The Future of Communications

In this lecture, Alan Watts challenges our conventional understanding of communication, exploring how our obsession with symbols and language often separates us from the true essence of life. He delves into the paradox of communication, suggesting that while our modern technologies extend our nervous systems and connect us superficially, they also deepen our sense of isolation.

Ultimately, Watts invites us to reconnect with the world through a more profound, unspoken communion, where the boundaries between self and the universe dissolve.

AI Generated Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Tatramasi.

You’re it.

Ha!

[LAUGHS] You’re everything that’s going on.

In other words, you are a particular place at which the whole universe is focused.

[MUSIC PLAYING] This is part of a series of seminars on the future.

And last weekend, we were discussing the very nature of time.

And I want to give a sort of summary of what we were talking about before going into this particular weekend’s discussion, which is the future of communication.

Last weekend, we discussed the idea that history, the notion of human life as a kind of progressive system that is beginning from the old, the primitive, the worn out, the stupid, and going on progressively to the greater and greater attainments, the wise, the good, the successful, and so on.

That this is a very dangerous illusion, that insofar as we feel we are participating in and improving human life through the course of history, we are actually destroying ourselves.

Because everything that so far, through technology and through the accumulation of human skill, we call the increase of our powers is leading us to destruction.

Not because technology in itself is a bad thing, but because the spirit in which it is used is a spirit of man against the universe, man against nature.

And man has to realize that he is an integral part of nature, that he is just as much a natural form as a seagull or a wave or a mountain.

And if he doesn’t realize that, he uses his technical powers to destroy his environment, to foul his own nest.

And so when you look at a great modern city like Los Angeles and you see the absolute ruination of what used to be a very lovely natural scene, full of citrus trees and sunshine, now turned into a smoggy slum.

So the Los Angelization instead of civilization of the world is a result of having a sense of our own existence, which is contrary to the facts.

That is to say, we are all trained by our parents, by our teachers, by our peer groups to experience our own existence as an ego in a capsule of skin.

Confronted by an external world which is not ourselves, definitely not.

And that this external world is something that really threatens us because we’ve been brought up to the idea that basically it’s a mechanism.

It’s a stupid, unintelligent manifestation of energy.

Right out in the farthest galaxies, it’s nothing but fire and gas.

Nearer to us, it’s nothing but water and rock.

And it’s full of buzzing insects and other organisms that are inferior to the human status, and therefore something that’s not to be trusted at all.

And we have been brought up to the idea that we come into this scene as if we were complete strangers to it.

We are born by an accident of bad rubber goods or something like that.

And we arrive in this and confront it like that.

See?

It’s outside there.

And this is a hallucination.

All this is a complete fantasy.

Official people in psychiatry complain about the hallucinatory states induced by LSD and so on and so forth.

But they are nothing.

They are nothing in their hallucinations compared with the hallucination of being a skin-encapsulated ego.

One is not that.

For example, it’s very, very, very simple.

A human being exists by virtue of living in a world where there are plants, where there is air, where there is water, where there is sun, and that’s temperature.

And plants imply insects and grubs.

They can’t live without them.

And grubs imply birds.

And birds imply fish.

And so on and so on.

It all fits together so that you are patterns.

Every living organism is a pattern of something which is inseparable from the pattern of everything else that is going on.

So that you could say, you as a living human organism are something that the whole universe is doing at the point of space and time which you call here and now.

You are not separate.

You flow into all that surrounds you in exactly the same way that your head goes with your feet.

See, they’re inseparable.

When you were born, you weren’t put together like one constructs an automobile, screwing on this bit and screwing on that bit and so on.

You beautifully grew, head and feet together, all of one piece from your mother’s womb.

And in exactly the same way that your head and your feet are related together, so you go with– I want to get this word into the English language– go with.

Instead of cause and effect, instead of that mechanical understanding of the world which was Descartes and Newton, they thought of the world as billiards.

You hit a ball and it goes– and it hits that ball like that, you see.

And they thought of cause and effect.

You don’t need to use that concept at all.

Go with.

Just as a front goes with a back, just as a top goes with the bottom, just as up goes with down, they’re inseparable.

So in exactly that way, you go with everything that you call the external world.

And therefore, you have to treat the external world as if it were as much you as your own foot or your own head.

It’s part of you.

It is you.

There’s no way of separating them.

Therefore, you have to be very kind and reverent and respectful to the mountains, to the forests, and so on, to the water, to the fish.

You, for example, live on fish just as birds live on worms.

And if you kill any creature in order to live, you have a duty towards it.

That is to say, you must not exterminate the species on which you live.

People have– for example, in the whaling industry, they have practically exterminated whales.

And it’s becoming a very serious situation, because you must farm, cultivate every species on which you feed.

If all worms were to be eaten by the birds, the birds would have no further sustenance.

From the worms’ point of view, if all birds were to vanish, the worms would overpopulate themselves and starve themselves.

So the worms depend on the birds just as much as the birds depend on the worms.

So we all depend on the whole interaction of the system of biology.

It’s a mutual eating society.

You may say that’s too bad, that life has to involve this crunching and crushing and annihilation of other creatures.

But that’s the way it is.

And therefore, if that’s the way it is, the way to do it properly is, number one, to farm instead of merely destroy.

Be assured that the species you feed on is maintained, that it goes on.

Farm the whales, don’t just hunt them.

That’s the first principle.

The second principle is, whenever you destroy a living body for your own maintenance, give it the honor of cooking it as beautifully as possible.

A fish that has died for you and is not well cooked has died in vain.

I’m quoting Lin Yu-Tang.

So this is the situation in which we find ourselves.

Life is a system in which organisms, by mutual eating, transform fish into people, grass into people, lettuce into people, cows into people.

What about people?

What are they transformed into?

We are proud, too proud, and we try to resist our transformation into some other forms of life.

And therefore, we have a wretched profession of morticians, otherwise known as undertakers, who try to embalm us and preserve us and put us in concrete and bury us, instead of letting us simply join the biological rhythm.

Actually, what should happen when a person is dead is that they should be buried three feet underground with no casket, nothing, just naked in the earth.

And that field should be allowed to lie fallow for some years.

And then it would be beautifully fertilized by human bodies, and crops would grow out of it.

They always say that the best wheat is grown on old battlefields.

But you see, we resist that.

And the morticians will put an ad in with some girl who’s lost her husband, looking out of the window on a rainy day.

They say, trust us, he’s not rotting, really.

We’ve got that concrete thing.

We’ve got that extra special covering, that super embalming.

And the corpse is still there.

Baby, don’t worry.

How mad can you get?

How insane, how ridiculous.

[BREATHING] The root of this kind of disturbance are feeling that you are separate inside your skin, and not simply all one process with everything that’s going on around you.

The root of this is a failure of communication.

[BREATHING] Now, if I want to talk about communication, one of the funny things that occurs to me straight off is that the subject of communication is really the same subject as life.

Life is communication.

But let’s take the subject of advertising.

Life is advertising, because the moment– what is advertising doing?

Advertising is trying to promote somebody’s game, somebody’s existence, somebody’s biological reality, because he’s maintaining himself by selling something, and he advertises it so as to sell it.

So one could say that all life is advertising.

Everybody advertises himself in some way or other.

Or take another subject, strategy, military strategy.

All life can be seen as a form of strategy.

Any major department of human life that we classify– we can call it business, we can call it strategy, we can call it advertising, we can call it communication– but we can see all life as that.

How, then, are we going to define communication as a particular human activity, as distinct from other activities?

What is the difference between communication and architecture?

What is the difference between communication and playing on the stock market?

What is the difference between communication and football?

These are very, very difficult things to define, because there is no difference.

Football is a form of communication.

Sex is a form of communication.

There isn’t anything that we do that isn’t a form of communication.

And therefore, you may say, why talk about communication?

Because it’s everything anyhow.

So in order to define the field, I’m going to talk about communication more narrowly.

Communication is language.

Communication is the world of symbols.

It’s true, sexual intercourse is a form of communication.

But I’m not going to include that sort of activity in what we’re going to discuss.

