I was introducing the general subject of this weekend’s discussion this morning by trying to describe my own approach to the study of comparative religion and the psychology of religion, saying that I was really in the following of William James, who tried two things: to give a description of the psychological dynamics of religious experience as brought about by what you might really call the various disciplines, and concentrating rather heavily on the type of experience (which is contemporary in Bucke) called cosmic consciousness, the state in which the individual has a transformation of his awareness of his own identity and experiences himself (instead of being a skin-encapsulated ego) as a being continuous with the entire universe, the cosmos, or its energy. And I went on to say that he made the point that you can’t really verify this sort of experience, but you could only test it by its consequences for human behavior.

But I wanted to go a step further than that and say that the pragmatic aspect of this sort of experience is not merely moral and social, it is also universal in the sense that the question of man’s relationship to his physical environment is one that is now crucial in the middle of the twentieth century, because our technology gives us the capacity to destroy the planet—and not necessarily by atomic fission, but by improper ways of attempting to control the natural environment (both animal, vegetable, and mineral)—so that, more than ever, it seems to me of a practical import to go beyond the hallucination that we are separate from the total natural environment. And so this brings up the whole problem of the study of religion as not a merely historical matter, not simply a study of museum pieces, but it brings up the study of religion as an experimental inquiry.

You know, it’s a funny thing: in the academic world as we’ve known it for some time, all effete subjects are taught by the historical method. For example, when you learn mathematics, your initial courses are not on the history of mathematics. When you go to medical school, the only courses on the history of medicine are electives for graduate students, pretty much, or seniors. But you will always notice that beginning religion is apt to be “History of Religions,” beginning philosophy is apt to be “History of Philosophy,” which advertises right away that these are museum pieces. You can also tell a great deal from the size of the department and its position in the general geography of the campus. We have a campus set up nowadays where the central building is the administration building, because that’s the most important thing going on. In a funny old place like Oxford you can’t even find the administration building!

But now, here comes up a very considerable question. There is a professor at Harvard in the Department of Social Relations, who shall be nameless. But a little while ago, when there was a disturbance there—because people were altering their consciousness and studying its effects—he made the pronouncement that nothing which is incapable of being put into words (or rather, no nonverbal area) is a proper subject for the academy, for the university. And I began wondering about the Harvard football team.

But surely this is a very strange attitude, but it’s not a new one at all. We’ve been through all this before and, long ago, most scientific people were on the other end of the argument. Because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Western science really began to get underway, what is not generally realized is that natural science and mysticism, whether it was the sort of mysticism of which I suppose you would call theosophy and the original meaning of that word—I don’t mean the Theosophical Society, but the theosophy of a man like Paracelsus, or of Nicholas of Cusa, or of van Helmont—this was something which went hand in hand with the curiosity about natural science and an experimental attitude to the study of nature. I don’t need to tell you, the theologians who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope wouldn’t look through it because they already knew what the state of affairs was, because it was revealed in the Bible and in the writings of Aristotle. So you got a scholasticism where people were depending entirely for knowledge on the written system, on the verbal system, and they would not put this verbal system to the test of experiment.

But the young scientists of the West wanted to read the book of nature. Francis Bacon very strongly criticized scholastics for having a system of great elaborateness. He said it’s like a spider weaving out of itself webs of great subtlety and precision, but at no substance or profit. And he thought this was conceited, and that one should instead refer to the experience of the physical world. But the trouble with that was, from the scholastic point of view, that it involved getting your hands dirty. Because scientific experiment required manual operations, and this is beneath the dignity of a brahmin. It’d have to be a shudra to get into manual operations, or a kshatriya who fights.

But we have a tendency now for the same thing to be true. That—look at the curious thing: we all make jokes about two-bit colleges that give courses in basket weaving. And in both high school and college, what you might call practical courses are looked upon—unless they’re in medicine or physics or chemistry or something like that—they are looked upon as something for dropouts. If you’re in high school and it looks as if you’re not going to be very good at computation or verbalization, they suggest: “Well, maybe you should prepare for a trade and, alas, rather regrettably, you’d better go into the workshop.” Now, that’s a very curious thing, because what we’re doing (by having a form and style of education that is exclusively literate), we are training our children to be bureaucrats, bankers, and maybe a few professional people, or even teachers, where the system just turns in on itself: you’re training teachers to teach teachers to teach teachers. And, as a result of this, our civilization is very seriously impoverished in certain quite fundamental things.

