00:00

I’m going to start by talking to you about the foundation idea underlying the whole of this seminar, which is the Hindu Buddhist—that is to say, Indian—idea of the world as illusion, which they call māyā. This is one of the most rich ideas that has ever been thought by the mind of man, because it has such a great multiplicity of meanings. When Hinduism is reported in little textbooks on comparative religion and encyclopedia articles, this is one point on which almost all the scholars are either completely misleading or very incomplete. Because a general impression has circulated in the West that the Hindus live in a very, very hot country, have very little to eat, and live an absolutely miserable life, and therefore this affects the brain in a certain way. The heat makes the world seem like a mirage, makes it seem rather unreal. And the extremely low standard of living makes life intolerable, and so they would just as soon believe that it isn’t real, that it all has a dreamlike quality, and that the highest ideal to which man can aspire is to escape altogether from this sort of physical existence (which they call saṃsāra: the round of birth and death), and to disappear into a state of rather diffuse consciousness wherein the individuality vanishes and one is simply suspended forever, or in a kind of timeless time, in an infinite ocean of faintly luminous, mauve jello. Now, this is all terribly misleading. This isn’t the point at all. And so I want to start, then, by telling you the many, many things that the word māyā actually means.

02:14

First of all, the foundation of the word is the Sanskrit root mātṛ, and that has as its original meaning (so far as we can trace it back) the idea of measuring or laying out the foundations for a building. And you can see how, from that root mātṛ, we derive many, many words through Greek and Latin in the English language connected with measurement: “metric,” “meter,” “matrix,” “matter”—as in the saying: “does it matter?” Does it measure up to anything? And so, fundamental to the concept of the world illusion is, then, the idea of measurement, of equating the realities of the physical world with certain systems of numbering—whether it be so many spans of the hand, so many feet, so many paces, so many bongs on a drum, or whatever you got to be your regular model, your regular system. For the whole idea of measurement is to find an equation between the physical world and something regular, that is to say, with a ruler.

03:53

Because, you see, the physical world is fundamentally wiggly. We don’t notice this very much if we live in towns and if we live in ordinary houses, because we build our streets and our homes so as to seem to be non-wiggly. And so we’re confronted with tables and chairs and walls and window frames, and we get a sense of non-wiggly reality. And so then we are also always in conflict with wiggliness. We try, for example, not to let the stars seem to be disordered, but to organize them into constellations. The constellations, of course, aren’t there; there are no strings joining those stars which constitute the Big Dipper. Seen from another point of view in space they wouldn’t look like a dipper at all. Actually, those stars happen to be fairly close to each other in space. But sometimes a member of a constellation could very well be in an entirely different galaxy millions of light years away. But we like to do this, and even I once read something that I never believed any human being had ever thought, but during the eighteenth century, when Western man had a peculiar passion for symmetrical order, somebody wrote an essay saying that the stars had been very poorly disposed, and that if they had been arranged in geometrical patterns it would have been far more consistent with the divine reason than this haphazardly scattered affair.

05:27

So our world is wiggly. All of us are wiggly objects. Trees are, rocks are, clouds are, waters are, the outlines of islands and so on—it’s all wiggly. And so, in that sense, the universe is rather like an enormous Rorschach blot. Now, a foundation of artistic creation is to see things in blots. For example, if you examine the animal paintings in the caves of Lascaux, which are probably the earliest artforms in existence, it is apparent that the painters of those images first looked at the rock, at its contours and at the smudges and various changes of color in it, and saw the animals and creatures that they painted just as you might see something in a Rorschach blot. And then they brought it out. Leonardo da Vinci spoke of using his imagination on a dirty old wall in which he could see landscapes and battles and all kinds of things. And there was a very great Zen painter in China in the Sung dynasty who used to paint as follows: he’d get very drunk and then—he had long hair—and he’d dip his hair in ink, and then he’d wave his head over a piece of paper. Then, when he’d sobered up a little, he’d look at this and do a Rorschach blot on it, and he would see a landscape which could be brought out for all to see by just a few extra touches of the brush. And, you see, by that method you create a gorgeous landscape.

07:14

So this curious ability of the mind of man to pick out significant things in any kind of a wadge is what we call consciousness. Con-scio. The basic root in Latin means, con: “together with,” scio: “to know.” “To know together.” And so from the root—scio, you see, is connected with “cutting.” “Science” is the same root. And “schizm,” see? It’s the same word: to cut. To cut things up into bits, to recognize, to pick out what is significant from what is not. Because conscious attention as it exists in man is a kind of radar, or a kind of spotlight, whose function is to warn the whole organism of significant changes in the environment. If things don’t change, consciousness goes to sleep; it gets bored. But the moment anything changes, consciousness notes it at once. That is why our attention is won or captured by a moving object rather than still backgrounds, by easily enclosed and recognizable figures as distinct from vague and diffuse spaces. Although, as a matter of fact, our organism responds to everything that is happening in the environment, but consciousness only notices those things that are thought to be significant.

