I've been making some investigations recently to try and find out what is the most taboo thing in our society. It certainly isn't sex anymore. All the story about that is way out in public. But I think I've come across something that is really a very serious taboo indeed. And something to which society objects, is very much afraid of, because it might give the whole show away. And I want to talk to you about this because it is a very often a clinical situation and I think that various experiences and ideas that have grown up in Asian cultures are perhaps helpful in understanding this particular situation. And I'm referring to the conviction that blossoms in some individuals that in some way or other

[01:07]

they are God. Now that, as you realize, simply won't do. We have all sorts of bad diagnostic terms for this state of mind, which may be called, if it's only a rather mild experience of being God, such as the so-called oceanic feeling, then we call it a regret. Which really isn't quite a nice word. Therefore, however, the individual goes so far as to claim identity with the sort of God that flourishes in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, that is to say the all-knowing and omnipotent controller of the universe, then we call it megalomania and very bad things indeed. And we humor such people and we think that they must be either extremely blasphemous as the Jews thought that Jesus Christ was, or else quite insane.

[02:09]

In our contemporary culture, we give them the benefit of the doubt and put them quietly away. But I don't think we've done enough to investigate the physical, neurological, and other types of basis for this kind of experience. And a great deal more thought has been given to this subject in the Asian cultures than hitherto in the Western, although we are beginning to think about it very seriously for several reasons. What kind of inner transformation goes on in a person who has, or if you want to say is afflicted with this sort of, will you say, delusional state? First of all, it means very different things to say, I am God, in the culture of the West than, for example, the culture of India, because the word God has different meanings in the

[03:12]

two cultures. In the Western culture, the popular image of God, which is of course the vivid one and the one that really counts, is of an encyclopedic technologist who personally and consciously controls everything that happens in the entire cosmos. You should read, if you want to get the real inside dope about this, the Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas, where this is all made perfectly clear. It's a fantastic intellectual exercise and you'll come away staggering with the thought of what God must be. And so anybody who in our culture claims to be God is making a claim to technological omnicompetence and therefore we humor such people or challenge such people by asking

[04:13]

them technical questions. How did you make the world in six days? Could you transform this rabbit into a mountain? Could you make a stone so heavy that you couldn't lift it? And other interesting questions, and reminding me of a certain woman who was in an asylum because of this delusion and answered to the questions, I never talk shop. But on the other hand, if in India you were suddenly to announce that you were God, everybody would say, of course, it's wonderful you found out at last. You have seen through the Maya, the world delusion, which causes you in the ordinary way to feel that you're a separate person, all on your own, thrown into this rather hostile world. But now you found out that that was a trick that you played on yourself. Just like if you were free to dream any dream you wanted to dream, any night, just imagine

[05:17]

the kind of troubles you'd get into when you have exhausted all possibilities of ordinary wish fulfillment. You'd go adventuring. And so indeed you would find out, I think if you followed things very closely along what you would do if you were God, and all the adventures you could get into, you'd probably land up sitting here. But in any case, the Hindu and in general, the Asian non-Islamic idea of God is not this omnicompetent being, but something rather different as exemplified in Hindu images of the deity, which are very often shown to be many arms. Indeed there is a Buddhist image, which I've recently seen in Japan, of the so-called goddess of mercy, Kanon, with one thousand arms. And you might wonder how anybody could possibly manage one thousand arms, because it's hard enough to think about what to do with two, and it takes a great deal of training at playing the organ to use left hand and right hand, left foot and right foot in different rhythms.

[06:17]

What about a thousand? The answer is, of course, that Kanon and Shiva and all these people who have many arms, use them in the same way that the centipede uses its legs, and the same way that you operate your glands, your heartbeat, your respiration, and all sorts of other inner processes to which you give no thought whatsoever. The centipede's legs move by themselves and he doesn't have to think about them, and probably if he did he would get confused. And so in exactly the same way, the Hindus regard their deities as managing the universe with the tremendous competence of not having to think about it, so that they can enjoy themselves by not having to go into all the details because they take care of themselves by automatic omnipotence. And therefore if you ask a Hindu who has had the sense of being one with God all these technical questions, he says, I of course know how to do them, but I can't possibly explain it in your clumsy language, because you see, oh, ever so many things going on