To name a few: by and large, our cooking is abominable. Our clothes leave a great deal to be desired. Men’s clothes are absurdly uncomfortable, and we all go around looking like funeral directors. And housing isn’t too hot. Nobody, really, gets particularly educated in the art of lovemaking. But all these are very fundamental to the good life. We have a reputation in the Orient and here of being the most materialistic civilization on the face of the Earth. It’s completely undeserved! Because a materialist is a person who loves material. And we don’t. We’re ashamed of it. We want to conquer it, abolish it. We talk about abolishing the limitations of time and space. And as a result of this process—though I will say jet aircraft is one of the few very excellent things that we produce. It’s beautiful engineering. And we produce some gorgeous scientific instruments and electronic contraptions.

But when we get to more basic things, what happens, you see, is just like this. When you can go almost immediately and instantaneously from one part of the Earth to the other, the two places become the same place. So when you wake up in Tokyo nowadays, you’re not quite sure where you are. You’re in a strange mixture of Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Paris. And therefore tourists—thinking about going, say, to Hawaiʻi or Japan—they invariably ask their friends who’ve been there, “Is it spoiled yet?” Now, what does that mean? It means: is it just like where we start out from? And if it is, there’s no point making the trip. Because once you obliterate the material dimension (the distance between two places, as I say), they become the same place. If I offer you a banana, you will be very unsatisfied—if I offer you just the two ends of the banana. What you want is the substance between.

In the same way, when you consider a great many of our products—automobiles that are essentially toy rocket ships with built-in obsolescence, when you consider fabrics that we use which fall apart in a hurry—what are we really doing? We say we’re practical, but we’re not. We’re abstractionists. Almost like the scholastics. Because we are making surfaces with not much underneath them. This is a great way of making money, because it’s really cheating. When you go into the grocery business and you manage to make all kinds of imitation food, and then inject chemicals, and sell people styrofoam instead of bread, yes, you may make lots of money. You can also cheat on the packaging by reducing the quantity and making the exterior look very attractive with color photography. But the difficulty is that when you’ve made all this money, you have nothing to buy with it except other people’s inferior products. You have to go outside the country, back to peasants and people like that, who took joy in their work and had a material relationship to it.

This is a serious puzzle, and it all goes hand in hand with an attitude to education that is too abstract, too scholastic, too much in the head, and too little in the belly. Lao Tzu says in his book: “The energies of the emperor should be directed to keeping the minds of the people un-preoccupied and their bellies well filled,” which seems an extraordinary attitude for a mystic. You would think he would be all up in the mind.

But the contrary is the case. Great mystics are very well related to the physical world. We think of Saint Teresa of Ávila, of the Zen masters, of great Chinese mystics who were also artists, and Hindu mystics who had the most fantastic methods of physical culture. And you realize that the attitude of mysticism is not at all—when you really come down to it—anti-worldly, or as Inge calls it, acosmistic. This is a superstition. Just because they use negative language and may refer on occasion to the world as a māyā, or illusion, we forget that the word māyā, for example, also means art, magic, and skill. And it isn’t necessarily the point of Hindu spiritual endeavor at all to get rid of one’s experience of the world. It may be in some particular emphases of it, some particular schools, but you can’t make that a generalization by any means. Furthermore, you will remember that, in the most influential form of Buddhism, which is called the Mahayana, that the whole point is that when you’ve attained enlightenment, instead of going off and disappearing forever into some undiscoverable nirvana, the whole point is that you, as a bodhisattva, come back to work in the world. That is why Mahayana has been so creative on the artistic level.

So there is a very strong bond, you see, between the mystical approach and the empirical approach, since both are interested in experience and, insofar as one realizes the fundamental unity of the cosmos, there is a tendency to do away with the dualism of the spiritual and the physical. I’ll never forget when D. T. Suzuki was at the World Congress of Faiths in London in 1936. We had a kind of final round-up lecture in Queens Hall, and the subject was that several representatives of various traditions were going to talk on the supreme spiritual ideal. Well, one person got up, and another person got up, and delivered themselves of incredible quantities of hot air. Finally, little old Suzuki got to his feet and said, “I am asked to talk about supreme spiritual ideal. Now, I am countryman from very far off place. I do not know what supreme spiritual ideal is. I look it up in the dictionary, but I do not understand this at all.” And then he went on to give a description of his house and garden in Japan, and just everybody gave him a standing ovation. It wasn’t exactly what he said, it was his attitude. Of course, he did say in the course of his observations that what we needed more than anything else was an attitude to life in which the spiritual and the material were inseparable, because otherwise what influence on the material could the spiritual have? It’s the old problem, you know, of: if you are made of two parts, one spiritual and the other physical, how does the spiritual part move the physical part, since all good ghosts walk straight through brick walls and don’t disturb the bricks?