08:56

So then, consciousness is constantly active in trying to make sense and pick out the significant separate bits of a wiggly and fundamentally bitless and thingless universe. And that is one of the meanings of māyā. So, for example, if we have some wiggles like that, that immediately creates something problematic for us to describe. How can we say anything exactly about that shape? How can we deal with it? Well, the answer is: to deal with that shape—which is essentially wiggly—we’ve got to measure it in some way. There are various ways of doing that. For example, we might refer to certain significant elements in the shape. This can be interpreted either as a promontory or an inlet, whichever one you want. But it seems to be a thing. We can catch hold of that. It’s something that sticks out like a nose. Or here’s another one, you see? We can mention that. Or we can liken this to certain other things we’ve seen and say, “Well, at the point where there’s a pear-shaped inlet, there’s something significant.” That’s one way of doing it. The other way of doing it—which is more exact and more scientific, and which we use for purposes of navigation and also for plotting the stars—is to superimpose over the wiggly shape a uniform pattern, and the fundamental one that we use is, of course, the grid. You see? Now, superimpose that over the wiggliness on cellophane, and then we can number the spaces down and the spaces along. And we can say: this point is number one down and two across, and so give every point a number on our grid, see? And that begins to give us an accurately describable but nonetheless somewhat caricatureish version of the wiggle.

11:09

Imagine for a moment—you see, if you examine a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass you will find that it is an amalgamation of dots, some light and some dark. In other words, the whole thing has been reduced to a sort of pointillist amalgamation of bits. And under the magnifying glass this doesn’t look at all like the thing—like the human face, for example—that is supposed to be represented. But put away the magnifying glass, look at it from a distance, and it approximates to the human face that you recognize.

11:44

Now, in a way, all conscious knowledge does that to the world. It reproduces it in terms of some kinds of bits. Words are bits. We arrange words in lines so as to describe events, but we’ve got a limited number of words that we use: the words in the dictionary. And they are the bits. And words, in turn, are composed of letters. And these are, again, the bits. Or much more so when, for example, we transmit television: what is actually coming into our set is a series of impulses, of bits, in certain rhythms. And these, when they affect the television tube, do more of this kind of newspaper jazz on the screen. And so, in that way, a picture is arranged—but again, in terms of little bits. So, also, you see, this was all related to the fundamental way in which, from the earliest times, the study of physics approached nature. From Democritus on, the physicists wanted to know: what are the fundamental bits out of which everything is made? And so they thought at first there were atoms. The square ones were for the element of earth because cubes would all hang together, whereas water would be made up of balls, because it flows, you see, and doesn’t stay put. And so on. Fire was made of pyramids and so on. I forget what air was made of. But they wanted to analyze it. And that is because consciousness itself is an analytical faculty. Consciousness is a bright light which illuminates the world one bit at a time; in series.

13:57

So that is one fundamental meaning of māyā: the illusion that the world consists of separate things which can be isolated from each other and regarded as being independent. Now that is a colossal illusion. It’s a very useful illusion, but it simply isn’t so. But it looks as if it were so because we are so accustomed to looking at it that way. You see, as a matter of fact, we’ve all been kind of hoaxed by our culture, by the way we’ve been brought up, into looking at the world in this way, and to picking out those things which the culture has told us are important and ignoring the things which it doesn’t think are important. Now, for example, most people are completely unaware of space. Space means where there isn’t anything at all. There may be air, but you can’t see air, and you can only feel it if you move very quickly. So space is nothing. It’s not important. And so we tend, you see, to be unconscious of the field, the area, the setting, the background, the space, in which so-called things and events happen, and so to pretend that things and events are not influenced by their space. But every architect knows that space is immensely important; that the kind of room you live in, the kind of house you move around in influences your behavior enormously, just as the frame makes all the difference to the picture. I’m thinking, for example, of photography. Where does the photographer frame the subject? How does he shoot it, how does he sight it? And then, when he’s developed the print, where does he cut the edges? Upon how he does that depends the whole significance of his picture.

