Reflecting the Mirror

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merrily being or whether god is primarily will
and the thomas argued that god is primarily being and the scotus that god is primarily will
because the scotus argued that god exists because he wills to exists but the thomas argued that god wills because he is
and this was the kind of marvelous hairsplitting with words that went on in the heads of these medieval philosophers
because they suffered from the great disease which has afflicted civilized man and in a very peculiar way as afflicted western man
which is what i would call hypnotize ation with words
we have to realize that the world we live in is not words it is a non-verbal world or a scholarships can call it an unspeakable world which is a phrase our is like
you know there's something slightly naughty about it
and
when philosophers try to understand the world purely by manipulating words they don't get very far
and that is why philosophy in the western world in the universities has become an extraordinarily unproductive discipline
it is so dreary and so dull today to study philosophy and the university that philosophy departments have degenerated into tiny little buildings and minute little sections ah in non central areas of the campus
and indeed are in danger of breaking up altogether
and being divided between the mathematical department because mathematical logic goes into mathematics all the department of linguistics because since philosophers are dealing almost entirely with words they are really being absorbed by grab grandma
and the reason is that philosophy became arid by being completely verbal
originally philosophy it meant natural philosophy
and there are still shops in london old shops which have over the window a sign
such and such a company philosophical instruments
and you look in the window of intense interest as to what philosophical instruments might be and there are chronometers and slide rules and telescopes and for tractors and all kinds of essentially a scientific instruments because science was originally natural philosophy it was an inquiry into nature reserve
salting from man's curiosity
and the moment philosophy as a discipline becomes entirely separate from the discipline of science
as well as from the discipline of psychology
it's a flop it's merely manipulating words
so
any inquiry into what consciousness is or what the universe is must not only be a discussion but also a practical investigation through which ones five senses at the very least must experience
what's going on because what's going on if we asked the question what is all this
supposing you ask the question what is being there's no answer to that in words
because
in order
to answer something in words you have to be able to classified
words are nothing but labels which we put on intellectual boxes
into which we sought various kinds of experience
and
it is no consolation to have an empty wine bottle with a fine label on it and no wine and
so in exactly the same way
it tells you nothing to talk about being existence as such
and to have no real experience of that
but there is a difficulty of course and having an experience of existence
because everything you experience is existence
therefore what is the common element to everything you experience you cannot experience that as a pot because a what is it expecting an answer in words
can't be done
but if you ask what is it and then somebody shows you
then you can experience it
but the difficulty here is that
all experience of anything at all
is on you
and when i say it's on you it's in the same sensors all reflections on a mirror
our on the mirror
now the mirror has no color
we say it's silver
but an ideal mirror isn't even silver it has no color at all
and therefore can purely reflect all other colors
but we know by reason of the frame on the edge of the mirror that the mirror is something very definitely there
but we don't have those that sense of boundary with respect to our own personal mirror
and that is because in one way the boundary is vague
if you will study or field of vision
you will find that if you raise your hands
look straight in front of you and wait till your fingers go out of sight just out of sight see
then you trace
how much you can see you will find you got an oval
only are not aware of it as over in the ordinary way because the edges a vague
and there's no clearly marked frame it's not like looking like this is the where you can see a clearly marked frame but as soon as you do this you put your hands into the field of your central vision
but you also have peripheral vision and so it's it's vaguer off their
so you're not aware of the oval in the ordinary way
so in the same way when you come to other senses how can you it it's rather easy with the i sense seeing but with the auditory sense it's very difficult to find out what are the limits of your hearing
very easy to see with the eyes
what are the limits of smell
what are the limits of touch
see all these things are very vague
but everything that we experience is on you
in the same sensors reflections around on the mirror
it is in other words
all that you're aware of
is a condition of your nervous system
now
what does that tell us
it leaves it always leave something out
something about which we are infinitely curious especially if you are really alive
because i rarely a live person
is a personal has a sense
of the mysterious this of existence
now people tend to divide themselves into various categories personality types and there are some people who don't want to admit that they have any curiosity at all about the mysterious this of existence
because they liked to maintain that they are practical people
that they deal with strictly down to earth affairs and that all inquiries say into the nature of existence ah highfalutin abstractions which may be of concern that some very esoteric people but if i want to declare to you that i'm an ordinary
it was like everybody else and that you didn't expect any shocks out of me then i won't go into questions of what is the nature of existence
but on the other hand if you have any slight grain of poetry in you