So in this way, then, when you look back to the origins of Western science, you find that concern for what is to be found by the observation, by getting involved in the physical universe, was of interest to the same people who were interested in an experimental approach to religion. One thinks particularly of that cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, who was interested in all sorts of scientific investigation, and at the same time wrote De Docta Ignorantia, the book called “Learned Ignorance.” He used it in the sense of unknowing, like the cloud of unknowing. And he was primarily concerned with the whole problem of the relationship of opposites or polarities. He was one of the great thinkers on that subject.

So, therefore, it seems to be that a serious study of the psychology of religions and of their symbolisms must involve both a literary approach and an experimental approach. It is precisely for lack, you see, of an experimental approach that a great deal of religion (and also of philosophy and traditional metaphysics) has become of so little interest to young people in particular. They want to go further. And this is why young people are to such a great extent interested in expanding or altering their consciousness. It isn’t the question of looking for kicks. You know, we don’t take young people very seriously. And when they do something like that, we always say, “Oh, boys will be boys. They’re looking for kicks.” And yet, let’s say people of the same age can be sent off on the highly responsible job of fighting in Vietnam. We just can’t have it both ways. If they are responsible enough, mature enough, to go and fight our battles, we should allow them some say in the deep and important matters of life.

So it is a very puzzling question, though, as to how one might engage in the study of religion experimentally with a scientific attitude, and do it within the framework of the academic community as we know it. Because, you see, the moment you start experimenting with it, you are suspect of being goofy. It’s all very well for Professor X to be a Sanskritist and to know all about Vedic literature and the commentaries on Gita and have all this fingertips. But the moment he’s known that he’s practicing yoga and that he’s got some scientific apparatus to measure the EEG effects of his breathing and of his states of concentration, they say the man’s off his rocker. Because he’s getting into this non-verbal exploration.

But this is once again, though, a renaissance of scholasticism that would make this sort of criticism. People tend to think that the attitude of science makes it perfectly clear that there is nothing more to life than a pilgrimage from the maternity ward to the crematorium. That’s what there is. And in this new theology of the death of God—this attitude is exploding into theological circles many, many years behind the times, one might say—and suggesting that we’ve really got to face up to it after all, that religion is wishful thinking, there isn’t anybody up there who cares, and that life is just what we see it to be. It is banal. It is just this so-called practical world, and that we’ve got to deal with that.

So how one manages with this sort of theology to go on being a Christian is an extreme puzzle to me. It’s like the joke that somebody made in this theology is saying that there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only Son. In other words, the central meaning of Jesus’ life was a hallucination. But, you know, always be suspicious of dogmatics of any kind, and ask the question: when a person propounds an idea of that sort, what is he trying to tell us about himself? What role is he playing? What kind of an act is this?

Well, you realize that when scientism—which I think we must call it—was really fashionable in the end of the nineteenth century and early in this century, and this (what I have called) fully automatic model of the universe was in vogue, there are some extremely interesting things about its attitude. Remember what it revolted against? The conception of God (who was, of course, dead long ago), which was the old gentleman with the white beard on a golden throne. It was that God that was dead. It was a very uncomfortable God—in this sense: that people were delighted for an excuse to get rid of the thought that they were being watched all the time by a just judge, however loving.

You know, when you were in school and you were a child and you were writing, and the teacher walked around the class and watched over your shoulder what you were doing? Even if you liked the teacher very much, that always put you off. So the sense that there’s always somebody watching, who knows not only what you do, but what you think and feel, and therefore you are subject to judgment at every moment—it’s very uncomfortable. So people were most happy for an excuse to have an unintelligent universe rather than one presided over by this all-prying intelligence.

The difficulty was, however, that they sort of threw out the baby with the bathwater, because when they got rid of this God, they were confronted instead with a stupid universe. And so all this is reflected in the language of nineteenth-century thinkers when they talked about the energy of the cosmos being blind energy, when Freud described psychic energy as libido, which means blind and unconscious lust. It’s what we call reductionism.

