; he doesn't want to go on into an experiential dimension. He wants to go on arguing, because that is his trip, and all these great mystical statements mean nothing whatsoever. They are ultimate statements, just as the trees, clouds, mountains, and stars have no meaning, because they are not words. Words have meaning because they're symbols, because they point to something other than themselves.
But the stars, like music, have no meaning. Only bad music has any meaning. Classical music never has a meaning, and to understand it you must simply listen to it and observe its beautiful patterns and go into its complexity.
When your mind, that is to say, your verbal systems, gets to the end of its tether and it arrives at the meaningless state, this is the critical point. The method of jnana yoga is to exercise one's intellect to its limits so that you get to the point where you have no further questions to ask. You can do this in philosophical study if you have the right kind of teacher who shows you that all philosophical opinions whatsoever are false, or at least, if not false, extremely partial. You can see how the nominalists cancel out the realists, how the determinists cancel out the free willists, how the behaviorists cancel out the vitalists, and then how the logical positivists cancel out almost everybody. Then someone comes in and says, "Yes, but the logical positivists have concealed metaphysics," which indeed they do, and then you get in an awful tangle and there is nothing for you to believe.
If you get seriously involved in the study of theology and comparative religion, exactly the same thing can happen to you. You cannot even be an atheist anymore; that is also shown to be a purely mythological position. So you feel a kind of intellectual vertigo that is as in a Zen Buddhist poem, "Above, not a tile to cover the head. Below, not an inch of ground to stand on." Where are you then?
Of course, you are where you always were. You have discovered that you are it, and that is very uncomfortable because you can't grab it. I have discovered that whatever it is that I am is not something inside my head-it is just as much out there as it is in here. But whatever it is, I cannot get hold of it, and that gives you the heebie-jeebies. You get butterflies in the stomach, anxiety traumas, and all kinds of things. This was all explained by Shankara, the great Hindu commentator on the Upanishads and a great master of the non-dualistic doctrine of the universe, when he said, "That which knows, which is in all beings the knower, is never an object of its own knowledge." Therefore, to everyone who is in quest of the supreme kick, the great experience, the vision of God, whatever you want to call itliberation-when yt)u think that you are not it, any old guru can sell you on a method to find it. That may not be a bad thing for him to do, because a clever guru is a person who leads you on. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty. I've got something very good to show you. Yes. You just wait. Oh, but you've got to go through a lot of stages yet." You say "Ah, ah, ah, ah. Can I get that? Oh, I want to get that." And all the time it's you.
I was talking to a Zen master the other day, and he said, "Mmmmm. You should be my disciple." I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way, and he burst into laughter and gave me a piece of clover. So long as you can be persuaded that there is something more that you ought to be than you are, you have divided yourself from reality, from the universe, from God, or whatever you want to call that, the tat in tat tvam asi. You will find constantly, if you are interested in anything like this-in psychoanalysis, in Gestalt therapy, in sensitivity training, in any kind of yoga or what have you-that there will be that funny sensation of what I will call "spiritual greed" that can be aroused by somebody indicating to you, "Mmmm, there are still higher stages for you to attain. You should meet my guru." So, you might say, "Now, to be truly realized you have to get to the point where you're not seeking anymore." Then you begin to think, "We will now be non-seekers," like disciples of Krishnamurti, who because he says he doesn't read any spiritual books can't read anything but mystery stories, and become spiritually unspiritual. Well, you find that, too, is what is called in Zen "legs on a snake." It is irrelevant. You don't need not to seek, because you don't need anything. It is like crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after you.
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