16:20

So we could say, then, it is a māyā, an illusion, that we all imagine ourselves to be living inside our skins separated from the rest of the cosmos. We’ve been taught to ignore this enormously significant relationship. Because if we ignore it, we can play the game “who started it?” That is: who is responsible? Who shall we praise and who shall we blame for things being thus and so? I was given a riddle the other day—I’m not going to go through the whole riddle, it’s a complicated story of a woman who got murdered, and because she had an assignation with a lover and so on and so on, and there’s a whole lot of people, and her husband, a lover, the friend, the woman. And they asked me: who is responsible? And I thought and I said, “Well, this isn’t the question. The whole situation is responsible because the parts that everybody play in the thing are defined by the other people. You can’t have them playing these parts unless they’re all in relation in a common group.” So it’s the group, you might say, as a whole, that is responsible. And to play that the individual members of it are responsible is a game, an illusion. And note, please, that the word “illusion” is related to the Latin ludere, of which one part is lucus, the perfect. Ludere: “to play.”

17:52

So playing that we don’t go with our environments, our surroundings—that is to say, the whole cosmos in which we are discovered—is a big game. You can do lots of things with it. But we’re all going around unconscious of this marvelous interdependence between what we call “ourselves” on the one hand and what we call “the universe” on the other, and therefore don’t notice that, as a matter of fact, our real self is the whole cosmos. We’ve forgotten that. That was rapidly expunged from our minds in very early infancy. And we’re all something the cosmos is doing, just like the water is waving and the wind is blowing. The whole wind is blowing, but it blows through this window and that window and the other window. It isn’t a separate wind that blows through each window. So, in the same way, we’re all something, we’re all wavings of the universe—only, we’ve forgotten it. That knowledge was never verbalized. We had it in a nonverbal form in infancy. But as soon as we were taught words, the words hypnotized us—one always hypnotizes with words—they hypnotized us out of that realization.

19:12

Now, that doesn’t mean to say that individuals just aren’t there; that if you were awakened and free from illusion this room would suddenly turn into a formless void. The void doesn’t mean that in Buddhist philosophy. What it does mean is something like this: we are individual in the sense that you can see separate and clearly formed waves or whirlpools in water. Now, here is a whirlpool swinging around. The actual water is constantly flowing through the whirlpool and there is no stuff permanently in the whirlpool. All that the whirlpool is is a pattern: it’s something the water is doing. And so, in exactly the same way, we are a constant current of electronical phenomena. At a more obvious level we are a current of beefsteak and potatoes and eggs and milk and water all flowing through us. And we know that the cells in the human body are completely changed within at least seven-year periods. So who are you? In the same way as a university may change not only its student body every four years, but its faculty every ten years and its buildings every hundred years, and is still known by the same name: the university. Well, what is the university? The university is a particular kind of behavior, you see? It’s a particular kind of doings. And there we are. But, you see, when you don’t notice that and the behavior changes slowly enough—like the behavior of this building—so one thinks of it as a thing rather than a process, then we get into our heads that the world is full of things. But it ain’t!

21:07

So now, let’s just retrace our steps a moment to clarify some of the ideas about māyā. The first was “measurement:” making sense out of the apparent formlessness of the world—the wiggliness of it; it’s a better word than formlessness—making sense out of the wiggliness of the world by cutting it. As the grid cuts, or as the consciousness cuts out certain things that it deems as significant. That’s measurement. The second is related to it: playing the game that things so cut are really separate. Now, further than that, māyā means also “magic.” Magical power. Power to evoke. Power to create dramas. Now, all magic is related to drama because the art of the dramatist is to convince the audience who’ve come to see the play that what is happening on the stage is real. The audience hopes to be convinced of that almost, but not quite.

22:29

Now, the conventions of drama provide a certain setup that we are all familiar with—in our culture at any rate—that there has to be a certain arrangement. There’s an auditorium for the audience. There is a stage for the play. There is a proscenium arch that divides the stage from the auditorium. And behind the stage there is a green room for the actors to change their clothes. Now, there it all is. There’s the whole box of tricks. Because what the proscenium arch says is, to the audience: what goes on behind this arch on the other side of the footlights is not real, it is a play. And the actors have a place to go off and hide in the green room so that we won’t see them changing their costumes or their masks or their personalities from plain Mr. Smith on the one hand to the role of Hamlet on the other. He will walk into our view as Hamlet. And although we know in the back of our minds that this is only in play, the skillful actor will put everybody on the edge of their seats in suspense because he half-convinces them that it’s real. And so he makes magic.