But what lies behind reductionism? Well, you know, people who like to take that attitude like to fancy themselves as being tough and realistic. Someone up there who cares may be all right for the old ladies, you know, who are feeble-minded and can’t face facts. But for a real man, let’s look at this thing. Let’s look it in the face. Now, you see, that is a very different attitude from being open-minded. Some people—I remember an entomologist remarking when von Frisch discovered that bees had a language. He said, “I have the most passionate reluctance to accept this evidence.” Bees? Talk? Why, you see, nature was starting to get intelligent again, and that simply mustn’t be allowed, because intelligence was something to be found only inside the human skull—and then only as a result of the fluke. And if this fluke was to be perpetuated, and man’s intelligence and human reason and values were a triumph, and naturally we had to fight nature tooth and claw. And we began this assault on it in the name of scientific naturalism. It’s very paradoxical.

So you can see that in this attitude to the world, in this kind of scientism which still prevails with many people is their basic common sense, there is something not altogether impartial. There is a desire to make a point. There is a desire to prove that there are no mysteries. Get rid of mysteries! They bug me! That what’s out there is just simply banal. It is mechanical. And you can develop a science; oh, you have to go a little further and you understand the things through and through and there won’t be any more mysteries. And it will all be perfectly boring. That’s not an impartial attitude at all.

When we found, for example, and it really penetrated people’s minds, that man’s world was not the center of the cosmos, what did they talk about? They said, “Oh, we’re just a little germ of life on a small rock that revolves around an unimportant star on the outer fringes of one of the minor galaxies. What do we matter?” What a put down that was, you see? They didn’t stop to think that the remarkable thing about this little germ was that, not only could it look at the entire cosmos and think about it, but that, by virtue of its nervous system, it was evoking this cosmos out of something which would otherwise be quanta, which have about the same order of reality as the sound of a hand playing on a skinless drum. Have you ever heard that thing about the sound of one hand; question in Zen?

Because we realize more and more that it is the complexity of the human organism, and especially its neurological aspects, which is in fact evoking the universe. You can play all you like with your fingers, you see, and make complex tunes, but if there’s no piano, no music. So the sun can emit energy all it likes. But if there are no eyeballs anywhere, it’s never light. Because existence is relationship.

So an open attitude—which is, I think, in the true spirit of science—does not have an axe to grind: that, namely, things shall turn out to be banal, things shall turn out to be stupid and boring, and heaven preserve us from anything that isn’t that way, because it would worry us. And yet, not so long ago, when some rather startling, even if unproved, theories were advanced by Velikovsky, pressure was put on his publisher (by some very highly placed people in the academic world) not to publish that kind of book, or they could no longer be regarded as a publisher of serious scientific literature. It was an attempt to censor him, because his opinions ran contrary to the accepted fashions in thinking.

So, so far as any institution where these subjects are being discussed, let’s remember one thing: every academic community requires the presence of a small minority of oddballs. If not, it’s sterile. See, we never really know who is crazy and who is a genius. Time tells. But at the time it’s very difficult to decide. And if we’ve got interesting crazy people who are not destructive and messy and so on, there’s a fairly good risk on gambling on them, because they keep things stirred up. Crazy people are, in a way, like innocent children who see that the emperor has no clothes on, and aren’t afraid of saying so right out. They’re the kind of crazy people who will question the most fundamental assumptions that we make. So heaven forbid that the entire faculty should consist of that sort of people, but there must be one or two of them just to get things going.

It’s like this too, you see: everybody needs to spend a certain amount of time out of every 24 hours—or at least out of every seven days—out of his mind. If you are sane all the time, you’re unreliable. You’re like a bridge that has no give in it, and it doesn’t sway at all in the wind. It’s a rigid bridge, it stands like that—fixed, always. And that’s a very brittle bridge. In exactly the same way, a political community that does not tolerate criticism is very insecure. I always remember, on Hyde Park Corner in London, you could get up on a soapbox and you could criticize God the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, His Majesty the King, the Prime Minister; say anything you like. The police would stand by and rub their chins and laugh. But nowadays, in our rather insecure political climate, you have to be increasingly careful what you say—especially in corporations and universities, where you might lose your job for being “controversial,” of all things.

