Berkeley, and Hegel, and Bradley, which assert that the universe is a creation of mind. The difficulty of that is that we can't find very much meaning in the word mind, or really in the idea of differentiating two substances called mind and matter. Nobody has ever come up with any really illuminating ideas about this differentiation between the mental and the material, which has so haunted all philosophy for generations. In my own way of thinking, I don't use either concept, either mind or matter, but simply

[01:12]

keep a view of the world which is basically one of form or pattern. And I explain to you that the word Li in Chinese, which describes the order of the world, means literally the markings in jade, and therefore might best be translated, as Joseph Needham has suggested, by the term organic pattern. And I've shown you in what way that differs from mechanical pattern. Mechanical pattern is always describable. Its aesthetics are much clearer to us than those of rather more enjoyable organic patterns,

[02:16]

such as we find in clouds and waves, fire, contours of land, and the human body. So, we don't have to think of naming or thinking as the origin of things quite in the same way as an idealist would think of mind as the origin of things. The point is difficult sometimes to make clear because it's so simple. When I say there are no things in the real world, that doesn't mean that the real world, if correctly seen, would appear to be void, in the sense of something like infinitely

[03:20]

empty space. It means that there are no things in the world as we see it. What we call things, I prefer to call, using a pattern word, wiggles. In the wiggles of the world, wiggles in the world, the world wiggling, however you want to put it, because the world is the wiggles and therefore one doesn't really want to say the world wiggles, there is no difference between the world and wiggles. And the wiggles aren't part of the world because they're not mechanical in nature, that is to say, they're not screwed in and brought from somewhere else. So every wiggle is the whole world wiggling in the sense that it implies all other wiggles. This is the image that is called in Japanese, Jijimuke, which means literally, the Chinese

[04:29]

say shir shir wu lai, which means a shir, or a ji, means a wiggle, or a thing-event. And it literally means, between thing-event and thing-event there is no obstacle. Which is the negative way of saying, this world is the mutual interpenetration of all things and events. So that, if a scientist from another universe altogether were to be given a fingernail pairing, with sufficient insight he would be able to reconstruct not only the kind of being from which this fingernail pairing was taken, but the kind of environment in which that being

[05:31]

lived, going out to the outermost galaxies, because every part implies the whole. That's why it's not a part in the ordinary mechanical sense. Indeed, playing with words, we would say, it's not a part from the whole. It cannot exist without it. We can see this in holographic photography. The crystalline structure of a photographic negative is such, that if we study a small area of it, we can use lasers to reproduce the whole photograph from which this area was taken. In other words, snip a small square out of a negative, and laser projection can give you the whole negative from which it was taken. It will be a picture in which the images near the piece you snipped out will be relatively

[06:34]

clear, and the images relatively fuzzy as you go away from it. That is, following the rule, that some sort of proximity, that the thing-events in some sort of proximity to the thing-event we're talking about will tend to have more relevance to it than those further away. But that's only a vague rule, because very often what is most relevant to any given thing-event may be something that at first sight would appear to be completely trivial. That is to say, you married somebody you met entirely by chance. This chance meeting had momentous consequences, and we would never have thought of it in making plans. We would have thought more rationally, that is to say, in accordance with a more obvious method of measuring relevance of one thing-event to another. But we don't know how to set up the rules of relevance.

[07:38]

And so all our laws of logical connections between thing-events, laws of causality, laws of statistical prediction, and so on and so forth, are really very unreliable. So the point here, then, is this. A thing or an event of which the naive person who lives under the influence of Western rational scientific mythology, he thinks that the world is an assemblage of things and events, not realizing that a thing is a unit of thought in the same way that, for example, an inch is a unit of measurement, or a bit of information is a unit of information theory.