23:51

Now, the Hindu doctrine of the creation of the universe is, if I may put it in extremely naïve terms, that the lord God—who, in Hinduism, doesn’t have a beard and things like that, as he does in the West, but is something unimaginable; however, he is represented often in human form with many arms and so on—but the lord God is playing that he’s not himself. And in the Western version, the first thing that the lord God said in creating the universe was, “Let there be light.” But the Hindus would have said: the first thing he said was, “You must draw the line somewhere.” That is this action of cutting; of māyā, see? And that’s the whole of life: you must draw the line somewhere. See? If we’re going to draw a line at all, you see, there’s going to be a difference between this and that, between good and evil, between the pleasant and the painful, between the modest and the immodest. Whatever you will, you see? You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. So the whole of life is the game of where are we going to draw the line, see? And how far can you go? And you can be way in or you can be way out, but still you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

25:09

And then that was māyā. And then he decided, you see—the second thing he said to himself was: “Get lost!” Because he was bored with being God. And he thought, “Everything is possible. There is no obstacle in any direction. Nothing is happening. So… let’s get lost. Let’s pretend we are not God.” And so he’s pretended that he’s all of us. And every one of us is the Lord in disguise making a big scene that you’re just “little me.” And it’s very embarrassing when a good, skillful guru calls your bluff on this and says, “Listen, Shiva, stop kidding me! You know, I know who you are perfectly well, and all this come-on that you’re just you, and that you have these problems, and so on and so on—that’s a lot of bullshit! Come off it!”

26:02

So the person is very embarrassed by this and makes out that they really don’t know what the teacher’s talking about. But just like the audience in the skillfully acted play knows in the back of its mind that it is a play, so every individual in the back of his mind—hardly and barely conscious—knows who he is. And he may insist on “little me” just like, you know, when—have you ever enjoyed being in a state of grief? Or hating someone? You know, there’s a fundamental zest in really hating someone. And you know you don’t really hate them: somehow, you wouldn’t want to give it up. Even though it’s an unpleasant feeling to hate someone, you see? And so they have a sort of attitude of, “Oh, come off it!” You can sometimes penetrate through these negative emotional states.

27:08

So then, you see, in the green room—behind the stage—this corresponds to the back of the actor’s mind. Because it’s in the green room that he doffs his mask and changes his costume and drops his role, see? So it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the word “person” is a dramatic word, because the persona was the mask worn in classical drama. It is shaped with a mouthpiece, like a megaphone, so that in the open air stage the sound will travel. So “that through which the sound comes:” per sona. The masks. So the dramatis personae in the beginning of a play is a list of the masks which are going to be worn by the actors. And by a very, very curious and significant subversion of the meaning of this word: how to be a real person. Think of that! How to be a genuine mask. A really successful fraud! That’s māyā! Magic.

28:28

The next meaning of māyā is “art.” “Art” or, indeed, “skill.” I wonder—there’s an old Greek tale that there was a competition in painting. And two very great painters were the final runners up in the competition, and they had to do paintings that were going to be judged at a great affair. And the first one painted a vine with grapes on it. And it was so convincing that birds kept banging into it trying to pick at the grapes. And the bees were coming around, and, you know, wasps, and so on. And everybody thought, “My! Isn’t that fantastic! How clever this man is.” Well, they said, “We’d better have a look at the other painting.” And they said to the artist, “Unveil it. Draw the curtain and let’s see it!” He said, “What curtain?” His painting was the curtain. So he was awarded the prize because it was considered more remarkable to deceive human beings than to deceive the birds.

29:47

So that story lies at the beginning of a world of art, a philosophy of art, which has prevailed—certainly in the West—for many thousands of years, really. The sense that the skill of an artist is to make art look like nature. And so the highest reach of Western technique comes with people like the great Flemish masters—Pieter de Hooch and van Dyck and van Eyck, so on—who represent what you might call the peak of photographic realism, which eventually deteriorated into the sentimental painting of the nineteenth century with all its luscious nudes and historical mythological scenes done like colored photographs. And for most people living today, the vast majority of Westerners, that is art and anything else doesn’t look like a picture.

31:13

But, however, what is not appreciated about this (except by painters and people who understand the techniques involved) is that the camera has a prejudiced point of view. The camera does not see things as they are, it sees things as it is constructed to see them. The camera has been bewitched. And the lens is made the way it is made in order to conform with a certain philosophy of how things are supposed to look. For example, if you show a so-called primitive person a photograph of himself or of a friend, he will not recognize it. He will turn the picture over and look at the back and wonder what happened to the back of the person’s head. He will not understand why it’s flat. He will not understand perspective. Why are the trees in the distance smaller? They’re all the same size. When an American G.I. in Paris—during the war or just after the war—met Picasso, they got into a discussion about modern painting and Picasso’s painting, and the G.I. said he simply couldn’t make head or tail of it. He said the world doesn’t look like that; women don’t look like that. Picasso said, “Do you have a girlfriend?” And he said, “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “let me see her picture.” And he pulled out his wallet, and he had a little photograph in the thing, and showed the picture. Picasso stared at it and said, “Is she so small as that?”