any slight
sense of
in any capacity in you have that peculiar energy which turns ordinary people into geniuses
our artists
our great scientists
you have this itchy fundamental i'm get rid of a bull get rid of olav
curiosity as to what is this all about
and you asked this question and you don't know whether you've asked the right question and you don't know how it could possibly be answered
but you know that is it that it is very queer indeed
that this world is going on
because there are certain that the world is rather menacing
it isn't just a succession of rather nice comfortable experiences mean it doesn't like just sitting down to a beautiful television show and then the end of the show you press the button and the light goes right back to a point and vanishes now that was all it was to life
it'd be very simple
will say well now it sits entertaining it goes on for a while and then it just ceases
whether it happens again on odd is no concern of ours because if it just ceases we're not going to have any troubles
this television show
will come on with the not just nice little pictures on a screen but the the the the box will suddenly shoot flames out at us
all sorts of spikes or it will scream into our ears it will accuse us of immorality of callousness of lack of responsibility and will nor down into our very got some tangle us all up in knots and all these things are very vivid sensuous experiences
so that's why we ask questions about it why does such a thing like that go on
how is it that that's what there is as distinct from some other kind of arrangement altogether
and we discover the tab
there's not much we can do about it
we can sweat and work and talk endlessly to get say political reforms economic reforms medical reforms
cookery reforms all kinds of things that would make our lives more comfortable
but we find that that's only a drop in the bucket
that we conquer one problem and by conquering that problem we get seven new ones
because everybody is in the situation of the sorcerer's apprentice
that he learned the magic of how to make the broom fetch water
he doesn't know how to stop it
and we have interfered as human beings in the course of nature
and once you've done it you suddenly find yourself involved in a situation where you can't stop
you're sucked in
and then the trouble is you're in charge now what do you
see that's that's really the whole story that lies behind the the story of the fall of man in genesis
what happened was this
that damn
that this story about the tree of knowledge isn't usually understood very well the knowledge of good and evil
in the hebrew the words which we translate good and evil i don't have a moral connotation they have a technical commendation
they have to do with skill as of us a making bronze axe heads or flint arrowheads
what is a good arrowhead or a bad arrowhead or what is technically advantages or disadvantages
so the the eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge meant
acquiring technical skill
and therefore being able to control the course of nature
so in other words instead of saying
ah well i'll just do what i feel like
i'll run along on my instincts
like an animal does like cats do without cats don't use any tools
lets you regard their claws as tools that's sort of built in
but they don't use tools as we do
they don't use measuring instruments
they have a cat requires nothing except food outside its own physical organism
but we require everything in the world outside our physical organisms in fact our whole culture is devoted to the acquisition of objects outside our physical organisms
so you could say there is a state in which organic life flourishes without using instruments
this is pre-fall
and in that state there are no laws
not any formulated laws at least
and everybody does what he feels like doing
as we used to say they just follow their instincts
and that leads to the kind of life that bees live at aunts live that my slive that rats live that cats live that dogs live the butterflies live the birds live and that's been going on for millions of years
and human beings introduce a new wrinkle into the thing
which is that we reflect on what we're doing
it's as if the development of the human cortex
have provided us with a mirror
and in a mirror you see yourself and know yourself
when the cat looks into the mirror the cat is puzzled because it's another cat
i was like to tell a story about the hebrides islands on the far far west of scotland were very primitive life goes on
and that there was an old couple living on one of those islands and the officials came and said sorry but you're gonna have to move to the mainland because the island has been washed away and your house won't stand up much longer
so they shifted them to a new house on the mainland
well when they got in there the husband went upstairs to the bedroom and for the first time in his life he saw mirror he'd never seen one before they looked at it he said ah tis favor
and he thought that was a very supernatural and weird thing
and so he took the mirror so as why shouldn't see this magical thing and he put it under the mattress of the bit
so i went downstairs and
but every so often he would creep up into the bedroom pull the mirror out from the mattress and look at it lock his favor
about and is why i've started to get worried about this why was the always going upstairs and coming back looking kind of living swallowed a canary is something you know that strange so one day when he was out having whiskey at the local bar she went upstairs she started digging around
and at last looking out of the mattress she discovered the mirror
and she said i knew it i knew it locked is another woman at hay hey shirley
huh
so
where do you know when you finally find out you see that the reflection in the mirror is you
and you know yourself that act of self consciousness
being aware of you as you is the beginning of all technology
because it's reflect
all consciousness in the sense of human consciousness as we now know it begins with reflection thinking about
so you can use ah
the the mirror to reflect all you can use words to reflect