[08:47]

You can see at once that a thing is arbitrarily designated because everything you can think of can be subdivided into smaller things, or made a subdivision of a larger thing. So what we find is this. A thing is any area of the world which can conveniently be represented by a concept. And so when we ask, what is a wiggle, you can imagine a picture of a coastline, and it suddenly projects as what we call a cape. Now, we see clearly that the cape isn't really separable from the coastline, or from the land. One could say the land capes at this point. That's a caper. But there isn't a thing called a cape which you could say begins exactly there and there

[09:57]

and comes to a climax out there. Just in the same way, there is no actual rigid line which divides your head from your neck, and your neck from your shoulders. Nor is there a place where the shoulders end and the trunk begins. Or does the trunk include the shoulders? I showed in the same way that if we want to define the sun, we do so rather arbitrarily. The naive view being that the sun is where the visible flames terminate. Some people might get persnickety about that and say that's too much, because the flames come out from the liquid body of the sun, or whatever it is, and that's where the sun ends. The flames are merely expressences. Well, it's just a matter of opinion. Let's define it as where its heat reaches to. Let's define it as where its light reaches to.

[10:57]

It's a matter of opinion. And we talk with each other and understand each other because we decide arbitrarily that we will agree about certain opinions. Or maybe it's not so arbitrary. Maybe somebody forces it upon us, because a government dictates what shall be the language spoken, what shall be the conventions of communication, as when the British government recently decided to alter the way of counting money, with disastrous inflation as a result. Or when it's going to be decided by the United States government that we will drop inches and feet and all that kind of thing and go on to a metric system, meters and so on. So somebody sets up the standards. But it's originally really very arbitrary as to how much of a much is an inch

[12:02]

and how much of a much is a meter. A meter is a certain fraction of the Earth's circumference. So what? That's a way of starting out a reckoning. And one starts out with something which everybody will somehow give a cent to. But the point is that the division of the world into meters is as arbitrary as its division into things. Only, since there are features, that is to say celestial bodies, which are generally speaking globular, floating in space, we are inclined to regard them as separate units, because they are separated by space.

[13:05]

But I pointed out to you yesterday that space joins the world together as much as it separates it. That it's a kind of a two-way phenomenon. That in other words, I am I and you are you, by virtue and by virtue only of a space between us. And in that sense, space differentiates us. But by differentiating us, it joins us together. It makes, as it were, a unity of differences. We see this when we get far enough away from it. Then these vastly distant stars are seen as a galaxy. We say a galaxy.

[14:06]

And if we got far enough away from all the now known galaxies, we would see a universe and call it a thing. It all depends where you look from, what language you talk, and how your group has decided and agreed among itself to figure it. So therefore a thing is really a thing. And it's in that sense that I mean there are no things of the world without implying at the same time that the world, the real world is featureless. This is a mistake commonly made by students of Indian philosophy, whether they be Westerners or Indians. When they hear about the highest state of consciousness, in which there are no things,

[15:10]

they imagine that the highest form of consciousness should be a Samadhi, which is so abstracted from what we would call normal perception that one is, as it were, floating in a void, which may be luminous or mauve, as in spiritual drawings. But I don't think that's what it is at all. Of course you can get into a state like that, yes. You can by auto-hypnosis get yourself into almost any state of consciousness you can imagine. But if you think that the highest form of consciousness is to be like that, well that's a matter of taste. It's a free country. You can be in that state of consciousness if you want to. And there are gimmicks whereby, if you can manipulate yourself by auto-hypnosis,

[16:12]

and things deeper than auto-hypnosis, into these various states, you can start reading other people's minds and doing some very startling things that will be called miracles. But as I explained, my comment to that is, so what? We manipulate enough already, with not always beneficent results. And I hate to think what would happen if we were all manipulating each other's minds. Miracles aren't really a very profitable line of investigation. It so soon exhausts itself. I'm much more interested, for me, and I'm telling you, I'm talking to you quite personally, and I'm not laying down the law as to how you should behave, or think, or what state of consciousness you should be in. There's no should in this.

[17:15]

But I would rather remain in the human state. I don't want to be an angel. And I found that human beings who have ambitions to be angels usually become devils. The human state is really, you could say, the Taoist ideal. It's an extraordinarily humane philosophy. And in certain ways later on, I can't show why, but for the moment, it is very important to get the point, to understand the full meaning of this expression. Naming is the mother of ten thousand things. Because here, naming simply means representing.