33:07

So, you see, it’s a very instructive exercise to look really carefully at the surrounding world and not jump to conclusions about the colors of things. You see, a person might walk into this room and be asked, “What color is it?” and he would jump to the conclusion, “Oh, it’s a sort of off-white.” Now, it’s nothing of the kind! Watch this wall carefully and you will see that it’s myriads of colors. Pearly grays, golds, blues, purples—all kinds of shadows play along it. But these shadows are not gray things, they’re all colors. And luminous. So just to say it’s off-white color is to have an idea in one’s head and not to be using one’s eyes at all. And to have an idea in one’s head and not to be using your eyes is, in a way, to be a victim of māyā.

34:23

But then, you see, art and māyā have a kind of a curious relationship. Because one is not merely a victim of māyā. There’s good māyā and bad māyā, as it were. There’s a way of creating a world. And in this sense an artist or a poet is a great creator. The word “poet,” from the Greek poiesis, means “to make” or “to do.” The poets, then, are those who give us an imagination—that is, the power of building images—and so also painters teach us to see things that we never saw before. They evoke them. They see creatively. Because we can see this Rorschach blot of the universe in many different ways just as the ordinary Rorschach blot is seen in many different ways by different people. And if I can convince you to see this Rorschach blot my way, I’ve not necessarily pulled the wool over your eyes, but I have given you a new possibility of imagination.

35:33

There’s a place in a national park called Inspiration Point, and everybody goes there and they say, “Oh, ain’t it just like a picture!” That is because they have seen the kind of landscapes that are reproduced on the tops of candy boxes and so on, and they know that this is supposed to be beautiful. Now, ask the question: of what is a landscape itself a picture? Are the clouds like anything? You know, do they reproduce something? Do the trees mean something? Are they symbols? Are they figures? Are they about something? No! So when an artist paints a landscape in a kind of chocolate-box style, he’s actually painting a painting of an abstraction, of a non-objective dance—which is the tree or the cloud. See? Or the foam on the waves. It’s just become a little corny, that’s all. It’s been done so often.

36:35

So instead, painters thought, “Let’s not do that. Instead of copying the dances that nature is doing, let’s just make dances directly on the canvas.” And so Jackson Pollock and everybody starts leaping around all over the place doing different things. But then, in a few years to come, people walk down a street, and there’s an old board which has been splattered, and they’ll say, “Oh, ain’t it just like a Pollock!” See? “Ain’t it just like a picture?” Because they’ll have been taught to see the marvel of these particular colors and forms. So again, some artist has done māyā, and so made a new universe to see.

37:32

Now, however, here comes the interesting point. Is it all a projection; māyā? That’s to say—look, when we look at someone who’s tested on a Rorschach blot, we assume that the story he tells about it is a projection. That is to say, it is only in his mind. And because it’s only in his mind, the story he tells you about the Rorschach blot is symptomatic of his particular psychological condition. Are we then going to say that the external world has no order and no sense in it intrinsically, but that is something purely projected into it by human beings? And since human beings might differ from each other—as, say, one artist differs from another, or as one might have different kinds of brains or different sense organs—does that mean that according to the differentiations in the individual the external world is changed?

38:48

Let’s say this: when astronomers use their telescopes and they discover that the stars are not angels, or they’re not lights being carried in crystal spheres, but they discover these galaxies—when they discovered the galaxies, did they invent them? Were there galaxies there before anybody looked at them through telescopes? That’s the same question as: when there is a noise, is it noisy if there’s not anybody around to hear it? And, of course, we know from a physical point of view of that old problem about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it is very simple. It’s a problem of relativity. In other words, the vibrations in the air do not become noise until they hit an eardrum. Just as light going through space is not manifested as light until it falls upon a reflecting object. Just as a thing is not moving unless it can be shown to be moving in relation to something comparably still. So, you see, in a way there are no galaxies until they arise as a situation responsive to them. Nothing exists by itself, but only in relation to other things.