What I’m going to talk about is the way in which human beings use noises, like words, and symbols, like numbers, to represent the things which go on in the material and physical world.

If you take a glass of water, and you drink it, and you taste that, you see, that is an event in the physical universe.

But the word water is also in the physical universe, because it’s a sound.

But that particular sound, water, is used in a way that is peculiar.

It is used to represent that transparent liquid that you drink.

So alongside the physical universe of people and everything that’s going on, there is another universe that we have invented of words, and signs, and numbers that represent the physical world.

And we are very, very preoccupied with this symbolic world.

And we very often confuse it with what it represents.

Especially this is true in the United States of America.

This is a country, a nation, a culture, which is devoted in a most peculiar way to symbols.

Not so long ago, the Congress of the United States voted very serious penalties against anybody who burned or mutilated the American flag.

That same group of people is responsible for burning and destroying the physical landscape and population of the United States of America.

They will not properly resist the depravities of lumber companies who are destroying the redwood forests, the watersheds, the industries who foul our streams, deprive us of water, poison the air.

That’s all fine, just so long as you don’t destroy the flag.

The flag is the symbol, only the symbol, of the physical country.

But they, instead of protecting the physical country, protect the symbol.

In the same way, exactly, people confuse money with wealth.

Money is paper, is bookkeeping, is a useful method of avoiding the inconveniences of barter.

But money has become something to possess in its own right, to have more money than you can possibly need.

You know the joke about if somebody gives you a million dollars on the condition that you spend it all in one day, what would you buy with?

And certain things are excluded, like you mustn’t buy an enormous real estate thing.

You just have to spend it on things that you could use.

And it’s a very difficult problem as to how you would spend a million dollars in a day.

Think it out realistically.

But when you get this obsession with money as a reality, as if it was something that actually was desirable, you get an entirely hallucinated population, people who simply don’t know what’s good for them.

And are, shall we say, intoxicated, addicted to money, as if they were all on heroin or opium.

This is the confusion of the symbol with what it’s supposed to represent.

So then, let’s inquire carefully into the origin of all this.

Because before we explore the future of communication through symbols, through words, we’ve got to look a little bit at its past.

At some point in the development of mankind– and nobody historically knows how long ago this is– we invented, we developed two things.

One of them was the ability to scan, to pay attention, to use our consciousness in a focused way.

In other words, to notice what’s going on.

Ordinarily, we depend to an enormous extent on a kind of consciousness that doesn’t notice.

That is to say, you’re functioning all the time, breathing, beating your heart, even driving a car while you’re absorbed in conversation with your friendly passenger.

You’re doing an enormous number of things, very well indeed, without noticing what you’re doing.

Your entire physical existence, as a matter of fact, goes on and maintains itself without your noticing anything about it.

So your faculty of noticing has the same relationship to your total organism as, say, on a ship.

The radar is scanning, scanning, scanning the environment, looking for trouble.

That’s all it looks for.

For another ship that it might collide with, for a rock, for the proper entrance to San Francisco in the middle of the fog.

That’s what the radar is looking for.

But besides the radar, there are all kinds of things going on on a ship that are much more fundamental and essential to it.

So in the same way in the human organism, we have a radar.

We call it conscious attention.

And we are constantly scanning our environment and noticing this and that as to whether it is advantageous to us or disadvantageous.

But that’s only a little frippery on the top of us.

Useful, yes, important, but it’s not you.

The real you is the you that is beating the heart, shaping the bones, all that.

And we have learned, you see, by a curious social process to identify ourselves, our very selves, our– oh, what I say is the real me.

We’ve identified that with the scanning process, the little radar job, instead of identifying it with the whole total organism.

And therefore, we are estranged from our own bodies.

And by virtue of being estranged from the body, we are in turn estranged from the physical environment of nature.

If you understood, if you really clearly realized that you are your own organism, you would at the same moment feel, because your organism knows it, that you were one with your environment.

This organism is related to the world outside it in exactly the same way that, say, a whirlpool in a river is related to the river.

Everything outside you is sort of creating you by flowing through you and humaning, bodying, just as when the river moves, it whirlpools, and then goes on.

So the entire physical universe is peopling all around here, you see?

But conscious attention doesn’t deliver that to us as an experience.

Why?

Because conscious attention or noticing is a function of consciousness which is separative instead of unitive.

It analyzes instead of synthesizing.

I don’t want to, by saying this sort of thing, to put it down and say it’s a mistake and something that shouldn’t have happened.

It’s a very beautiful function, provided, provided, provided, it doesn’t annihilate and distract us from seeing the world synthetically as well as analytically.

In a mirror, you can see many images, all different, clear, and distinct.

But underneath the difference of images, there lies the pure silver of the mirror.

So in exactly the same way, seeing all the details clearly analyzed, we need to remain aware of consciousness itself, of awareness itself.

Just as, for example, all galaxies, all physical bodies exist in space.

What do you think space is?

Most people think space is nothing.

Space, however, is you.

Space is consciousness.

Space is the mind.

Space is what you call self, me.

That’s space.

And it includes everything.

But you can so easily forget it because conscious attention ignores every stimulus, every input message that is constant.

It rules it out.

It says, that doesn’t make any difference.

I’m looking for differences because I’m on guard for what might threaten my existence.

Therefore, I’m looking for a change in the environment.

I’m a troubleshooter.

So if you identify yourself with consciousness, you are constantly anxious.

What’s going to happen?

Is it going to work?

Am I on the spot?

You see?

Everybody’s like that.

But the real you is relaxed.

It really doesn’t care about that.

It’s got this little function up there that tells it on the whole whether there’s any trouble going to happen.

Really, inside you, deep down, you are harmonious with your environment.

And it really doesn’t matter whether you live or die because the whole system goes on anyway.

And that’s what you are.

So whether you, as a specific example of the system, go on a little while– one year, two years, three years, 50 years, 100 years– it doesn’t really make any difference.

If you want to play it– in other words, if you want to put a gamble on how long will you live, you want to gamble on 50 years more or how many years more?

You say, by gambling on it, you put importance on it.

You say, that’s what I’ve wagered on.

That’s what I want to do.

OK.

But that’s your game.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

So what we have, then, is a situation in which, by the ability to use our radar to scan ourselves and the world around us and to notice features of this universe, we notice these features by being able to put symbols on them.

You notice the face as something distinct from the knees by being able to call it face and call knees knees.

You do not have the capacity to notice these different features of the human body without being able to assign some symbol to the part that you notice.

This is absolutely crucial.

Noticing and language go together.

Noticing is the same thing as what we call notation.

Notation, as in music, symbols, little signs to identify sounds on a scale, words to identify bits of the world, numbers to identify how many bits.

All this goes together.

So to attend, to concentrate, to watch, to be aware in the way that a spotlight focuses on the surroundings, this goes hand in hand with symbols.

One uses the world of symbols, the world of special noises, not like ordinary noises, not like the sound of the wind, not like the washing of the waves, but the noises made by speech to create a separate, almost separate world of noise forms, which of course we can think silently in our heads, sub-vocally, as thought forms.

They’re all the same.

It’s forms of noise, forms of air vibration used to stand over against the world of ordinary, direct physical experience and represent it in a clumsy way.

Clumsy, yes, clumsy, because conscious attention as a scanning thing, as a spotlight roving over, however fast it goes, diggity-diggity-diggity-diggity-diggity-diggity-diggity, all around, as I watch you, if somebody measures where my eyes look, it can be done.

They will see them dancing over you, picking out significant points.

But that way of looking at life can only comprehend what’s going on in a very clumsy way, because the actual physical world is an operation where we would say uncountable, innumerable things are going on altogether, everywhere, at once.

And so we say, what a complicated world we live in.

Now actually, this world is not complicated at all.

It is perfectly simple.

It’s only complicated when you try to think it out.

That’s what it means.

Complicated, the word complicated, expresses a relationship between the physical world on the one hand and on the other, a scanning system, which is trying to understand and represent in symbols the physical world bit by bit, as, for example, if we would talk about it.