[18:18]

Working out correspondences. Between thoughts and the world. This things the world. And thinking is a divisive process. One sees how disastrous thinking can sometimes become when we get over specialization in medicine. And somebody specializes in hearts, and somebody in ears, and somebody in eyes. As if those organs could be separated from the others. And so they will perform surgery at one point of the body, which may heal that part of the body, but have disastrous consequences somewhere else, so the operation was successful and the patient died. And that piecemeal way of looking at the human organism is a result of excessive thinking.

[19:27]

In Whitehead's language, we call it reification. From the Latin, raise a thing. No, the parallel, raise thing, and reor, I think. And also he called a certain kind of thinking the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The ego, for example, being a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Or the equator, if we talked about it, as a thing, would be the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. So, therefore, the real world is the not-named. The world as not-named. And that, as I said, is the world of the baby. Before the baby has been taught

[20:32]

the table of distinctions, which the culture into which the baby is born observes, before the baby has been taught the social conventions, the baby sees the unthought, unnamed world. Unfortunately, it cannot tell us anything about it, because we have brainwashed ourselves to the point where we can't understand anything we haven't been told. We will put the baby through this brainwashing, as a result of which it will no longer be in the state of consciousness that it could tell us about. Although, it has been suggested with some degree, I think, of wisdom, that if you would treat a baby like a person, and instead of treating it in a baby way, treat it as a small adult,

[21:34]

and talk to the baby in natural language, as you would address another adult, that by the time the baby is three years old, it will have an astonishing mastery of the language, and will be able to tell you lots of things you don't know, because it will be still close enough to its oceanic consciousness, as Freud's word, to still be in touch with the undivided view of the world. For the baby seeds, no difference between the voluntary and the involuntary, the doing and the happening, the subjective and the objective, that's all learned. Now, we are of the opinion that it's a very hard matter to get back to that state, and we're scared of it, because the psychoanalysts will call it regression. And will say, oh, you are not facing up to the reality principle.

[22:37]

You are not facing the real world. You are wanting to withdraw into the amniotic fluid of the womb. Now, this is bullshit. It isn't necessarily that way at all. Eric Erickson has seen the point. So, he now talks about regression in the service of maturity. Because, it isn't a question of going back to what you were like when you were a baby. You can't do that. You can't degrow. What you're doing is you're rather like this. You were given a sheet of paper to make a drawing on. As you made the drawing, the piece of paper disappeared. And you have the drawing without any basis,

[23:40]

which gives you a lot of separate things. What you've got to do, by regaining the oceanic consciousness, you're going to regain the paper. Now you can see the drawing properly. It was like that. I mean, it was not the best metaphor. But, if we could have a baby's oceanic consciousness, plus a knowledge of all the tricks and games that adults play, we would have a most amusing combination. And that would be what we're talking about. As people in Taoism or in Zen see the world, or any good mystic will see the world that way. Now, having set aside the people who say that's regression

[24:42]

and terrible, let's look at the people who say it's impossibly difficult. The problem of stopping thinking, and therefore getting back to the world as it is before it's been thinged, thinked, is to realize it is not a matter of getting rid of thoughts. Because there's nothing wrong with thoughts. Thoughts grow in the mind as naturally as grass grows in the field. Or if you don't like the word mind, I'll say they grow in the nervous system. Terminology doesn't matter, it's all pattern. What we do is, we assume all too readily that the thoughts in the mind reflect the state

[25:47]

of the world. But they don't, any more than the leaves on the trees reflect the grass in the field. But we could work out an arrangement whereby we set up a code so that the leaves on the tree would represent the grass on the field. Or the cows in the field, or whatever you want. Why, we could number the leaves, and number the cows, and say, you know, here's a representation. So there are wiggles in our minds, fluctuations, vibrations, and we arrange for these to represent the world. And so we've got thinking. I mean, it was rather smart of us to see that, that that could be done. But you can be too clever sometimes,