So if one cannot stand this sort of… I call it “lunatic element” or “subversive element,” or whatever it is. It’s like putting spice in a stew. You don’t want the whole stew full of spice, but you want just a little bit. It keeps things alive. And so these things have to be tolerated, because otherwise one is suspicious that if you can’t tolerate them, you’re on the defensive about your own principles. And if you’re on the defensive about your own principles, you probably don’t believe in them. We get fanatical about things that don’t stand clear examination and positions for which we have no evidence. And I notice again and again that, in arguments in the newspaper, letters to the editor, and things like that, people who take some types of what you might call reactionary stand will never bring up any evidence. They’ll use all sorts of cuss words and loaded terms, but no evidence. So I think it’s important, therefore, for an institution of this kind to observe its proper percentage of oddballs, and for this reason to feel free to make experimental investigations into the study of the religious consciousness.

Now, such investigations can be of many kinds, ranging from giving grants available for people to go to Japan and India and Burma and so on, such places, to enter into religious communities and work along with the monks or members of an ashram, and actually partake in the disciplines of what they’re doing. That’s very important. It’s also important, however, to bring other points of view to bear on those sort of disciplines, and to provide facilities for neurological and psychiatric study of these disciplines. It’s also important to investigate the connection of these things with things that we know something about already, such as hypnosis. Is Zen meditation self-hypnosis? Well, for heaven’s sakes, try and see. Try and see with experiments in hypnosis whether you can get the same results as monks sitting in a monastery. What happens? What really goes on to people when they control their breath in certain ways? Is altered consciousness the result of hyperoxygenation? What is loneliness, the hermit, the cell? What does that got to do with sensory deprivation? Get working with the psychology department, or whoever else has sensory deprivation equipment, and see what happens to you.

Oh, about chemistry; brain chemistry. There is an awful lot to be done in that field. But it’s typical that it’s practically impossible to carry on that kind of research, except in a very limited way, because there’s a panic about it. All scientists in the past were willing to take risks. Lots of them experimented on themselves in ways that would now be considered very dangerous, as we can think of the history of x-rays. But nevertheless, if they hadn’t taken those risks on behalf of the rest of us, we would never have found these things out.

We have a kind of panic for not taking risks. I know of a high school where in the auditorium there is a great banner over the proscenium arch which says, “Safety first in all things.” Our children are overprotected. You see children in Japan or Mexico running around all over the place. They’re much freer. They play in circumstances that we would consider absolutely deplorable. But part of love is giving those you love the freedom of their own lives. If you were so possessive that you would feel yourself utterly crushed if an accident should happen to your child, it means you’re not really loving your child at all. You’re merely clutching your child as something that satisfies some need in you, which isn’t necessarily love at all. So I do think we’ve got to be willing to take risks in a line of inquiry which is, after all, quite dangerous. Nothing is more dangerous than religion, when you really come down to it. Because it is in this sort of, in this domain, as I was saying this morning, that we formulate the key suppositions upon which we act. It is here that we generate common sense.

Now take, for example—I’m just going to give an illustration—an idea like the following, and then you will realize how dangerous religion could be. Have you ever realized that, in the Spanish Inquisition, the Inquisitors were the sort of people whom we would regard in this day and age as the most eminent authorities? For example, the professor of surgery at a great medical school, or the chief astronomer at Palomar, or a physicist like Oppenheimer. The Inquisitors had that sort of status in their own day and age. And they not merely believed, but they knew, that people who suffered from heresy were going to be tortured forever and ever in hell. That wasn’t something you merely speculated about. It was in the current climate of opinion. You knew that that was what was going to happen. And therefore, first of all, out of kindness to these people, they had to be cured of heresy, because their immortal souls were in danger. And so when you are up against the danger as extreme as that, any measures will do to achieve your result. And so they invented their own kind of shock treatment. And furthermore, another awful thing about heresy is that it’s infectious, and you have to protect the community. I mean, today, imagine: just suppose the bubonic plague got going, what a disturbance there would be about cutting it off, isolating communities where this was breaking out. We would really go to it.

Now, we say, of course, the Inquisition was something of the Middle Ages. We don’t do things like that anymore. That just is unthinkable today. But let me give you a thought. Now, what I’m going to say now is a speculation. It isn’t necessarily something which I’m going to defend to the death, but it’s just an idea. Supposing it’s still going on right in the middle of this community, only we don’t know what we’re doing; we don’t recognize it. Of course we don’t—they didn’t recognize it then. The new form of heresy is called “mental illness.” One school of thought is called schizophrenia, rather like Protestantism used to be. There are others: paranoia, megalomania, all sorts of things. You must realize schizophrenia, in particular, is a very vague word. Nobody really knows what it is. But just entertain for a moment the idea that this is not a disease, but a heresy. It’s a way of looking at life which just doesn’t agree with other people’s impressions. A way of feeling, a way of interpreting experience, that is not in accordance with the orthodox kind of experience.