So when you try to talk about the world, it’s a complicated world, but only because you’re trying to talk about it.

In itself, it’s not a bit complicated.

The human body is a, from the point of view of surgery and physiology, infinitely complicated.

Its networks of veins and nerves and so on is absolutely extraordinary.

But we say these words extraordinary and complicated because we are confronted with a task of trying to translate this body into language.

And language is very clumsy.

It’s like if we would say we would move the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean with a beer mug.

It would be a very complicated thing to do because we’d have to take it mug by mug across, fly them across by jet plane and dump them in the Atlantic.

It would be very complicated.

But that’s what you do when you think about the world.

You take thing by thing, fact by fact, idea by idea, and it’s like beer mug after beer mug of water going from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

So we say it’s complicated.

It isn’t.

It’s only if you approach it with a certain method, then it’s complicated because you insist on that method.

And you say, well, that method is me.

I am the method of taking in the world bit by bit.

But that’s a hallucination.

You’re not.

Each one of you includes far more capacity than that narrow method of taking in the world bit by bit because every nerve end in your body is alive and aware.

Every organ is functioning without your thinking about it.

And that’s you.

So because we have a narrowed idea and conception of ourselves as purely the conscious scanner, we’ve invested so much emotion in that, and we’ve invested so much of the feeling that that is what we are, that we are completely miserable and tormented.

Our communication system, therefore, is constantly exaggerating, or to use the word in its very correct way, aggravating.

To aggravate means to make worse.

It is aggravating all the time the delusion that we are separate from the world.

In other words, communication, as we are using it, is a form of non-communication.

It’s a way of cutting ourselves off instead of actually communicating.

The more we talk, the more we think, the more we ideate, the more we separate ourselves from each other.

I identify you as you, as you, as you, and you’re a Republican, you’re a Democrat, you’re a beatnik, you’re a hippie, you’re a this, that, and the other thing, you’re a square, or whatever.

The more I identify you, you see, in these terms, the more I don’t feel that you are me.

You really physically are me.

All of you.

You are to everybody else.

It’s like a dewdrop on a spider’s web in the early morning, which contains in itself all the reflections of all the other dewdrops.

And we really relate to each other like that.

But in language, in communication, we all put ourselves apart as separate entities, see?

And believe that.

So the more we go on with this, the more we are divided up.

The more we quarrel, the more we don’t understand how to cooperate.

So here we start with this paradox.

Communication, which is related to the word communion, common, what we have together, communication is separation.

And the more we talk, the less we understand each other.

So then, it has been said that our modern systems of communication are an extension into the external world of man’s nervous system.

Telephones, telegraph, radio, television, all this network of electronic devices is extending our nervous system in the same way as a wheel extends our feet.

But consider the problems that are arising out of this.

The extension of the nervous system electronically means the end of privacy.

As if all your interior thoughts were to become instantly public and available to everyone.

Or conversely, as if your so-called private self were to become a shared self.

Let’s think of it first of all in the worst way we can think of it.

The inconvenience of everybody being able to barge in on us by telephone.

All that inconvenience.

Treble it with the inconveniences you can imagine for a future technology, where you would not only have the sound of the person’s voice on the telephone, but also their visual image.

It can be so worked out technically that everybody can be equipped with a little gadget about the size of a pocket watch.

On one side there is a dialing system and on the other side there is a little TV screen.

And everybody in the world who possesses one of these things has a number.

And if you ring it and the number doesn’t answer, your friend’s dead.

Imagine.

Because you can’t not answer.

That would be unethical.

That would be inhuman.

That would be to advertise yourself as dead.

You must answer.

Or else a busy signal.

Have you ever thought about busy signals as a method of self-defense?

Because we do it all the time when we say somebody asks you to do something you don’t really want to do, you excuse yourself on the grounds of saying, “Well, but that day I happened to be busy.

I have work to do.”

Even if you thoroughly enjoy your work, like for me, all my work is play.

But I can say to people, “I have to work.

I’m sorry.”

And I feel slightly dishonest and I don’t know what to do about it.

So then, imagine then this situation where we have the huge electronic intercommunication so that everybody is in touch with everybody else in such a way that it reveals their inmost thoughts and there is no longer any individuality.

No privacy.

Everything you are, everything you think, is revealed to everyone.

Well now, let’s go into the history of this, this idea of privacy.

It’s been for a very many, many centuries a belief of Western civilization that there is God who knows everything that you are.

The mass in the Episcopal Church begins with a prayer, “Oh Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”

That we have lived centuries now, before we now in this modern age, who don’t perhaps believe anymore, in this monarch God.

But before us, our grandfathers and their, our great-grandfathers and so on, all believed that there was a reference point called God, to whom every single secret thought that you had was an open book and was watching it all the time.

Because according to St.

Thomas Aquinas, God the Father creates the universe by knowing it.

In other words, you see a flag flapping out there, which you would say is an insignificant little rag on a pole.

But according to St.

Thomas, that rag flaps there only because God, with his entire infinite energy, is concentrating on every single molecule of its being.

And by virtue of that concentration, it exists.

So God is an every-which-way intellect that penetrates everything, that concentrates on everything, and only because of that does the thing exist.

So when your thoughts move in your brain, they do so only because the Lord God Almighty is supporting them.

When you say in the Creed, “Pistepho is enateon pantopantokratera.”

“Pistepho, I believe in one God.”

“Pantopantopantokratera,” “the ruler of all things.”

“The pantocrat,” not the aristocrat, “the pantocrat.”

“The all-ruler,” “who therefore is in charge of everything that happens.”

“Every happening is an expression of the divine power.”

But you as an individual are privileged with freedom to use the divine power any way you want.

You can do evil with it or you can do good with it.

This is the Christian doctrine.

So that when you do an evil thing, when you slit a baby from end to end and eat it, you are doing so with the power of God.

But you have gone against the spirit of that power, even though it supports you in doing it.

Now that’s the idea.

So, I’m just bringing up this point to show that the West has had for centuries the idea that there is no real privacy because God knows everything that you do.

And we’ve accepted that.

And what we don’t want to accept is the idea that our neighbors know what we do.

But let’s suppose we have a situation in which we know all our friends are listening and all our non-friends, and there is absolutely no way of concealing our inmost thoughts from general inspection.

What does that do to you?

What does it do to you?

Can you control the way you think and feel inwardly?

What would happen, in fact, if everything were exposed?

One thing would be very obvious.

Eventually, after attempting to control your thoughts and stop certain thoughts from happening, you would say, “To hell with it.

I’ll think just the way I feel like thinking.”

And be damned.

The public be damned.

That’s what you’d do.

Everybody would have to do that.

They’d have to do it in mutual self-defense.

Do you see how this would release everybody?

If we all could interpenetrate each other and know each other through and through, we would forgive each other all our sins.

So don’t be frightened of the notion that there may come a day when everybody is mutually bugged with microphones and everything so that there aren’t any secrets.

Why have secrets?

Why have secrets at all?

The moment you overcame the notion, you see, that you have to be defending yourself, when you overcome that, there will no longer be any need to defend yourself.

Now what we’re afraid of, you see, is that some uh… power will control all of us by this method.

But that power, whoever is the controlling agency, must in the kind of 1984 Orwellian horror be the one individual whose thoughts are not public.

If the super-controller has his thoughts public, then he can’t be in that position.

So the horror idea is if everybody is circuited so as that uh… his private thoughts are public knowledge to all his friends and relations and to the controller, but the controller’s thoughts are not public knowledge, then you have a system which is a real dangerous kind of dictatorship.

But if there are no private thoughts for anybody at all, and we are all hooked in on the system, all plugged in, then everybody will look at each other and say, “Oh, ha ha, come off it.”

And we’ll all be free to be our inmost selves, because you will recognize that everybody else is as much a rascal as you are.

And we’ll forgive each other, because we’ll understand that that is simply human nature.

This is so often the case.

Somebody goes to a psychotherapist because they have some kind of sex problem that is absolutely weird, or at least they think it is.

And you know, they want to chew the tip of a woman’s high heel, and this only will give them an erection.