40:21

This is a rough point. But remember this, though: this isn’t pure projection. Because the ability of the human being to have these sensory responses—to hear sounds, to see lights, and to know about galaxies and stars—the ability, the brain which makes that possible, is in itself a member of the external world. The brain is a member of the same world it’s looking at. It has something in common with the universe that surrounds it. See, that was the thing that (in the beginning) we screened out: nobody realizes that he’s in the external world. Everybody else is, but I’m in the internal world. Oh no, I’m not! I’m just as much in the external world as you. And my consciousness, my thoughts, my so on, can be regarded as something in the external world. So I go with it. The external world, as I pointed out in the beginning, does me. Therefore, there are correspondences, there are transactions, there are relations between what I call “me” and “everything else” in the external world. Only: I’m under the illusion that we don’t go together. I’ve forgotten that I create the galaxies in the same moment that I’ve forgotten that the galaxies create me. It’s mutual. Like two sides of a coin: they go together. You can’t separate them. Otherwise you have no coin.

41:50

So then, in sum, let’s go back. These are the principal meanings of māyā: “measurement” through cutting, “play,” “magic,” “drama,” and “creative art.” All fundamentally resting on the idea that the universe is not finally serious. And so the man who has penetrated māyā is a man who doesn’t take life quite seriously, you see? Now, there’s something unnerving about that, isn’t there? Because we use the word “serious” in two senses. When somebody says, “I love you,” and the other person says, “Are you serious?” the answer is, “No, I’m sincere.” Heavens, you don’t want to be loved seriously, do you? I mean, do you want a Sturm und Drang, a kind of Tristan and Isolde relationship? Surely not. I mean, if you go in for that kind of thing, maybe that’s your dish.

43:07

But do we really want the world to be serious, you see? Is God serious? Now, in Christianity it seems that God is serious because nobody ever imagines that the one who sits on the throne of grace is sort of laughing. He may be a very sad expression, a very kind expression, a very severe expression, but it wouldn’t be laughing. No. Because we feel, you see, that anything that’s in play and that isn’t serious is in some way trivial. But that’s not the case. You see, we have to get over that idea and realize that the Lord—or whatever It is that all this is about, that’s doing all this—is having a ball; is playing. Even though the play sometimes involves scaring itself out of its wits. The universe creeps up behind itself and says, “Boo!” And it jumps and all sorts of catastrophes happen, but ultimately they all change and disappear, and it all starts over again, see? This constant flowing in and out. And if things come they must go. See? Going and coming are the same sides of one coin, you see? If they live, they must die. It’s all one. And after all, here we are, thinking we are living, but going around chewing up animals and vegetables and creating death in every direction, see? And we say this disappearance of those forms into this form, we think it’s a good show. But imagine what a pretty girl’s pearly teeth look like to an oyster!

Alright. Now let’s have an intermission, and then we can have questions.

45:09

Well now, you know that one of the great problems that has arisen out of the Western study of Indian philosophy as well as out of the tradition of Western philosophy in relation to the whole problem of illusion is the question of what is called (in the technical jargon of Western philosophy) subjective idealism. This is the theory that all reality is mental. And we have to start by making a clear distinction between subjective idealism and solipsism. Solipsism is the doctrine that you are the only person who exists and everybody else is your dream. And you can see there’s a certain analogy between that and the Hindu idea that all this cosmos is the dream of the godhead. But the difference here is that, in the solipsistic doctrine, it is just you as you more or less know yourself from a conscious standpoint as a finite individual, and not much more than that, having this dream that all these other people exist. There’s no way of really producing an argument against solipsism because you can always say to a solipsist: what evidence, if someone could produce it, would you regard as disproving your idea? That’s a very disconcerting question to ask anybody, and I give it to you if ever you get involved in philosophical oneupmanship. Ask a Freudian: “What evidence, if it could be brought forward, would you consider to disprove the oedipus complex theory?” You find he can’t think of anything at all. Or ask a theologian: “What evidence would you find conclusive as disproving the existence of God?” And he can’t think of any. Whereas other people, if you ask them that question, will suggest an experiment and say, “Alright, if this experiment is negative then we’ll accept the evidence.” And one of the classic experiments of this nature is the Michelson-Morley experiment which disproved the existence of the aether—at any rate, in the form that people had conceived aether. And it’s been generally accepted. Somebody thought out what would happen if there were really aether. So this is always one of the problems of solipsism, and we’re going to see it’s one of the problems of subjective idealism.

47:51

But the difference between solipsism and subjective idealism is contained in the famous double limerick:

There was a young man who said, “God,

I find it exceedingly odd

That a tree, as a tree,

Simply ceases to be

When there’s no one around in the quad.”

And the reply:

“Young man, your astonishment’s odd.

I’m always around in the quad.

So the tree, as a tree,

Never ceases to be,

Since observed by yours faithfully, God.”

And the great subjective idealists in the tradition of Western philosophy are, of course, Berkeley the bishop, and Bradley. And it’s in some ways difficult to make out exactly what they were saying when they said that everything is in the mind, because they could never say clearly what they meant by the mind.