One should realize, you see, that experience is not something simply passive. When we receive experience, it isn’t just as if we were photographic plates or mirrors exposed to what is there. There are approved experiences and disapproved experiences, just as there are approved socially acceptable gestures and gestures that are not socially acceptable. So it is with experience. And we are very carefully trained to experience in certain ways. In other words, there are certain things that we just aren’t allowed to feel. And if by any chance these feelings should arise in people—like the typical joke question from a psychiatrist, “Do you ever have strange feelings?”—then we say the person is in danger of a mental disease.

Well now, Thomas Szasz and others have made a very hard-headed, serious critique of the whole idea of using a medical model for behavior and experience variations which are not directly capable of being related to organic damage. And they’re saying it’s the wrong model. These people are not sick, they are protesting in some way. They may in fact be showing symptoms of a healing process that is going on. And to treat it by trying to get rid of it would be like trying to cure chickenpox by cutting off the spots. Maybe these people are actually going through a painful process through which they are becoming liberated from a collective madness. And indeed there are indications that the human race is collectively crazy, insofar as it is on a suicide course. And we could think of some other things, too.

But here is a hypothesis which could be tested. That, when we get a person classified as mentally ill, we put him through a degradation ceremony. He is deprived of civil rights. And because he’s crazy, anything he says will ipso facto be wrong and evidence of craziness. If he doesn’t like this and starts to get obstreperous, then further restrictions are put on him. He is put in a solitary way. Eventually he’s trying to communicate, he’s trying to say something, and he feels mistrustful of himself because everybody around him doubts him. Finally he’s reduced to being put naked in a padded cell where all he has to express himself with is excrement. And we say, “Isn’t that typical of the sad case that the fellow’s in?” But it’s brought about by the circumstances. It’s not the individual, it’s the individual in a certain context: a context of total mistrust all around.

A clinical psychologist at Atascadero State Hospital was saying to me not so long ago, he said, “You know, people always ask about a given person: is he violent? And a person isn’t violent in the same way, quite, that a flower has five petals. He is violent in a certain context. And in that context, yes, violence will flare up. Is he a good husband? Maybe he is, but it also depends a bit on who he’s married to. It always takes two to make a quarrel.” So if, instead, you see, of the degradation ceremony and saying you are sick, immediately there’s an encounter, a psychiatric encounter. The person is a patient, and that means there’s something wrong with him. It used to be called wicked, you see, but now it’s called sick.

But supposing we worked in other ways? Supposing, for the sake of argument, we thought of a person who is experiencing life in an unusual way as growing in some direction, but disturbed only because of the resistance of the social environment to this kind of growth. And then we got this person into an institution where, instead of going through a degradation ceremony, he would go through an initiation ceremony, and be made perfectly clear that something special was happening, and the community is here to help him get through it and advance it and explore it. Maybe this is a religious crisis of some kind, spiritual crisis. But the trouble again is, you see, that in so many cases, whenever a patient in a mental hospital produces religious communications, then they know he’s nuts—especially if it has anything with Oriental religions, or weird things like that.

I remember a case of a young man in the Air Force who attended a school where I was teaching, and he got deeply involved into Oriental philosophy, and he had a classical awakening experience. But it was mighty strong stuff for him. But he was in the Air Force and he went AWOL. He couldn’t care less about going through all these procedures and so on. And his entire job in the Air Force was some stupid thing. It wasn’t connected with a plane; he never saw a plane. It was some kind of checking in and out at a desk somewhere. Well, we couldn’t handle him because he was the property of the Air Force. And the men in the white coats came along and they took him to hospital. And when he started talking about having studied Oriental philosophy, they just said, “Oh no, no, come now,” and they put him away. Finally he was returned to his family, and they put him into an institution where he had two years of shock treatment, and finally escaped and returned to the world as a very creative member of society, now engaged in a very important work.