So they go to the psychiatrist and say, “I have this very strange problem.”

He says, “My dear fellow, do you realize I have forty patients with the same problem you have?”

It’s a great, great relief, you see, that he has found out that he shares this.

So this same sharing of our minds, which might come about through super electronics, would, provided there is no one who is able to opt out of the system and say, “You don’t get my thoughts on it.”

So this is a parallel of what we’re doing already, that every individual has his secret, has his privacy, and to a very large extent identifies himself as an active individual by virtue of having that privacy.

And at the same time, what he mostly has in privacy are things about which he feels guilty.

There is sins.

Sin and privacy are really the same thing, because when you go to the confessional in a Catholic church and whisper your sins to the priest, you’re in a box, a private place, and the priest has a rule that he will never, never, even under the threat of torture, reveal anything anybody has confessed to him.

The seal of the confession.

So, in this way, we feel that our individuality depends on our privacy.

And privacy and sin are really the same.

Now, everybody who is at all sensitive likes to be alone.

You like to be able to go out on a sailing boat all by yourself and float in the middle of the water, or climb up the mountain, or go into the air, and, or just retire into your own place and relax in loneliness.

But I want to make the point that loneliness in that sense and privacy are quite different things.

The privacy of having a secret in you that should not be revealed.

That’s just a silly joke.

In other words, we all know perfectly well that Jesus Christ had to go and excrete, although no mention is made of it in the Gospels.

There are certain kind of people who, just because that wasn’t mentioned, drag it out and would draw cartoons of Jesus sitting on the toilet, like Paul Krasner in The Realist.

He loves to bring out the side of life, you see, where, uh, idols are debunked by being shown up as, after all, human.

But that kind of humor, that sort of sick humor, can only exist in a community where, indeed, there is a peculiar self-defensive privacy.

And where we base our individual existence upon secrets.

And this is why, of course, clothes, as I mentioned earlier today, are of such immense importance to us as the masks that distinguish us.

In a nudist camp, everybody is kind of depressingly equal. [laughs] And you have what you have.

If you’re young and lucky and strong, you look beautiful.

But if you’re old and saggy and, uh, not much, you look like a kind of a wet potato.

So, in order to show that you are more mind than body, that you have something in you that isn’t just this flesh, you express yourself in clothes.

Great, great, great, wonderful.

But everybody with x-ray eyes knows just exactly what you are underneath all that.

Now let’s take the x-ray deeper and read your thoughts.

What kind of a going on are you?

And at first you say, “Oh, God, listen to those person’s thoughts.

How boring.

Why couldn’t they be more interesting than that?”

Because you must admit that the ordinary train of your thoughts is pretty dull.

I often think what God must feel like when he has to inspect the ordinary train of thoughts of all these millions and millions of people.

And he has to–they can’t do that thinking without his being completely aware of it.

And just think what he has to undergo.

But when you look deeper, underneath the conscious thoughts, and you see the fantastic convolutions of the organism which is responsible for this thinking, the marvelous structure of the nervous system and the brain, that becomes really interesting.

And yet, you see, here most of us are.

We are all, from the point of view of our organic structure, we are miracles.

We are absolutely– we are more beautiful than any kind of gem, any work of art ever conceived.

And yet we preoccupy ourselves– use this instrument.

It’s like using a Stradivarius to play chopsticks on.

Something like that.

Use a Stradivarius to play that.

And that’s what most of us do with our organisms.

And we think that’s terribly important.

So much so that we keep it a dark secret from everybody else.

But now the moment you see we’re all public to each other, and there are no secrets, and I– supposing I’m the talker in this group, and therefore in a certain kind of privileged position.

Supposing it wasn’t so.

Supposing that I wasn’t in a unique position, and that we all– everybody equally– shared each other’s full conscious knowledge.

What would we do?

We would have to come off it.

Wouldn’t we?

We’d have to agree with each other.

We’d have to say, well, hello everyone.

You’re me.

All right, now.

We see our technology moving in this direction.

Inevitably.

But insofar as it is doing this, insofar in other words as electronics is making everybody available to everybody else, what we’re doing is that we are discovering through technology a state of affairs which in fact has existed all the time.

Look at it this way.

The first thing that human beings created on this planet to communicate with distant points were roads, trails where people walked.

With the coming of horses and the mastery of horses, the roads became, as it were, more clearly stamped because of the hard hoof of the horse.

But in the nineteenth century we began to go beyond roads because we discovered rails, then wires, and the world became a network.

The economic world became a network of roads, rails, and wires.

But now the fascinating thing is we are beginning to witness a disappearance of all those three methods of communication.

The railways and the roads have gone to the airplane and the wires have gone to radio and television which require no wires to connect.

And you will see that as human beings become more technically efficient that the scars of technology will disappear from the face of the earth.

The moment that everybody has his personal hoppycopter there will be no further need of the freeway.

And the freeway will break up and grass and moss will grow over it because nobody’s traveling it.

And it will disappear back into the landscape.

Hooray!

What an awful thing it is!

You know, the concrete octopus and these ridiculous automobiles in which we each travel around and make a nuisance of ourselves.

But they will vanish because they simply are not technologically efficient.

Now you say, “Well, the helicopter will take its place.”

All right.

Is that really necessary?

Because as a matter of fact if we couple the science of television with the science of laser beams we can get a three-dimensional image of anybody we’d like to see right here in this room.

In other words, you can contact your friends in New York and you can assemble them all together in laser beam images by, as it were, dialing each one and say, “Can you come on?

Can you come on?

Can you come on?”

Then we can have a laser beam created three-dimensional image of anybody you want to talk to sitting right in this room.

Now there may be some limitations to what you can do with a laser beam image of somebody else.

But to all intents and purposes, there they are sitting together.

And you understand that each one of them in their own room in New York or Boston or wherever, they have an equivalent laser beam image of you and all the others who are involved in this conference.

So you’re looking at a certain area in a room where there are three-dimensional images of a group of your friends.

And these three-dimensional images exist in the separate apartments of every single one of those people involved in the conference.

So that the same conference is happening in five different places.

Let’s say there are five people involved.

In each one of them, there’s one of them there who thinks he’s authentic.

And he has these five laser beam images, four, talking to him.

And so it is in every other situation.

You begin to ask then, “Where are you?”

And furthermore, by means of further electronic technology, every one of these five people are not only visible to each other on the screen, in the cubic screen of the laser beam television, but also their inmost thoughts are clear to each other.

There is no concealment.

Imagine that.

So this kind of mutual knowledge of each other, which we could have by some sort of technology, would be wonderful.

Really, if we would accept it.

We’d go on from this.

That just as the roads have disappeared, or will disappear, and the wires disappear, eventually the electronic gadgetry will disappear.

And the electronic network that communicates from person to person will eventually become ESP, or psionic.

We will get it from each other without any need for an electrical gadget.

By telepathy.

Because, you see, what all technology is doing, it’s not creating a new situation.

It is discovering what has always existed.

When we started to use conscious attention as our main faculty, of understanding the world and communicating with each other, we became ignorant of all the other methods of communication that exist, because we specialized on one.

And in order to function in this world, we had to make this one method of experiencing things.

Find out all the channels of communication that exist, and explain them, and talk about them, and measure them, so that we know they’re really there.

But as it goes on, you see, this conscious attention creating technological devices for communication, all it is actually doing, it is discovering the routes of communication that have always been there.

Now, I want to take this a step further.

Do you understand this now?

Let’s suppose we eventually discover that we don’t need radio and that we don’t need television, because we have ESP, and that we come through our technology to make ESP respectable, so that we can admit to ourselves that there really is that thing going on.

Because we couldn’t admit it before because it was not scientifically acceptable that there could be anything like that.

The first step is we make an electronic model of ESP, and it works, obviously, because it’s electronic.

But then we discover that we don’t need the model.

We can do it anyhow, just like homing pigeons have radar built into them, and white-throated birds can navigate by the stars.

How much more value are you than many sparrows?

You know, you have it.

So we discover that.