[07:21]

at once. Simultaneous operation of a complex organism is a thing that in our scientific languages can be thought about only in a linear way, that is to say we have to express our scientific view of world processes in verbal or mathematical notations, which are strung out in a line and have to be scanned by us in linear bits. That takes much too long for running the universe. An entirely different kind of thinking would be necessary. So then you get in a way two broad types of this experience. There are many, many variations, but I'll just consider two broad types. That which is largely characteristic of the Eastern cultures brought up with an impersonal or suprapersonal cosmic centipede type of God, and those of people brought up in the

[08:27]

Jewish, Christian, or Islamic background, where God is personal, omniscient, and omnipotent, and they have an experience of being that. Now, of course, the first one is much more socially acceptable than the second, because the Hindu, when he feels that he's God, is not liable to claim that he alone is God. He's going to grant this privilege to everybody else as well. But Westerners who sometimes get into this, if they're not, say, within the restraining fold of the Catholic Church, or the Quakers, or some other organization which takes mystical experience rather seriously, if they're not in that restraining fold, they are a bit liable at times to feel that they, in particular, as a single individual, are in some way divine or have been made Jesus Christ. That is to say they have a unique divinity which does not exist among other people. Now, I think that, which you may call a delusional state, is very largely a result of background.

[09:33]

And I want to discuss what this experience would be from a completely non-religious point of view. And then we can see why in different cultures people would give it different interpretations. It is, is not, is it not, a physiological fact that the human being has no direct experience of anything except its own organism. That is to say, all perceptions whatsoever that come in through extra-receptive or proprioceptive channels are experienced in terms of states of the nervous system. Ordinarily, we don't feel this very strongly. It is a kind of, it is a fact that is repressed because when we look out at the field of vision in front of us, we assume that it's out there, everything that we see, beyond the skin covering the face. And so we are not aware of the fact that the field of vision is more directly a sensation

[10:43]

of the optical nervous system, and that it is inside our heads. We translate the quanta of light into states of neurons, and it is states of neurons that we know rather than quanta of light. But this fact, which is ordinarily set aside and put out of mind, could very well under certain conditions become obvious, and become a sensuous experience for the individual. And if that is so, he will feel what is in this neurological sense quite literally true, that the movements and states and appearance of other people and other things are forms of himself. And so he would have a basis for saying, all this world is also me. Now just as we differ between the internal and external world, physically speaking, we

[11:48]

also differ between experiences that are cued to us as voluntary, and experiences that are cued to us as involuntary. In the same way, we differentiate between the experience of present happenings on the one hand, and memories on the other. Sometimes I think our wires get crossed, and a present experience comes to us carrying a memory signal, and then we have what is called a déjà vu experience. But so in the same way, the wires might get crossed, which distinguish voluntary acts from involuntary, so that we would get voluntary cues attached to experiences which we normally class as involuntary. And then we would get the sensation that we ourselves were doing everything of which we were aware. And so you would feel not only that you were everything around you, but also that you were

[12:48]

in control of it. That even though in the ordinary sense something is happening against your will, you can get to the point where you can see that you will not to will it. Or you will something to happen which would ordinarily be opposed to your will. You somehow cooperate with what happens, whether it is likable or unlikable. Now let me add one other condition to this state of mind, which is that it is invariably characterized by what I would call correlative thinking. Correlative thinking is not very characteristic of Western culture, but it's very characteristic of Chinese culture. The very ancient Chinese philosophical work called the Tao Te Ching has in its second chapter these words. When all the world understands beauty to be beautiful, there is already ugliness.

[13:51]

When all the world understands goodness to be good, there is already evil. For to be and not to be arise mutually. Difficult and easy are mutually distinguished. Long and short are mutually contrasted. High and low are mutually positive, and so on. For the Chinese people, at any rate, in their ancient culture, do not think causally in quite the same way that we do. That is to say, we divide the continuum of our experience into units which we term separate things and events. Having done this, we forget that we've done it and think that life presents to us separate things and events as given. Then it puzzles us as to how they influence each other, and we've invented a ghost called the law of cause and effect, whereby past causes, past events in other words, have influences

[14:59]

of the mysterious nature on present events. One being called the cause, and the other being called the effect. But in Chinese ways of thinking, this is not done because they realize that the distinction or the cutting up of the world into separate things and separate events is an intellectual device very comparable to dividing the world's surface into squares or rectangles of latitude and longitude. The things and events all go together. They are inseparably interconnected, and therefore what we would call cause and effect, they look upon as two aspects of the same event, or as many aspects as you want to delineate. And so in the same way, they see very strongly that everything that we call opposites, such as light and darkness, pleasure and pain, high and low, back and front, are polar.