Well, there’s a hypothesis. But you see how subversive it is? It simply turns things upside down. So far as we’re ordinarily concerned, it’s saying: sane people are mostly crazy, and crazy people are in certain cases on their way to becoming sane. You see what an inversion that is. Go back, however, in time, and you see that when the Buddha organized the sangha, they were all dropouts, and they adopted as their standard costume the yellow robe worn by convicts and said, “Well, we feel that the cosmology in which you people believe you are living in”—the order of society and the order of the world—“is pure agony, dukkha. You’re trying to solve unreal and illusory problems. You think that—by acquiring what you think is security, what you think is happiness, is merely a way of tormenting yourself. And if you’re sane at all, you’ll stop doing it. You’ll drop out.”

Do you realize Buddhism—in its initial form, as far as one can tell—is a critique of the notion that survival is the supreme good? It’s never been proved that it’s good to survive. You know, there’s really a choice whether you want to end up with a bang or a whimper. Some people would say it is good when something burns at a slow rate for a long time. That’s good. Other people would say: no, no, no, that’s boring. We want an enormous flash, and that’ll be that. Who’s right? That’s why lots of people love to do dangerous things. They feel more intensely alive than people who play it careful.

So I’m merely putting these suggestions out simply as a way of indicating that the realm of religious inquiry, the realm of investigating our basic assumptions, is a very dangerous adventure. Therefore, many people who carry on these things learn the art of protective coloring. And it is called esotericism. The reason for the esoteric—for a cautious attitude, for not telling everything, only to the initiate sort of thing—is that if the world at large found out what those people were really doing, it would have the screaming meemies. And you have to do the same thing—but do it consciously. That means: cultivating at the same time as you carry on such inquiries great academic respectability. It’s immensely important to have people going around in white coats, to have, when you do any practical investigations into religion, have plenty of scientific instruments. By all means get a computer, whether you use it or not. Because these are magical objects which will protect you in the same way as hex signs. And always be able to speak the right language.

See, that’s the trouble. When a person has schizophrenia, he gets into a difficulty. The difficulty is: he can’t talk the right language. A person who is what you might call a successful and adaptive mystic knows how to talk to people in their everyday language. And he doesn’t startle them—except in, say, in Zen circles. Now why is it, when you study Zen, that all these dialogues sound so funny? They sound absolutely nutty. Well, Zen masters did not, as a rule, carry on that sort of conversation with people who weren’t studying Zen. When you meet these people they are perfectly ordinary, able to handle the world in a very competent way and relate to anyone. And it’s only in the protected environment of the Zen school that there are occasions under which anything goes, and you are expected to react to a certain situation without stopping to think.

You see, what you’re doing—just to illustrate this sort of process—you’re learning to trust your own brain. And people who have only learned to think verbally don’t trust their brains. They say, “Wait a minute, I have time to think that out,” which means arrange a word order or a number order. That’s thinking it out. But one of the great difficulties of life is that there isn’t time to think things out, except very trivial things where an immediate decision is not important. How does one make decisions? Well, you gather a lot of evidence and facts and a lot of advice. And then you add it all up and you think, “Well, we can knock out this possibility and this possibility. We won’t do that. We come down to two things we might do. And the evidence on both sides is that either might be alright and either might be terribly wrong. Let’s flip a coin.” We do that all the time! Because in any human situation there are always infinitely many non-measurable variables which may upset the best laid plans. You never know. You sign a contract and you rely on this firm and so on, but you don’t know the president is not going to slip on a banana skin or have an automobile accident. There’s no way of figuring that out. So you flip coins. The Chinese invented the 64-sided coin for flipping, called The Book of Changes. They sometimes think things have more possibility than the merely two-sided coin.

So the point is, here: we do have in the human brain an extraordinary computer which can work at terrific speed and come up with some awfully sensible things. Because, after all, it is this brain that regulates the whole homeostasis of the human body, which is an astounding organization. And the thing that really proves how clever our brains are is that our best neurologists can’t understand them. So you’ve obviously got to trust your own brain, because if you can’t trust your own brain there’s nothing you can trust. So a lot of these experiments that are being done are experiments in brain trusting: in learning to act spontaneously and make instant decisions without hesitation.

It’s for this reason that Zen got connected with the practice of judo, because in judo you’ve got to act before you think. Because if you stop the think, it’s too late. And judo is not really building in reflexes, because you can only build in a certain number of reflexes, and then you wait for an enemy to attack you in a way for which you haven’t learned a reflex, and then you’re in trouble. It is actually, as it were, cultivating a kind of complex perception and intelligence which we don’t ordinarily exercise in a culture which overvalues thinking—that is to say, negotiating life primarily with the aids of words, numbers, and similar symbols.