Well, when we have finally no need to travel, to telephone, to communicate by any technical method whatsoever, because we all instantly read each other’s thoughts, and have all information whatsoever available to us, is that the point?

Is that the great desideratum?

Is that what we wanted?

The thing we were trying to get?

You find there’s still something beyond that.

Because when you can read everybody else’s thoughts, what information will you get from doing that?

You will find that reading somebody else is just like reading you.

Knowing somebody else’s mind is pretty much like reading your own mind.

Yeah, there are some little variations that are of interest, but basically, to know you thoroughly would be like knowing me thoroughly.

So, not only have the roads vanished, the rails vanished, the wires vanished, the radio has vanished, the television has vanished, but finally the ESP vanishes as a line of communication, because we’ve at last discovered that we are all one.

And so, in a way, there is no further need to communicate, because we are in total communion.

When we communicate, what are we really communicating about?

What is the content of communication?

Because you see, McLuhan has come up with a very strange idea, that the medium itself is the message, or putting it in a punny way to make it clearer, the medium is the massage.

Not so much, therefore, finally, the content of what is being said is the thing you’re getting over, but what you’re getting over is the way of saying it.

So we have to go into what it is, finally, that we are communicating about when we communicate.

What do we want to tell our friends, our other people, our other selves?

Now, I had a great deal of trouble really sympathizing with McLuhan’s point of view, especially in what he has to say about television, where he feels that the medium of television is highly participative, and that the mosaic technique of bringing the image across onto the television screen is something entirely different, say, from a film or from a painting.

He expresses the notion that television is more tactile than visual, and therefore it involves you as the sense of touch involves you, you see, because touch is the fundamental sense.

All the five senses are specializations of the sense of touch.

So when you see, you’re touching light.

When you hear, you’re touching air.

And when you taste and smell, especially in smell, you’re touching gas, the quality of gas.

And finally, with your fingers, you have, in a way, the most primitive sense, the sense that is least acute in its differentiations.

But nevertheless, you see, all of them are forms of touch.

And so you could say, as the Buddhists say, there is one sense behind all our senses.

They have a sixth sense, for example, they use the word “vijnana,” which means consciousness, and they have nose consciousness, eye consciousness, ear consciousness, touch consciousness, taste consciousness, five.

But behind that, they have “mano-vijnana,” which means mind consciousness.

That is to say, the unifying of the senses so that you will put together the sight of fish and the smell of fish and be able to integrate them and say, “Well, this is a single experience.

The fish looks so and smells so, touches so.”

And so by the integration of the senses, all being forms of touch, you can, of course, eventually come to a state of consciousness where you can hear colors and see sounds if you’re very, very sensitive indeed.

So, you might say now then that all communication is information.

But I want to show you that straight information is not the final thing we’re trying to communicate.

You see, we live now in a culture where there is great disagreement about the values of life.

What do we live for?

There is no consensus because all the religions which, you know, were the philosophies which gave us what life is supposed to be all about, they’re all fragmented.

And so there is being no common religion, there is no common view as to what life is about.

In default of that common view, there is, especially in the academic world where people think out ethical and political problems, a tacit agreement that the highest value we have, that we can all agree upon is survival value.

And therefore, naturally, when we communicate messages which have to do with survival, i.e. where to find the food, where to avoid the enemy, then one says we are communicating about essentials.

During the war, World War II, a friend of mine was in the office of the president of Northwestern University and he had a number of watercolors around his office.

And he said to this friend of mine, “Well, now we’re at war,” waving his hand at the paintings, “all this is irrelevant.

We come down to essentials.

Is this trip really necessary?”

Is this trip really necessary?

In other words, what do you mean when you say, “Is this trip really necessary?”

When you say, “Essentials.”

Priority is given to essential industries in war.

They are the industries of survival.

Because we got it into our common sense, even though we may not have intended to do this, but it is fundamentally established in our common sense that survival is the thing that is good.

While there is life, there is hope.

And this, of course, is a really asinine point of view.

Because it is not survival just going on that we want.

Yes, we want survival, but survival in a certain way, that is to say, in a certain style.

And you will therefore see that in the end, while there is always a survival content in communication, so far as that communication is information, what is finally more valued about communication than the survival value information is the style in which it’s given.

It’s just in the same way as lovemaking.

Finally, when it comes down to it, what do you want to say to the person?

“I love you.”

What are you going to communicate?

An engineer would say, when you say “I love you,” it means that we’re going to do reproduction, and therefore continue the race.

But that’s not the point at all.

It’s obvious that it’s not.

What are children for?

Just to continue?

No, they’re to be loved.

And how do you love things?

You stroke them.

You give them a massage.

If it moves, fondle it.

And so it is finally, what you’re communicating to someone you love, is a rhythm.

Whether it’s the rhythm of sexual intercourse, or whether it’s the rhythm of dancing, or whether it’s the rhythm of verbal play, as in telling a story, or in singing a song, what you’re communicating is a sort of caressing rhythm, which says to you, “I’m so glad you’re here, and that you can receive my communication,” which is about nothing, only to say, “In this way of a dancing with you, I love you.”

That’s really what it’s all about.

So then you see, the Buddhists call that factor of communication “suchness.”

For example, when we talk, you understand my words because each word that I use has a meaning.

And so the words that I use refer to something other than themselves.

So I use these symbols, and you get what I’m talking about.

Now listen carefully.

What does that mean?

That I communicate meaning to you by words is a situation.

Now what’s the meaning of that situation?

And you meditate a little bit on that, and you discover that it has no meaning at all.

A cloud has no meaning because it isn’t a symbol.

It’s what we call a thing.

The word “cloud,” the sound “cloud,” means that.

But what does that mean?

You see, it’s not a word, so it doesn’t mean anything.

A cloud is jazz.

It’s part of the dance of the universe.

And so likewise, when I make sense to you and you make sense to me, we have a kind of interlocking that would correspond perhaps to a spider’s web, where various rings of thread are joined to rings of thread inside rings of thread.

It’s joined together.

So we join together by talking, see?

We play together by talking.

But what that all means is some kind of jazz.

And that’s suchness.

In the practice of meditation, the most important thing is to get down to suchness in everything that goes on.

A great Japanese Zen master, when he was about to die, wrote a poem which said, “From the bathtub to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense.”

In other words, the bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, and the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial.

Alpha to omega.

Maternity ward to crematorium.

“All this time,” he said, “I have talked only nonsense.”

And this is part of the whole thing of Zen, to be able to hear all voices, all communications, all gestures, all shapes, all sensations whatsoever, in their fundamental form as laughing.

When the baby starts to talk in the beginning, it speaks what Yakuzema called the natural language.

And he says that man at his fall, talking about the fall of Adam, lost the natural language.

And the natural language is understood by birds and beasts, because they speak it.

Because a lot of what birds say is not communicative in our ordinary sense of delivering information.

Some of it delivers information.

But a great deal of what they say doesn’t deliver any communication.

It is just playing with sound.

And a great deal of what we do is playing with sound.

I’m particularly aware of this as a philosopher, because a lot of people will be very critical of what I say, and say, “You don’t really make any sense at all.

You sound as if you do.

You beguile and hoodwink the public into thinking that you have got something important to say, and all you’re doing is making noises.”

And I say, “Granted, that’s absolutely true.

But if I make interesting noises and manage to make a play of ideas that is in some way musical, see, fascinating, people say, “Well, it’s the same sort of thing that we enjoy out of looking at a mountain, or watching waves, or the flight of birds, because it is this dance.”

You may remember that this morning I described a situation as follows.

I’m talking to you, and you understand what my words mean.

Situation A.

Situation B is taking situation A as a whole, my talking to you and you understanding what I mean, what does that situation mean?

And we find it doesn’t mean anything.

This could be a way, when we say something is meaningless, it’s a way of putting it down.

But on the other hand, when you consider a mountain, or a cloud, or a tree, and ask, “What does it mean?”

and you realize it’s not a word, it’s simply an authentic existence in its own right, it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s great.

And so in this way, the nearest thing in that kind of achievement, that nature does all the time, in human activities is music.