[26:51]

and get yourself into a mess because you were too smart. That's a very familiar phenomenon. So, don't get involved in a... you don't need to get involved, as I say again, you can if you'd like to. But from my point of view, you don't need to get involved in any attempt to suppress your thoughts. All you have to do is to understand their nature. To understand that they are a babbling stream going on in the skull. And you need not take them any more seriously than that. That is why, for example, Sufi dervishes will repeat the name of God,

[27:53]

Allah, or repeat their own names, until they become meaningless. And by this process, they've seen a critical thought, the thought of God or the thought of oneself, put itself back in its place as noise. And so, this puts all thought back in its place as babble. And then there is no longer any split between the natural world and the mind world. The world that can be touched and the world that is conceived. Because they belong to the same,

[28:56]

the same order of vibrations. And it's in this way, you see, that really without doing anything, it's possible to switch from one level of consciousness to the other. And that, you see, that move over without doing anything is the trick. It's... You... It's what's reflected in the poem which says, Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass. Entering the water, he doesn't make a rumble. It's also what is meant by

[29:58]

the Taoist Zen image of the moon in the water. Here are thousands of puddles and ponds and lakes and rivers. When the one moon rises, instantly, there are thousands of reflections. The water does not wait or intend to receive the image of the moon. The moon has no mind to cast the reflection. And, as it were, where there is water and where there is moon, there is instantly moon in water. So... No interval. No hesitation. No block. That is why Satori is called sudden.

[31:00]

It doesn't mean quick. It doesn't mean something that happens in a hurry. It means the instantaneous. Instantaneous. The hands are struck and the clap is instantaneous. Because, really, the sound and the coming of the hands together are the same event. And it's awkward to say that the sound is the result of the clapping. It is the clapping. So... The Taoist, just as he uses minimal effort, not in order to be efficient, but just... he does it without

[32:02]

fuss. This expression without fuss translates to Chinese wu shi And it's interesting because the character shi is the same ji which also means the event. But it means two, business, fuss and affair. So, we get the expression wu shi ren which means a man of no business. In a way, a dropout. So, a man of no business is a man who has switched from being an ordinary man to a sage without announcing the change. Without anyone knowing about it.

[33:06]

Without having gone through some kind of a shamazal to turn out the other way. So fast, it couldn't be noticed. And so, I'm trying to point out the level at which this flip can so easily happen. Let me illustrate what I'm pointing out by going at it from another direction. We'll say that pain is a problem and we wish to overcome the problem with pain. Now, two obvious methods suggest themselves. One is to take dope and stop the pain that way. Another is to muster up courage

[34:10]

to lay will against the pain to become very tense and grim and stern and fight one's reactions to pain. Of those two ways, there really isn't much to choose between them. Probably the dope is better. But the Daoist approach to pain would be this. The problem of pain is that you don't like it. The problem of society is it says to all us children of course you don't like pain but you must pretend that it doesn't bother you. And here's where the trouble starts.

[35:14]

Because it isn't so much that pain will make me scream but it's the screaming that I'm not supposed to do that really bugs me. If I felt that I could scream when I hurt the whole problem wouldn't be so difficult because I would know that nature provides a responsiveness to pain that somehow allows it to blow itself off to clean itself up. But if I'm forbidden this response then I don't know where to go when I hurt. And so often people who are in pain have this sensation of having nowhere to go. You can't get away from the migraine headache.

[36:19]

So they take you to hospital. And there are lots of other people in pain in the hospital. And if they were all screaming they would madden each other and even more madden the nursing staff. And hospitals, you must remember, are run for the convenience of the staff. So that wouldn't do at all. So everybody has to be joked up. Now, I used to hate going to the dentist. And the only reason I hate going now is that it's such a... I'm so busy with other things. But I overcame the fear of going to the dentist by overcoming the fear of reacting to pain.