48:45

But if you will be a little naïve for a moment and seem at least to understand what you mean when you use the word “mind,” they will pitch the argument in the following way: you do not know anything except in your own mind. The whole existence of an external world is something known to you in your mind. The distance of other people and other objects from you is a distance that exists in the mind. You cannot possibly conceive any world existing unless it be an experience. How could there be an unexperienced world? That would not be a world for anyone or anything, therefore it would not be at all. Because being is always being for something. It is, in other words, relational. The sun is light for eyes. Eyes are organs of vision for a mind. If there are no eyes, the sun gives forth no light. If there are no nerve ends, it gives forth no heat. If there are no muscles, nothing is heavy. And if there are no soft skins, nothing is hard. Because it’s only in relation to a certain softness that something hard can be said to be hard, only in relation to a certain degree of measurement performed by the neurons that things can be said to be relatively hot or cold. Hot and cold are the impact of energies on a nervous system. Energies at all are recognized as energies by their impact on something.

50:33

So the Zen poem says:

The tree manifests the spiritual power of the wind,

The water the miraculous energy of the moon.

So the tree is waving. And we wouldn’t know there was any wind around, you see, unless there were a tree or something like it to wave in it. And in the same way as the moon, when the water ripples, breaks up into a thousand fragments and shimmers all over the place, you see, we wouldn’t know that the moon had this miraculous power to duplicate itself, to triplicate, quadruplicate, multi-millionaire itself, were it not for the water. So these are the foundations of the idealist theory. You must distinguish between philosophical idealism and ethical idealism—they’re two totally unrelated ideas. Philosophical idealism means that the ideal world is the real world; that is to say, the world in the mind.

51:37

Now, the theory is incredibly plausible as it has been stated by people like Berkeley and Bradley and the Western idealists, but today it is about the most unfashionable philosophical theory in the academic world that you could follow. Because Western philosophy has undergone a great revolution since about 1914. In that year, there was published Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Wittgenstein came from the so-called Vienna school or was influenced by the Vienna school of people who called themselves scientific empiricists, sometimes logical analysts, sometimes logical positivists. And they said only statements that are empirically verifiable have meaning. They never verified that statement. But that was their point of departure; that’s their basic assumption. Everybody has a metaphysical assumption which he can’t prove. Watch out for it. It’s basic to all thought. For example: you must be consistent. Try and imagine a system of logic that isn’t consistent.

52:55

But at any rate, this school has had immense influence in the twentieth century, and it argues, basically, that in order to say something meaningful—he’s having fun!—you must be able to verify it. That is to say, to verify things by prophecy. If you make a prediction based on your statement and it comes true, you verified it. If it doesn’t come true, you haven’t verified it. You de-verified it. A statement which was de-verified, shown to be untrue, might be meaningful, but untrue. But a statement that you can’t think any way of verifying it is in this theory meaningless.

53:45

Now, so, you say, “The world is ruled by God. Everything that happens happens under the governance of God.” So the logical analyst says: “You’ve made a statement now that says everything is affected by X; God. Suggest a way of verifying this. What difference would it make if it weren’t so? Would it make any difference to the way things are going on if they weren’t governed by God?” This is a problem because it’s just the same as if you had said, “All bodies whatsoever in the universe”—that includes all stars, all galaxies, all planets—“are moving in a certain direction.” Now, there’s no way of verifying this because you can only verify movement in a certain direction by comparison with something that’s relatively still. But there will not be any still body with reference to which all the other bodies move, because you said in the beginning all bodies in the universe are moving in such and such a direction. So you could only say everything in the universe is governed by God if you made an exception. “But there are certain things that are not.” You see? Then, according to logical analysis, you could’ve made a meaningful statement. But when you start making statements about everything, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t prove it, you can’t disprove it. And so they say although you think you have said something, you haven’t really said anything at all. You made a statement that was actually as nonsensical as asking, “Why is a mouse when it spins?” This statement about God doing or ruling all things sounded meaningful because we’re used to it, but is really pure nonsense. And this has been so persuasive in the climate of academic philosophy today that idealism of all kinds is, as I said, extremely unfashionable.