to represent
life what goes on
it's all a matter of representation or re presentation
feedback
feedback is a cybernetics that's the basis of technical accomplishment
so the moment you start doing that
you start living in a new way
instead simply are being the spontaneous production of biological process
you start putting your fingers into it
and figuring out the way you think it should go
but here's the problem
the process which you are trying to regulate
is extremely complicated
and you don't understand it fully you understand a little bit about it
and therefore you make changes in it and they have entirely unexpected results because i'm changing the process at one point that point shall we say that ganglion of biological behavior was connected with all kinds of other things and you didn't realize these connections existed because you hadn't exploded that far
and therefore every time you make a change would you think is in a beneficial direction
it has completely unpredictable consequences all over
all over the place all over the planet
and the more you understand and try to figure out these things you get an increasingly complex body of knowledge
and that brings you to the realization that beyond this complex body of knowledge is the possibility that there is knowledge still more complex so that you'll begin to be engaged in an infinitely insoluble problem
which goes on on on on
and the difficult you have is this but as this problem becomes more and more complex it's again this the story of the sorcerer's apprentice because you know he chopped up the broom which wouldn't stop bringing in water and it developed into two rooms which brought water
and he chopped those up and then became fall and so on so in the same way exactly as you become more and more aware that controlling the universe
involves an increasing degree of complexity
you then feel well now in order to keep up with this i've got to delegate this problem
for the simple reason that i can't think about it fast enough
because he thought
using the symbols of numbers or of words is very slow in comparison with the speeds of nature
so you invent computers
to think with extreme rapidity to keep pace now when you delegate to other scientists all sorts of special fields of study
and they all go off and do that then they bring their results back and you try to coordinate the results then you find you have to have a coordinating committee because one person's head guns a take the whole thing
and then finally is this thing goes on everybody that's starting to learn more and more about less and less
and you have this overwhelming
sort of bottleneck
this
jam this information explosion which we are facing in our culture today
and many of us are beginning to realize that enormous num number of our social
institutions
i mean things like the telephone company the post office corporations freeways and all that sort of thing are breaking down
because
everything's overloaded it's become a too complicated for anyone to handle
and you can you know you can blame the president of the united states as a personal scapegoat for all sorts of things that are going on but the president of united states as one of the most helpless individuals on earth
i just think if you were president
you would never have a moment's peace
you would be on the telephone constantly constantly constantly you will have to sit as the president does it with stacks of reports going through going through even though they've already been summarized by also sorts secretaries so that he reads just what they want to read
he has to go through all this hour after hour constantly listening to this listening to that he can never let go
see but no individual can take that kind of strain or responsibility so he has necessarily to go completely insane
that's the nature of the structure about of that office
because if the the more a human being approximates to the conventional conception of god
the more he is completely mad
because his conscious scanning process cannot deal with that much information he is simply suffering from excessive input but this happens increasingly to every individual because of the communication system which is feeding into your conscious scanning process
more and more and more information
so everybody is therefore because of the company the nature of communication that it's cereal as mcluhan points out communication comes in terms of the gutenberg galaxy which is that the serial lines of print
all the serial line of talk and da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da and you all done
and the trouble is
you can take in a vase of flowers at one glance
but a book you must go some people can take a page in at a glance but anyway even if they do they have to take the next page and the next page and the next page and the next page and the next page and
then they'll say
well that's a reasonable account of things but they leave something out i need more information on this that in the other see you can go on that were definitely
so as linear information is increasingly poured into us
we're all increasingly crazy
you just can't handle it
and we've all been absolutely drummed into our heads that that's the most important thing in the world to be informed how can you act them you're informed
well when do we have enough information to know how to act wisely
when indeed
so some people say wow to hell with it i'm not going to study all these things i'm just going to take an ancient chinese book called the aging
and here i can toss a coin just happens to be a sixty four sided coin and just plain heads and tails it's more interesting than that and i'll decide what i'm going to do on the basis of that
now you see we are facing that as a social revolution that sort of thing is in his is coming
because solving the problem in traditional rational scientific terms is becoming too complicated
and therefore we face the prospects of a colossal outburst of irrationality
not necessarily based on the same sort of gumption that for some reason or other are actual brains seem to be endowed with
and we don't know why because we didn't consciously construct our brains