Now, I can put this another way and you will see in this sort of thing—any of you with any psychological or scientific training—will immediately see possibilities for experiments. The thing that seems to have happened in the development of language is that we’ve learned to identify ourselves, our ego, with a peculiar and restricted use of perception or conscious attention. When we were little children and we were in classroom and, you know, we were goofing off, and looking all over the place, and picking on noses, and throwing spitballs at people, the teacher would slap the desk and say, “Pay attention!” And all the kids know exactly what to do: they wrap their legs around the leg of the chair and stare at the teacher. Because then they look as if they’re paying attention. Actually, they’re not! They’re thinking about paying attention, but they’re not necessarily listening to the lesson.

How do you force yourself to listen? Because that’s a distraction from listening. In order to concentrate you’ve got to trust your mind. You’ve got to let go and let the information come in. If you want to remember, you’ve got to simply assume that you will remember instead of hammering the phrases into your head. Assume that you’ve got a memory. Trust it.

So what has happened in something like this, as far as I can see: we’ve specialized in a form of awareness and attention—which is rather like the scanning process of radar—and we constantly scan our environment. We select those features of the environment that we consider noteworthy, that they have some sort of significance. And for those we have a notation. See, what is notable has a notation. Make a note of it. So words are designed to pick out those features of the environment. We have names for the things that we think are noteworthy. You’ve got the tailor who went to see the pope, and they said, “What was he like?” And he said, “He was about a size 40.” Noteworthy to the tailor. What’s important about rabbits? Are they cuddly? Good for fur coats? Or for stewed rabbit? You see, it’s whether you’re a cook or a furrier or a child looking at the thing.

So, quite obviously, we perceive an enormous number of things that we don’t notice. If you’re a husband and you go out for some meeting, and the lady is there, and you go back home and your wife says, “Was Mrs. So-and-so there?” You say, “Yes, I was talking to her.” “What was she wearing?” “I haven’t the faintest idea.” You saw, but you didn’t notice. So, as a result of this, you see, we are using a restricted consciousness. And we say, as a result of using that: you can only think of one thing at a time. One thing at a time is too slow. Most people cannot deal with more than three variables without using a pencil. You learn something more than that when you start playing the organ and you’ve got two keyboards, and you’ve got different rhythms going for each hand and another rhythm going for each foot. See, you’re beginning to loosen up a bit then. You are becoming unrigid. But there are all sorts of critical things happening all the time on which we have to decide so suddenly that there’s no time to think in the ordinary way. But many people are somehow peculiarly gifted at acting intelligently under such circumstances because you’re more intelligent than you think.

So this sort of inquiry means, when I say a scientific approach to nonverbal intelligence, non-symbolic intelligence. That’s the whole point in the Buddhistic, Taoistic, and a great deal of Hindu practice is called the state of dhyāna, which is the attitude of observing the environment—both the interior environment of the organism and the external environment of nature—without thinking about it. Now ordinarily, you see, this sounds like stupidity. But it’s only by thinking that I can say I’m different from you. A baby knows you’re no more different from me than my head is different from my feet. Well sure, the feet are different from the head because it’s all one body, but the body polarizes itself in different aspects. But my experience of you is a state of my nervous system. I know you by digesting you neurologically. And you know me the same way. It’s mutual, see?

So the separateness of things is conceptual, and it’s necessary to suspend concepts. This is very important academically, because you can get to the point where a library is nothing but a self-breeding concept machine in which books are about books are about books are about books are about books. It’s sort of disintegrating like a great cheese. It has mitosis. And so these poor PhD students are grubbing around, writing volumes about other volumes, and they’re making condensations of it. See, this is one of the great problems in information theory. In certain fields of science so much information is coming out that nobody can possibly read it, and so you have to make digests. And that means later digests of digests. And then where are we going to store the stuff? Well, we’ve got to have microfilms and new kinds of miniaturization of data. Should call it “capta” rather than data. But what about it?

Well, the difficulty in that is not only that it’s becoming unmanageable—and again, the difficulty of thought coping with something that requires speed—but also that it’s slowly moving away from reality. By reality I mean what we call the physical world. And consequently, it’s exactly the same situation as if I never stopped talking. If I do that, you see, I never hear what anybody else has to say. Now, it’s the same problem for a person who never stops thinking. He never has anything to think about except thinking. You’ve got to stop thinking.