[16:03]

That is to say they go with each other. Cause goes with effect, up goes with down, inside goes with outside, subjective goes with objective. Because obviously you can't have an inside without an outside, except in some very strange forms of geometry. You can't have up without down, and you can't have light without darkness. Indeed, what we call a beam or impulse of light is a vibration, which is an incredibly fast alternation of light-darkness, just as all sound is an alternation of sound-silence. Now you see, ordinarily, especially in the West, we do not think correlatively. We are involved in a great struggle to make the good guys win against the bad guys, in every conceivable dimension. We want to make life overcome death, pleasure overcome pain, and in general, the positive side to conquer and indeed obliterate the negative side.

[17:07]

To a Chinese person that is ridiculous, because once you get rid of here, or let's say you get rid of elsewhere, then where is here? Get rid of up, then where is down? Get rid of bad, then what is good? Nobody knows. These things need each other. They come into being, life and death, existence and non-existence, come into being simultaneously in the same way as the back and front of a single coin. Now, if by any chance one's neurological functioning should in some way or other slip into that way of looking at things, it will be very clear to you that everything you define as yourself goes with, as do back and front, everything experienced as other. Unless you could experience otherness, you wouldn't experience yourself. And you realize, therefore, that there's a kind of mysterious conspiracy between these

[18:14]

two things. They are different, but they are always far together. There's a certain kind of Tweedledum and Tweedledee who couldn't have a battle without first agreeing to do so. And so, when you begin to be aware of that polarity, just as a magnet constitutes a single bar between opposite poles, when you become aware of the polarity of insides and outsides, it becomes perfectly obvious to you that your own organism is not something separate from the environment which encounters it, which faces it as if two tigers stood opposite each other growling, but that life, whatever that is, polarizes itself as organism and environment, as subject and object, as knower and known, and that it's really one thing playing at two. And this is further ground, you see, for the feeling of everything going together, of voluntary

[19:21]

involuntary being poles of one and the same situation. And so, if by any chance, through chemical changes in the brain, because we know that the certain chemicals induced will create this sort of feeling, if by any chance then this should arise in an individual without his intention, sometimes perhaps with his intention if he took certain chemicals or did certain psychophysical exercises to bring about this sort of feeling, but if it comes upon him out of the blue, the way in which he will interpret it will depend to a very large extent upon his cultural background. So, if this person is emotionally unstable to begin with, and is brought up, say, in the Bible Belt culture of the United States, and knows that as his only religious terminology, then he is liable to jump to very socially unacceptable conclusions, and say, I am God

[20:32]

or I have had a direct revelation from God, and to carry on in this way. Now, but on the other hand, if he is Oriental, where this view of the world is accepted, both in Hindu and Chinese culture, though in rather different types of nomenclature, then the person is considered quite normal, or rather supernormal. He does not run into the same kind of social conflicts as a person would do in this culture, and therefore you don't get him scared or put his dander up, or he doesn't get on the offensive, everything is quite natural, and his God doesn't make extravagant claims to omniscience and omnipotence. Well now, let us go into this a little more deeply, because we really do have to decide, don't we, especially in your profession, whether or not this is a delusional state, whether

[21:38]

this is something, when you get it in a patient, should be thoroughly discouraged and the subject of religion completely avoided, or whether there is some way of helping people in that state to clarify it. There is a tendency, which I have discovered in most psychiatric and psychological circles, to dismiss all these states as delusional, and this is due to the prevailing and largely unexamined metaphysics professed in this particular kind of profession. The unconscious metaphysical systems of most psychiatry is the philosophy of science prevalent late in the 19th century. That is to say, it is some kind of behavioristic materialism, which assumes a rather naive Darwinian point of view, that man is a fluky evolutionary product of the animal world,

[22:43]

which in turn goes back to the geological world, and so that the greater is always nothing more than a complicated form of the less, and so any idea of there being spiritual values and so on must in the end be reduced to rather crude biological processes. This is a way, this was a fashion in mythology. It was a way of saying at a certain time in history, in the history of our culture, look, I'm kind of a tough guy, I don't go in for the silly wishful thinking that all these old ladies who go to church have. I believe that life is brutal and that everything except man is stupid, man happens to be a rather special form of stupidity, but still, if you want human values to prevail, nature has nothing in common with them and you've got to fight nature to maintain them. So we are real tough fellows, you see, and we don't go in for any of these silly ideas. And so normally anybody who has any strong religious manifestations and gets mixed up