they still baffle our neurologists completely and trying to figure them out
so we get back to it you see that we don't
have enough knowledge
not to trust our instincts
and i know was instinct isn't any longer respectable word in a psychology and so on
it's called that called drives instead today that's very significant because or contemporary man feels driven
he feels in other words the sense that i am driven is the sense that i am a puppet
a poor little thing that is banged around by enormous billiard cues
and i'm a sort of elliptical billiard ball is risk hunting to being banged around by these cues
and they're called motivations drives
prussians
and i imagine than that there that i myself am not these drives these motivations say i have to be motivated is if somebody had to put dynamite stick underneath me to do do anything simply because without motivation i'm just nina
a cloud
but you see what an unsatisfactory and the deprive definition of one's self this is
because what has happened is that we have
got a sense of self which goes hand in hand with a rather obsolete scientific notion of the independent observer
there is a that is the idea that can be an observer who can stand aside from everything and look at it objectively and know what the truth is
unfortunately there isn't any such thing as the truth
this is not a world in which the concept of the truth operates
i won't say that it did that the idea of the truth is entirely lacking in merit let's not be that extreme
there is a truth for
a number of people who can somehow agree as as to a state of affairs
and that for them as the truth simply because they're all looking at whatever they're talking about from more or less the same point of view
if we huddled together along the window here we will all agree as the approximately where a given rainbow is situated but somebody over there on the next boat will have a very different view of where the rainbow is
so what you see is always relative to where you stand
and furthermore
when we observe the world
something as it were different from us or outside us
we thought we were
we thought you could look at something out there and by looking at it that you would have no effect on it
but as things stand you cannot observe anything without affecting the situation
this doesn't become apparent at the ordinary level it seems perfectly clear that i can walk around this table seeing it from various points of view and not change the table or what's on it in any way
but if i start investigating the inner constitution of the table i must start taking little chips off it
and i put those little chips out of the microscope
and shine lights on it i changed the temperature of those little chips and they behave slightly differently when i get way way down to the nuclear level or whatever it was there the various experiments i have to make in order to understand how that level of being is composed have very des
infinite effects on how it behaves so i alter it by looking at it so how was it before i started looking at it that's what i want to know
but there's no way of finding out
so you see that that that what that's telling us and this has gotta be a a crucial point of the whole nature of the seminar what is that telling you
that you by looking at things alter them
that you can never stand outside the world and make it an object you can never get outside yourself and make yourself an object which you know all about
was that telling him
very simple message your it
you are inseparable
from much you know there is no such thing as an external world that's not you yeah it may be in some sense outside your skin
but that doesn't make it outside you because you don't end with your skin if i say well my border is my skin that is quite arbitrary
where does the sun end
what is the outline of the sun
will it depends what kind of instruments you using to look at it if you use the naked eye you will see yes up there in the sky a relatively are clearly outlined blaze of fire
right that's the definition of the sun according to the the interchange it makes with the optical nerves
but oh we know that if we photograph the sun so as to show
forces proceeding from it which don't impinge on the optical nerves we'd get a different picture
so we could define the sun as that globe
which is the extent of the radiation of its heat
that would be pretty big it would certainly include the whole solar system
we could define the sun as that globe reached by the extent of its light that would be colossal
from that point of view where all inside the sun
so where in other words the boundary of anything is is simply a matter of 'em
where we're gonna draw the line

where does its gravitational field and that's another way we could think of its boundary
and you know you have to draw the line somewhere
i suppose
ha ha
but
just as the sun
has know what we would call true limit
so we don't
so what did this of this summer
we we have a sort of our sticky feeling about the world
in other words that dumb
when you try to change it and alter it you get all gummed up
in complications

the meaning of that is that you were all gummed up anyhow
only you didn't notice it
because you didn't try to change anything
you didn't try to interfere as if you could
when you didn't start to interfere
ah you say it's like this
if i put my hands forward like that
i think i'm pushing my hands forward
what i don't notice
is that my hands are being pulled forward
as well as i pushed me that they are being pulled forward is the same force as my pushing them and vice versa
now you would say how could it possibly be that at this moment my hands are being pulled forward at very simple
why are you here
this is a social
constellation
and although if we want to figure out all the details it's very complicated but because you are here you are drawing out of me is that and explanations
and this involves the illustration of moving my hands and you have pulled my hands out when i do that using
cause you wanted an explanation and i feel that really i should accommodate you and if i we don't have those sort of feelings we can have a society