Once when Gustav Holst was giving a lecture on music, he started out this way, he said, “Music is a natural and universal language.”

He took a step backwards and said, “That’s so important I’m going to say it again.

Music is a natural and universal language.”

But nobody knows what it’s about.

Sometimes we say music represents emotions.

But a great deal of music, although it has a very strong feeling quality, does not represent specific emotions.

Inferior music copies natural noises.

The sound of water, the thunder of the hooves of horses, or in that dreadful composition, the 1812 Overture of Tchaikovsky, you hear Napoleon’s armies retreating from Moscow.

Or in some of the bad work of Debussy, like La Cathédrale Angloutie, makes noises like bells tolling from under the water.

But our very great musicians of the West, Scarlatti, Mozart, and so on, they don’t do anything with the music except create elaborate patterns of sound.

Bach is very mathematical, and yet, curiously, despite his tremendously developed intellect, the music has a very strong feeling quality, joyous and exuberant.

But it’s all pure play with sound.

And therefore, one might say, the communication that you make with music is in a curious way the most important kind of communication you can make, even though you’re saying nothing.

The music delivers no information, but what a form of communication.

And so it is also with dancing with somebody.

All you are saying with dancing is, “I love you,” if you’re delivering any message at all.

I want to play with you.

All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.

What does it mean?

What is the content of friendship?

You can’t say, “What is the content of love?

I want to screw you.”

That’s a sort of part of it.

It’s incidental.

It’s a way of saying very strongly, “Yes, I do want to be with you.”

But basically, love is something we can’t put our finger on at all.

We use such words as warmth, tenderness, all these things.

They don’t really get to the point.

When you’re loving somebody, you are simply delighting in that person as such, as if another human organism in its mental and its physical aspects were a piece of music or a work of art or a glorious morning that you were just enjoying every inch of it.

And you go over another person’s physical form and look at it from every possible point of view and play with it and tickle it.

And that’s what it’s about.

It’s the adoration of the form of a human being.

And you do that adoring in terms of physical contacts that are, say, dancing with your fingers across the skin or whatever it may be.

But this is the nitty-gritty, the nub of love.

It is not that I here and now solemnly undertake to support you for the rest of your life.

That’s a delusion of the West.

You think, “You don’t really love me unless you will sign on the dotted line here and give me this contract.

And then I know I can rely on you always.”

What did you want it for?

Why did you want the contract?

Just to be fed indefinitely?

Just to be supported indefinitely?

What a bore.

One wants something much more than that.

You want to be played with indefinitely.

That’s more like it.

To have this vibrancy going through you.

And this then is why music of all the arts is the most meaningless art after all.

Music is a major industry in the United States.

The money invested in orchestras and operas, in the recording business, is fantastic.

Horse racing is a very great industry, but music I think probably absorbs more millions than horse racing.

And you could make a case that this was a complete dissipation.

It solves no useful purpose.

It doesn’t help anyone to survive.

It is a noise, meaningless noise, endless meaningless noise going down the drain.

All these energies, orchestras, all the power of electronics that delivers this is total waste.

And people get hooked on it.

They get the thing called chorditis, which is addiction to harmonics.

And they have to have this repeated, day after day.

Some people get up in the morning and they can’t function till they’ve had a cup of coffee.

But many more people get up in the morning and can’t function till they’ve turned on the radio and got some music.

What would you say then of a culture which took this standpoint?

Music not allowed.

Music is a diversion from reality.

You know, that kind of awful utilitarian attitude.

But really, one of the basic things, you see, that we live for, what makes it worth surviving and going on is there can be such a thing as music.

There can be dancing.

In other words, that we can do things that are absolutely irrelevant so far as mere survival is concerned.

Now we have the proverb that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Dull for work.

And people who play, justifying their play by making it a means to that end, those people never play.

Because you don’t really play until you get so absorbed in the music or the dancing or the whatever, making the part or doing the calligraphy, until you get so absorbed in it that there is no reason for it other than what you’re doing.

The sheer delight of that.

Then because you are absorbed in something for which there is no ulterior motive and which is pure play, this by way of a by-product produces sanity.

In other words, if you play in order to be healthy, in order to be sane, you are not playing.

But if you play just to play, then as a by-product, as something you couldn’t aim at directly, you are sane.

And so a culture which allows for this, which allows for this sort of goofing is a healthy culture.

This is not the culture that we live in because it is extremely anxious about play.

Everybody when they play, they have to find an excuse for it.

They say, “Well, this is culture.

You try and persuade the city of San Francisco to support its opera.

What sort of propaganda do you have to use?”

You can’t say, “We should have a good opera house here because we dislike going to the opera.”

This improves the city’s image.

After all, they have it in New York.

And that is because we do not allow ourselves the idea that life is not serious.

Because somehow you feel, if you aren’t engaged in something serious, you’re a loafer.

You’re not contributing to the social welfare.

And so in this way, the artist has a peculiar role in this society.

Very, very interesting.

Because the artist is a very deceptive fellow.

He appears to be the supreme luxury, the irrelevant fellow.

You can afford an artist.

You can afford to buy paintings if you have surplus money.

That’s a luxury.

So you can support an artist.

And we call it fine arts.

The completely useless person who makes paintings, which are sort of big labels or posters that you stick on your utilitarian walls to decorate them.

But on the other hand, the artist is the man who shows you the future long before everybody else sees it.

The artist is the eye-opener.

Just because the artist is distinct in role from the preacher and the philosopher, the artist can get away with all sorts of things.

For example, in our culture, if you’re a university professor, a doctor, or a minister, take these three professions, teacher, doctor, minister, you have to be very careful about your private life.

Because the moment you have any alliances that are not quite regular, people’s tongues begin to wag.

And why do they wag?

Because they say the way you behave is inconsistent with your profession, with what you profess.

You are teaching people the good life, the healthy life, and you live in this disreputable way.

You have a mistress, you have something or other going on.

But the moment an artist should take a mistress, this is what is expected of him.

Everybody says, “Oh, he’s an artist.”

In other words, he doesn’t matter.

He’s irrelevant.

He’s an entertainer, some sort of clown.

But on the other hand, if you belong to high culture, you patronize artists.

See?

So the role of the artist is very fascinating.

Because he appears to be the clown, the jester, the absolutely unimportant and irrelevant person.

And yet it’s actually through the artist that we learn how to live.

Not through the preacher.

Not through the philosopher.

Not through the professor.

It is the artist teaches us, whether he does it visually, with painting or sculpture, tactually, or with above all in music.

So a man like Mozart, who could well claim to be the greatest man in European history, was a kind of a gay, happy-go-lucky fellow.

With problems.

Money.

Illness.

Et cetera.

But what a songbird.

What a nightingale.

And so then to this day, listening to Mozart is a, in England, the Glyndebourne Opera, this is about the farthest out, fashionable, aristocratic thing you can do.

To go to this lovely country house in Sussex and hear the Mozart operas.

It’s as much a matter of status as going to church.

Almost more so.

You should read, if you can get hold of it, an interview with George Harrison, one of the Beatles, in a recent issue of the East Village Other, where he explains the deep philosophy of music that they understand and follow.

How the very nature of sound reveals the meaning of the world.

And why because of this, he regards himself as a Hindu.

In Hinduism, the fundamental source of life is called “Vaak.”

Vaak in Sanskrit means the word, to speak.

But not so much the word that communicates as the sound, the utterance, the flow of tone.

So you have in India, the use of mantra, the use of chanted words as one of the very basic forms of yoga, understanding the mystery of the world.

The Hindus use the word “Aum,” which would be spelled out A-U-M, because the letter A, “A,” is in the back of the throat.

You push it through the vowel to “Aum,” and “M” is at the lips.

So the word “Aum” comprehends the whole range of sound.

It’s called the pranava.

And “Aum” simply means, well it is the sound.

All sounds are basically the sound “Aum,” but varied.

The word that not only signifies, but also is what there is.

Everything is “Aum.”

Aum, sweet Aum.

The whole universe is Aum.