[23:44]

with a mental hospital is in trouble. So, but we should think about these things from another point of view, and that is, is it really true that a person who experiences this sort of switch in his feeling of personal identity, is it really true that he's entered a delusional state? Could it not equally be argued that our ordinary common or garden sense of personal identity is a delusional state? In other words, most people, as I think I've said to many of you before, seem to experience their own existence, and more particularly their ego, as a center of consciousness which is alone and all by itself and is confined in a bag of skin from which it looks out upon an alien world with which it must make friends or in some way come to terms with it.

[24:48]

I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made. That's the average feeling. Now this feeling of personal identity, as you know, has absolutely no relation to any scientific facts whatsoever. All biological, physiological, zoological studies of man show that like every other organism, he is not just an organism. He's an organism-environment field, because you can't describe the behavior of the organism without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment. And the more you do this, the more you realize that your entity of description has changed. Instead of it being the organism alone, it's something you have to hyphenate clumsily as an organism-environment, or a unified field of behavior. This is perfectly clear. It isn't that there is environmental determinism, that the environment kicks the organism around. It isn't that there's kind of a crude free will, that the organism often succeeds in kicking

[25:53]

the environment around. The real point is that both of them move together, just as when a snake moves along, the left side moves at the same time as the right. Now this is obvious, and this is perfectly clear from all descriptive sciences of human behavior, or any other type of living behavior. It's also true in quantum theory and electrical fields in an entirely different division of science. So perhaps a person who suddenly realizes that he is unified with his environment, that the two behaviors happen together, has a sounder view, a sounder, let me say, sensation of what's going on, than the person who insists that the environment, the rest of the physical universe, is something quite alien. Indeed I would go so far as to uphold the person who experiences the two as going together

[26:57]

as having a much higher degree of sanity than we do, because he is in a position to understand something very urgently indeed. The human race has to stop conquering nature. That is to say, taking a hostile attitude towards the physical environment. Because if we carry on with a technology based on hostility, we're going to wipe out the planet. We are, in other words, interfering with our environment in ways that do not recognize the total interconnectedness of the environment with every member of the environment and with our own physical bodies. The environment is your physical body extended. And naturally, if we don't recognize that, well, we get the situation where people put

[28:00]

all kinds of chemicals into things with a short-run view of how they will work, but they never think of the long-run situation. And it has unforeseeable, unpredictable effects in a vast number of ways because the universe is not made of a lot of separate things. You cannot influence one corner without influencing the rest. It all goes together and is of a piece. So then, it seems to be that this problem of identity is of great psychiatric concern from two points of view. One, in dealing with patients who, for one reason or another, have had this sort of experience and are confused by it, and who are behaving in a socially unacceptable way because of it. But secondly, there is great psychiatric importance, is it, in it, as a kind of, shall I say, social

[29:05]

therapy. When we merely work to build up the ego strength of a disturbed individual, we are being rather short-sighted. Ego strength will help him to a certain extent, but thereafter, it will make him as crazy as everybody else. One, it is vitally necessary to go beyond that point and to enable individuals to have a sensation of their own existence that is not alienated from the environment, but belongs in it, is at home in it. So that we can understand that the world grows people in the same way as an apple tree grows

[30:07]

apples. If apples are symptomatic of the apple tree, people are symptomatic of the nature of this physical universe. If the apple tree apples, the world peoples. It's a peopling world, as well as many other interesting things besides. But we have been brought up, you see, in this culture to feel it as a matter of basic common sense, that outside the human skin, the world is just downright stupid. It is an interplay of blind forces, which are characterized, look at these words, blind, blind, brute, people love to talk about brute facts, brute forces, and so on. This is the tough guy approach, you see, because what that person is really saying is not a philosophical statement, but kind of, I'm a sort of a tough guy. It's my role. So then if we could bring people to get beyond this insular sensation of their own existence,

[31:11]

and actually experience solidarity, belonging, participation in everything that goes on, then we have gone a long way towards creating the emotional motivation for the things that need urgently to be done on the advice of our ecologists and conservationists. And if we don't do them, well, the human race is in for a rather short ride. Philip Telemann, 1539.

[31:49]

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