55:53

But there are considerations that might cause us to reflect on this more carefully. Because we can think of situations analogous to the idea that all things are ruled by God, or all things exist only in the mind, there are situations analogous to that in our everyday experience. Only, we can be aware of these situations because we stand outside them. Now, first of all, consider a mirror. A mirror will reflect all kinds of shapes and colors. And when you look at the mirror, the mirror itself will be the ground, or the underlying element, common to all those shapes and colors. And it is not meaningless to say that they are all reflections in a mirror. Because the mirror has an edge, and you can see other things around the mirror which behave in a different way from the reflections. You can’t put your hand out and pull the necktie of a reflection in the mirror, but you can reach your hand out and pull the necktie of somebody standing beside the mirror, you see? But nevertheless, within the context of the mirror all the things that are there are reflected in it. And if the mirror weren’t there, they wouldn’t be there; those reflections.

57:20

Now supposing, similarly, everything that exists has its being in a mirror called the mind, only there is no way of seeing the edge of this mirror—is that meaningful? Is that possible? The positivist, logical analyst will say no, because the statement makes no difference to anything. It makes no difference to anything in this thing you call the mind that it’s in the mind. It makes no difference to anything in the mirror that it’s in the mirror. For example, your face is not immediately changed by being reflected in a mirror. The mirror doesn’t exercise influences—or so they say—upon the reflections. But it very well could. Let’s consider what we were discussing last night. Lenses in cameras influence the kind of world they photograph. A convex lens will give you one thing, a concave lens will give you another thing. And one can think of all sorts of wonky lenses: prismatic lenses, bent lenses, squarely lenses. Now, you see, if the lenses of your eyes could be said to distort the physical world, you would take that distortion as normal. Because there would be no way of setting up a standard and saying: by that standard, my eyes are wrong. Unless you simply took some other kind of a lens and said this is right, and the eye is distorted. You would’ve always seen things that way. So nevertheless, whether the eyes are distorted or not distorted is impossible to decide. So according to this way of logic that is a meaningless question. There is no way of deciding the answer, and it makes no difference whether it is or whether it isn’t—or so they say. But I think that they have neglected certain kinds of difference that these things do make.

59:45

First of all, there is a difference of feeling, and very often a difference in behavior, between a person who is aware of an underlying ground or continuum for every experience and every reality, and a person who is not aware of it. The person who’s aware of it feels at home in his surroundings, the person who’s not aware of it doesn’t. The first belongs and the second doesn’t feel he belongs—he feels he’s engaged in a contest. Furthermore, one of the difficult ideas to get across and express well in any language which wants to assert a pluralistic universe—in which there is no unifying ground—any language based on that assumption is going to have difficulty talking about relationships. Let’s go back in the history of philosophy and look at former instances of this difficulty.

1:00:57

The thing that really bogged Descartes down and that puzzled him—he never could answer—was the relationship of mind and matter, or spirit and matter. He had inherited from Platonism and from Christianity the theory of the two worlds: the natural and the supernatural, the material and the mental, the real and the ideal. And what never could be explained by the philosophies of the people who believe that way was how the one influenced the other. How does the spiritual world influence the material? As is well known, all ghosts, all well-behaved ghosts, walk straight through walls without budging a brick. Now, if my mind is my ghost within me, how on earth does it lift my arm when a ghost doesn’t budge a brick when it walks through a wall? See, this is the real problem. It all sunk on this. They couldn’t explain that.

1:02:03

And, you see, in just the same way as the cartesian cannot explain the influence of mind on matter, so a person who works according to the theories of logical analysis can’t really explain relationship between so-called things. If he’s going to take a pluralistic theory of the universe in which there is no unifying continuum, but there are just these events, you see—there are these things we can talk about in a scientific descriptive manner. How are they related? They obviously are related. They obviously influence each other. But how? Put it in another way of historic philosophical problem: how does a cause influence an effect? Kind of amazing, you know, that they do. We say there are causes and effects. But how does a cause lead to an effect? Is it something like a row of dominoes that stand on their end, and you flip down the first one and they go clickety, clickety, clickety, clickety, and all knock each other down? Or a row of billiard balls—that was the idea of Newtonian physics. Of course. That the atoms were things like billiard balls, and they bang each other around, and so you got results.

1:03:30

But this really won’t do. For very many reasons. One is, of course, that things influence each other backwards. A future event can change a past event. A lot of people aren’t aware of that, but it can. If I say, “The bark of the dog and the bark of the tree,” what happens to “bark,” the former event, is very seriously influenced by the later event “dog” or “tree.” Although the word sounds the same and is spelled the same, it has a different meaning according to what happens later. So, in the same way, in music. What is happening at this moment may be changed altogether by something happening later. A note has one meaning in one context, another meaning in another context. So what is the cause-effect relationship between them when, apparently, the earlier event seems to be causally affected by the later event? You see how puzzling all that is. But it’s very easily illustrated by certain phenomena of music. When a person is tone deaf—that is to say,