The whole universe is Aum.

And so this is a very good word, because you can use it instead of God.

God has all sorts of nasty associations attached to it.

The political boss of the world, the preacher, the prig, the nosy parker in charge of everything, the rotten grandfather and all that, the sentimental mother of the world or whatever it is.

And the word God, therefore, is a distasteful word now to most Westerners.

But Aum has no associations with it.

You might have encountered it in a Vedanta society and associated with Swamis in yellow robes or something.

But on the whole, Aum has no association with it.

So it is a clean word, and it has no meaning, except it is the very pulse of life.

So I’m spreading a rumor.

In Buddhism, you know, there is a mantra, Aum, Mani, Padme, Aum.

And Aum means nothing, except everything.

Mani means a jewel.

Padme is a lotus.

Aum is hurray.

So the jewel in the lotus, in other words, imagine a mandala, you see, which is a lotus flower with all those petals spreading out from it.

And right bang in the middle of that, there is a little crystal ball or a diamond.

And you look into that and it contains the reflection of everything.

You go way, way, way into that thing, down, down, down, down, you know.

And that’s the ultimate turn on.

So Aum, and at the end, Hum, or H-U-M, you can say Hum in English, Hum, Hum, you Hum.

Now there’s a new religion existing called Hum.

And this religion has no hierarchy, no organization, no doctrines whatsoever.

No words, only music and ritual.

And we will find in a little while that Hum is really what most people belong to.

And, but you can’t pin it down.

There is no address to write to.

There’s nothing to join.

It’s just something that people do, like they shave and brush their teeth and eat breakfast.

So they Hum.

Well now, it’s very, very fascinating for purposes of understanding music as communication to look for a moment at fundamental differences between Western and Oriental music.

I know a very, very great musicologist who thoroughly understands the world of Bach and Beethoven and is one of the greatest scholars in music I’ve ever run into.

But when to his ear Hindu music is childish and he sees no subtlety in it, he’s quite deaf.

But when it comes to Chinese and Japanese music, most Westerners are flabbergasted.

They can’t make any sense of it at all because it sounds as if somebody were making the most ridiculous noises.

So when it was a Japanese, no drama singer comes on. [singing] We think he’s sounding as if he’s being strangled.

But he’s giving sounds of passionate love.

But then we say, “Ah, yes, that’s deplorable.”

You know, but we want to give examples of love. [singing] Et cetera, you know.

We really have said we’re in love. [laughs] Well, now, here is the thing.

In Western music, when we study music, the first thing we learn is notation.

We have, most people begin with the piano or at any rate, some instrument where the important thing is to be able to read the music and then do the stuff from the written paper.

Now, this limits you in a curious way because our notation, first of all, is based on the chromatic scale.

And secondly, it has fixed rhythmic intervals.

You have, you see, your whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note.

And you can change the value by dotting them to give them half their value.

And you tend to write in bars four four, time, three, eight, or whatever it may be.

And when an oriental listens to our music, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a love song or a grandiose peon of praise or whatever.

All of it sounds like a military march, because it’s that one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, or one two three four five six, one two three four five six, one two three four five six.

He hears it all the time.

And he hears a mechanism in it.

You see, he hears this absolute regularity.

Now in Indian music, you’ll have bars.

Very long measure, you can count 20 to the bar times more.

And when you learn music from a Hindu teacher, you don’t learn notation.

You learn directly from the teacher.

In other words, he takes the instrument and plays it, and you copy him with the same instrument sitting in front of him.

And they think, you see, that notation could never record music.

They do use a notation.

They use a notation to remember simply themes.

There is a certain raag, a certain theme, and they can write that down.

But they don’t play from it.

What they do is they, according to certain traditional procedures, they improvise on the basic forms.

And you therefore play the instrument.

And what you’re trying to do is to make it as completely as possible responsive to the subtle motions of which a human organism is capable.

In other words, just as in moving your hand, there’s an infinity of waves you can put it through.

So likewise, in using your voice, there is an infinity of sound that you can produce.

Because the same you can with a stringed instrument in moving your finger, where there are no rigid stops as there would be on a piano.

So on the continuum of a violin, you can move your finger and produce an infinity of subtle sound.

And what they do is they delight in the infinite possibility of making sound with the human organism.

And they like instruments which are very easily and directly related to the organism.

So the flute, the vena, the drums.

See, these are direct human contact with an instrument.

With a piano you’ve got something interspersed.

You’ve got a hammer mechanism, and a rigidly tuned string with a harpsichord the same way.

The pluck.

And when Wanda Landowska, marvelous as she is, plays the harpsichord, you get a hurdy-gurdy effect.

Clickity clickity click!

Klop-klop-klop-klop, clickity-click, klop-klop, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click.

You hear this going on all the time.

With a clavichord there is a difference because the clavichord doesn’t have a mechanical relationship between the finger and the string, so that by every variation of touch you make on a clavichord is represented in the sound.

In other words, the piano and the harpsichord are like electric typewriters, which have a uniform touch, whereas the clavichord is more like an old-fashioned typewriter, where however hard you hit has some effect on the print.

So, in Oriental music, while there is an incredibly subtle discipline and a certain degree of precision, a Hindu drummer can do the most astounding things.

And you can count it out.

He counts it out in these very, very elaborate patterns.

But at the same time, there is an attitude about it that’s just fascinating.

We attended a concert at the De Young Museum a few weeks ago, where there was Ali Akbar Khan’s orchestra.

And there was a drummer in this who was just out of this world.

And the wonderful thing about it was that as he was playing with the rest of the orchestra, they were all talking to each other with their instruments.

And they made eye contact while they were playing.

And this guy was just in sheer delight.

He was laughing as he was playing.

And all the other musicians were just loving it.

So that he wasn’t this dead earnest person looking at his music, you know, and reading that and doing it.

He was joining in with everybody, dancing with them.

His fingers were like butterflies, hummingbirds, better to say, just vibrating in the most extraordinary way.

Because it takes years and years and years to learn this.

But he was really enjoying it.

But what was he saying?

They have a language for the drums, and they can speak a drum rhythm by using syllables like dit-di-dit-da, dit-di-dit-da.

Or din, meaning one kind of a hit.

Din and tin.

Din-tin, din-tin, din-tin, din-tin, dit-di-dit-da, dit-di-dit-da, dit-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, you know.

And they explain a rhythm like this sometimes first.

They say it, and then they play it.

But it’s all, what’s all about?

It’s all about dit-da.

Dit-da.

I suppose some of you have read a book of mine called The Joyous Cosmology, in which I referred to once a very curious experience I had with Hindu music.

I happened to have acquired from Timothy Leary some of this extraordinary Mexican mushroom.

And I was feeling awful.

I’d come back from a trip to the East and was tired, and I had a sore throat, and was just lousy.

So I took this thing.

And at the first, it just felt just terrible.

Everything turned into mud.

And you know what you expect of mushrooms, of fungus, everything fungoid and kind of clammy and dark.

Well, after a while it all changed.

And I found myself listening to this Hindu music.

I didn’t know what it was, because the, my host, whose house I was at, didn’t explain anything.

And I thought when I listened to this, what kind of idiocy is going on?

I thought, you see, my friend with whom I was spending the day is a pretty wild kind of fellow.

And I thought he’d put on a tape recording of his and his friend’s antics, because they weren’t doing anything that anybody’s supposed to do.

It was like children making faces.

You know how they do this, the children love to do something, these awful faces, and make weird noises.

I thought this is just something absolutely absurd going on.

And then came this ditt-da business in the middle of it.

So I said, Raja, hey, let me see the album.

And I got the case.

And here it says, Classical Music of India, edited by Anand Danialu, who is the most scholarly, respectable pundit on the subject of Hindu music.

I said, somebody’s pulling my leg.

No, not at all.

Here was this just babbling sound.

Not only do the ditt-da business, but they also could use their voices like oboes.

You know how the [demonstrates] you could put a clothespin on your nose and do an oboe stunt.

And it sounded like this.

And it was just this whole kind of business of children just going out of their heads.