so in that sense it's as that's only one sense in which the hands are pulled out
as well as pushed
are you will find you see that everything you do
is in that sort of our relationship to the world around you
it's not saying in the old fashioned way that you are nearly
moved by your environment going back to the idea of the billiard ball being hit other que
this is not that simple
it isn't that you just respond as if you were nothing
you are simply you in relation to your environment
are not in a passive role nor an active role
you simply one process with it
only we ignore that
because we can't talk about you want to talk about it you must draw the line somewhere
you must make a boundary in order to have a word because every word describes a class and every class is a bounded area
so if i want to talk about you or you are you are you i've got to define you i'm gonna say this is your area of responsibility this is where you are defined to be acting well and good if we're just playing games
but if we're talking about the physical world
there are no such boundaries
in this actual nature the nearest thing you'll get to it as the buddhist description of the mutual interpenetration of all things and events which is to say that any so-called thing and it's so called event in the universe
implies all others
and all others imply it
it goes with let's say in other words that a a baby burping in mill valley
goes with the existence of the constellation m eighty one i mean that the nebula m eighty one
if the the eighty one doesn't exist a baby doesn't exist if the baby doesn't burp there's no m eighty one
will you can overlook that you sell well
the baby didn't burp today so does the i'm eighty one go out of existence know because the baby not burping as just as important to the existence of them eighty one hundred the bakery burping is this whatever happens whether the baby bumps or doesn't the whole thing's interconnected
and when you ignore that you see
you
suddenly find when you try to interfere and change things everything sticky
you find your all interconnected all the unexpected things happened but you didn't foresee as very scary and when schizophrenia x find this out
they will have to become catatonic
because they don't do anything
for fear of what it might do it is said mcconnell wait
so you might say well if everything's interconnected in that way i bet it just wait
do nothing
but that's equally absurd
has to the idea of interfering
because you can't do nothing
why for the very simple reason is that what you are is nothing but action
you are doing
you're nothing else than doing being is doing being is a vibration is it is it is energy he energy equals mc squared i'm doing is picking
so
the question is then
if we can do
in such a way as but we have we do we act in full awareness
our this inextricable
unity of ourselves and all that there is
but if you understand that you see if you want to get the hang of that
makes a great deal of difference to what you do
you don't get the hang of that you don't understand that you always act as an enemy of the world or as if you could be an enemy of the world
you're always making trouble
so in in this way civilization as we know it so far is progressive troublemaking
and it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse
now if we could understand say that added that's
that's not to
not necessary

then
then then then we can get a new sense of action
now
when you drive a car you feel in control of the car
but you realize you are controlling and energy which your organism alone doesn't possess the when zooming along with his huge power and yet you're using it you can analyze that power
now let me suppose that you became aware that in everything you're doing you're using the entire energy of the universe
that's what you're using
and that
you're acting with it
put it in this way
let's suppose that am
you'll learn just to let things happen
you entirely
the sort of let go and let everything happens just as it's gonna happen that your thoughts go the way they want to go at your ears hear what they want to hear the gy see what they want to see a child body do anything it feels like doing see
a new suddenly get the feeling of them
because of your conditioning individuation you get the feeling that you are nothing that your does being led around
but that's simply because you have been accustomed to think of yourself as the objective observer the interfere the controller
but you see once you you let yourself
do that it's as if you
blue all the flogged and the congealed cholesterol and
old soap and grease out of your piping say
it goes like the has and let's all the blocks out of you because in the ordinary way people go around thinking they're controlling themselves and so they strain and squeeze the club are on their emotions and they were all tied up in knots
so you know you need a pipe job you need plumbing and so when you let go like this it it may be temporarily rather upsetting people but
if your bush know all this stuff is let out of the pipes
then you realize you've got a new thing
and do you can discover in other words and new way of acting it's perfectly socially acceptable perfectly disciplined or whatever you want
but you are using freedom
you're using a freely functioning organism psyche instead of one that's all jammed up with all sorts of controls
all of which are fundamentally useless
because they are all various ways of people straining to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps
and however hard you pull you won't get any further off the ground
except you just waste a lot of effort straining by people who feel guilty
the guilt does absolutely nothing for them
it doesn't really change their conduct in any significant way on are people who feel worried it doesn't make any difference doesn't make them any more sensible in their behavior it is simply a exhaust their psychic images for perfectly useless purposes and they wonder why that time
reflecting the mirror part one this morning's lecture by billy alan watts we have continue with this seminar was part to of reflecting the mirror next sunday morning