[37:27]

You cannot stop pain happening. Or you could perhaps by auto-hypnosis. But that's supposing we're not using any tricks. But pain is a stage in a chain of reactions so you have a reaction to it that is thus and so a certain kind of vibration set up in you. You allow that to happen, allow the next thing to happen allow the chain of events to follow. Well then you see your pain is cushioned by a lot of subsidiary bounces which you've allowed. Society doesn't want you to cushion it. It wants you to hold it in. So you see in this way the problem with pain is addressed without some colossal, bombastic and pompous program of self-change.

[38:34]

And that is of the essence of Taoism. When I hear people are in for a program of self-change and that they're going to this esoteric school they're going to want to go a terrifically complex manipulation I often think wowee, how much faster you have to make in order to postpone this thing. You know it's like those sort of games people play in love. That I'm going to make myself as difficult to get as possible so that anybody who wants my love will really have to make a fuss

[39:45]

on the thought that they will appreciate it all the more when they get it. Which may or may not be true. You may find that you put a tremendous investment in something that wasn't worth it. So I think then, well when somebody tells me that the path of spiritual development is very, very, very difficult and that it requires a person of unusual guts and terrific indomitable will I think, what a crap for egotist this thing is. I mean, it's just beautifully painted. The challenge, wowee. And so when you approach it in that way, why, you have to show results.

[40:50]

When you come out of that school, if you're still human, you'll be suspect. And this appeals very much in the United States because we have by no means shaken off our puritan ways of thought. We believe fanatically that your mind should rule your matter. And we're hypocritical about it because we're the biggest pill takers on earth. But the general thing is you ought to be able to command the physical with the mental. If you count your weak and this makes us very cruel.

[41:52]

That's why we make taking heroin a crime. Why we don't really seriously treat alcoholics as sick. See, you ought not to be sick, you see. You ought to be able to resist that bad habit. Okay, so it's immense profit to our racketeers. We forbid human nature. And we ask our policemen to act as armed clergymen. To enforce sanctuary laws of a purely religious nature. To enforce laws against crimes without victims. Whereas it's axiomatic that in a free country you must be able to go to hell in your own way. Otherwise there's no risk. Otherwise it isn't free.

[42:55]

It's a lottery. So I must say I'm very, very suspicious of all these puritans. But that's the nice thing about the Taoist philosophy. That it does not impose on you the requirement to be a puritan. Only that you be a human being. And so for this reason you will find that many of the so-called mystical ways certain forms of yoga of Buddhist meditation, of Christian practice, Hindu practice will say that a spiritual person doesn't have sexual relations. Well, when the yoga and Buddhism came to China

[43:57]

and they told the Chinese that to practice you have to be celibate the Chinese were absolutely horrified. Because the whole of the Chinese social order so far as it's Confucian is based on the family. I mean, not to have children seems absolutely ridiculous. Then they found out, you see, that the Hindus were uptight about sex. Because they equated loss of semen with loss of blood. Now, from a biological point of view there is no analogy between the two situations. And they couldn't make a clear distinction between feeling rested and at ease after sexual intercourse

[45:01]

and feeling exhausted after loss of blood. And so they felt that the sexual energy must be conserved and diverted so that the kundalini or the serpent power which resides at the base of the spine instead of sending all its energy out in sex would withdraw that energy send it up the sushumna into the thousand-petal lotus in the brain where the sexual would be spiritualized. Now, the Chinese had some similar ideas that they took over from the Hindus the Daoists meditators

[46:02]

and then they found a way of cheating. This is of interest to men. They took over from the Hindus and they found that instead of suppressing the sexual orgasm there was a way of putting pressure on the tubes between the scrotum and the penis so that the semen would go into the bladder instead of being ejected. It was kind of a groovy method of birth control. So they discovered this and although they made a lot of hoo-ha about this was the way of causing the semen to ascend back into the brain

[47:02]

of course it didn't do that. But this is such an amusing side-light on the Chinese way of handling Hindus. Be sure to specify that you want part four from the seminar on Daoism. And that address again, MEA Box 303 Sausalito 94966 www.mooji.org

[48:23]

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