Well, I listened to this and I suddenly realized that that’s what life’s all about.

And it was the most fantastic, sudden recognition that everything in this world is gloriously meaningless.

And there’s curlicues like on phones.

We get mixed up about it because sometimes we think that a play that is going on– when you see a fern, it has, first of all, the main branch.

Then it has sub-branches.

And out of these sub-branches come sub-sub-branches.

And out of the sub-sub-branches come sub-sub-sub-branches.

And so you get a fern.

So now you could number each of these levels on which things are happening.

And you say, well, this is a number one level.

This is a number 42 level.

This is a number 65 level.

And you judge events and say, it’s good, it’s bad, it’s proper, it’s improper.

But what you don’t recognize is that you say something is improper because you thought it was a 63 level, whereas really it was 112.

And you didn’t know.

You didn’t realize the level the thing was on.

So actually, the whole play of human life, with all its joys and sorrows, its tragedies, its evils, its good, is just something like a fern.

It has tumors on it.

That means just simply another clan is making its life there.

See, a clan of bugs of some kind are living there, too.

And they’re doing their stuff.

They’re living off the fern.

The fern’s living off something else.

We’re all leaning on each other in one way or another.

And I saw this whole thing, this fantastic play.

So in order to get into– can you get into that state, you see?

You get into it by listening to sound.

That’s one way in.

There are lots of ways in.

But one of the easiest ways in is through concentration on a tone.

Because, you see, this is the easiest way to stop thinking for most people.

If you just concentrate on a single sound, it’s very easy to do it.

And this stops your thoughts.

In other words, it stops you talking to yourself inside your head, verbalizing.

And the important thing is, if you want the vision of the world as it really is, you have to stop talking, at least temporarily.

It doesn’t mean that talking is a bad thing.

It means it’s too much of a good thing.

So that if you silence talking and you experience yourself just in the same way as you experience– That’s what’s going on.

And it may be going on, you know, kind of a way that you call nice, which is– No, it may be going on that way.

But so what?

Finally, it is that.

That’s what’s happening.

And you– we’re all taught by our mothers and fathers to put a value on it.

See, when it goes a certain way, the rhythm of life goes in a certain way when we say, “Oh, watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out,” because that may be the end.

What will the end be?

Clunk.

What’s wrong with that?

Things that stop have to stop.

Things that go on have to go off, and things that go off have to go on.

But you see, we get involved by putting a value on it all.

All right, now I could say that’s bad, you shouldn’t do it, but at the same time, getting involved and putting values on it’s all part of the game too.

Getting hung up, getting hooked.

So you don’t get unhooked by saying to yourself, “I shouldn’t be attached.

I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t do that.”

All you do is you see that getting hooked on it is simply another form of it.

More nonsense, more jazz, but deeper jazz.

So like you feel you have an ego, that’s an illusion.

But it’s a very weird illusion, see?

It’s a very far out scene.

A person who you might call a square, who’s thoroughly committed to the illusions of standard life is a very far out person because he doesn’t know where he started.

He’s completely lost.

But you could say it’s a great show to get that far out, to get that involved in seriousness.

So when you look at a square who has this determined, set, inflexible attitude, you have to say secretly, you laugh and say, “My, you’re doing a wonderful job.

How far out would you go?”

So you can learn in this way to love squares.

And this is the only way that will ever change anything.

You must never condemn the squares with harsh language because they are very far out people.

They don’t know.

Involved, in other words, in the ultimate curlicues.

It’s like a labyrinth, you see?

All life is a labyrinth.

It’s a system of tubes.

And there are tubes within tubes within tubes.

And upon the very, very great fringes of this labyrinth, you get all kinds of hothouse growths.

Very complicated games.

So complicated that the people involved in them are lost.

But that’s simply a function of being a long way from the center.

When a fern or any form of plant expands from its center, what is happening is this.

Inside the stems and the stalks and the tubes which constitute this organism, they’re all in little creatures.

And they’re going traveling along.

And they’re getting out there.

They want to go out.

Of course, there’s always somebody along with them who says, “Now, be careful that you get too far out because if you get too far out, you’ll spoil the form.”

Instead of keeping inside the bounds of the fern, you’ll just go off into gas.

And that would be awful.

See?

Because you’re a fern, you’re not gas.

But those little creatures out in the end say, “Man, we’d like a gas.”

So they want to get way off.

But it is a result of the tension between those little fellows that want to go way out, see?

And the people who want to stay in.

That you get the outline.

The clear form of the leaf.

They’re working against each other.

But they are working, even though the one thinks it’s right and the other thinks it’s right.

They’re both right and they’re both wrong.

They’re both right and wrong.

But they do, by being both in a counter position like this, they create what we call existence.

What we call the shape of the leaf.

The form of the fern.

So you will find, of course, that some of them are in fact escaping.

And some of them are going off into gas.

And some of them are not.

Some of them are staying put.

And if there weren’t some of them going off into gas, there would be no energy in the thing.

You see, all energy is a quality of follow-through.

When you hit a golf ball, you mustn’t stop the hit at the ball.

You have to go, “Zzz,” like that.

See?

Right through.

So all energies of life are, have in them a possibility of an excess of going too far.

When you bring up your children and you tell your children of your various far-out ideas and the children suddenly believe in them.

I’m horrified.

You know, all kinds of philosophy I’ve talked about is being believed by children.

And they’re taking it literally.

I think, “Oh my God, what will they do next?”

But everybody feels that way in regard to the strength of a younger generation that is coming on.

Because this younger generation has energy.

See, we think about young people.

We have terrible ideas.

We think that we know what life is and that they have to be told and that they will learn it from us and be like us.

We don’t take that attitude when we see the new vegetables come up in the spring.

We don’t say the vegetables have to be educated to be vegetables.

We say, “Hooray!

At last, young vegetables with all the life and energy in them.

New meals for everything.”

So when we see young people come up, say, “Good gracious, isn’t this great to see the human race is still doing its stuff.

I wonder what they’ll have to teach us.”

Because wisdom doesn’t come from above down.

It comes from below up.

It’s where the wisdom is.

Surging into us.

The old people, they have a function.

But they have it in order to fulfill that function they have to understand first that they can learn from the young sources.

If they understand that, then they can be wise and be teachers.

If they don’t understand that, they never can.

To be wise, you have to…

That’s the meaning of saying to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to become again as a child.

And finally, to get back to my point, to become as a child means that you do things which adults consider unimportant.

There is a wonderful Buddhist character.

His name is Hotei in Japanese, Putai in Chinese.

And he carries around a bag, enormous bag, in which he collects rubbish, every kind of inconsequential rubbish, and gives it away to children.

Because children understand the meaning and significance of rubbish.

Something which my father, when I was a small boy, once said, “You’re a picker up of unconsidered trifles.”

Because the rubbish is the most wonderful thing in the world, from the point of view of a child.

So, once a Zen master was asked, “What is the most valuable thing in the world?”

And he answered, “The head of a dead cat.”

Why?

Because no one can put a price on it.

So in this man, you see, who is wandering around picking up rubbish, all the trivialities of life, who sees leaves floating down in the wind and laughs at them, this is becoming again as the child.

In other words, from the child’s point of view, the things which the adult considers irrelevant to survival are perfectly important.

And so children collect pebbles and coloured glass and all sorts of trivia which they consider as precious as diamonds.

The adults say, “Oh, pfft, frippery.”

But they really have the secret, you see.

Now, the child, as child, doesn’t know how to play the adult’s game, which is a power game.

And so has to be educated to learn the values of the power game, to learn what’s what and what is important.

But when he has mastered that game, he realises it has no rewards.

That all the things that the adults thought they were gaining by their power game are, after all, not worth having.

That’s why you couldn’t be rich and miserable.

So that having learned and having seen through the adult power game, you come back to the point of the child.

And so, you say, “Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb.”

Well, let’s have a brief intermission.

We’ll serve refreshments after the seminar.

Just a stretch.

And you say, “Who’s in charge around here?”

Well, nobody’s in charge.

There never was anybody in charge.

END