We are living in a world where deviant opinions about religion are no longer dangerous because nobody takes religion seriously. And therefore you can be like Bishop Pike and question the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the reality of the virgin birth, and the physical resurrection of Jesus, and still remain a bishop in good standing. But what you can’t get away with today—or at least you have great difficulty in getting away with—is psychiatric heresy. Because psychiatry is taken seriously. And indeed, I would like to draw a parallel between today and the Middle Ages with respect of this whole question.

When we go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, we must remember that the professor of theology at the University of Seville has the same kind of social prestige and intellectual standing that today would be enjoyed by the professor of pathology at Stanford Medical School. And you must bear in mind that this theologian, like the professor of pathology today, is a man of good will, intensely interested in human welfare. He didn’t merely opine; that professor of theology knew that anybody who had heretical religious views would suffer everlasting agony of the most appalling kind. And some of you should read the imaginative descriptions of the sufferings of Hell, written not only in the Middle Ages, but in quite recent times by men of intense intellectual acumen. And therefore, out of real merciful motivation, the Inquisitors thought that it was the best thing they could do to torture heresy out of those who held it. Worse still, heresy was infectious, and would contaminate other people and put them in this immortal danger. And so with the best motivations imaginable—they used the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron maiden, the leaded cat o’ nine tails, and finally the stake—to get these people to come to their senses, because nothing else seemed to be available.

Today, serious heresy—and rather peculiarly in the United States—is a deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions as having a kind of experience which is different from “regular” experience. And as Ronald Laing, who is going to participate in this series, has so well pointed out, we are taught what experiences are permissible in the same way as we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behavior is permissible and socially acceptable. And therefore, if a person has so-called strange experiences, and endeavors to communicate these experiences—because, naturally, one talks about what one feels—he endeavors to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked at in a very odd way and asked, “Are you feeling alright?” Because people feel distinctly uncomfortable when the realize they are in the presence of someone who is experiencing the world in a rather different way from themselves. They call in question as to whether this person is indeed human. They look like a human being, but because the state of experience is so different, you wonder whether they really are.

And you get the same kind of queasy feeling inside as you would get if, for the sake of example, you were to encounter a very beautiful girl, very formally dressed, and you were introduced, and in order to shake hands she removed her glove, and you found you had in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would be spooky, wouldn’t it? Or let’s suppose that you were looking at a rose, and you looked down in the middle where the petals are closed, and you suddenly saw them open like lips, and the rose addressed you and said, “Good morning.” You would feel something uncanny was going on. And in rather the same way, in an everyday kind of circumstance, when you are sitting in a bar drinking, and you find you have a drunk next to you. And he turns to you and said, [imitated drunk slurring], and you sort of move your stool a little ways away from this man, because he’s become in some way what we mean by nonhuman.

Now, we understand the drunk: we know what’s the matter with him, and it’ll wear off. But when, quite unaccountably, a person gives representation that he’s suddenly got the feeling that he’s living in backwards time, or that everybody seems to be separated from him by a huge sheet of glass, or that he’s suddenly seeing everything in unbelievably detailed moving colors, we say, “Well, that’s not normal. Therefore there must be something wrong with you.” And the fact that we have such an enormous percentage of the population of this country in mental institutions is a thing we may have to look at from a very different point of view—not that there may be a high incidence of mental sickness, but that there may be a high incidence of intolerance of variations of consciousness.

Now, in Arabian countries where the Islamic religion prevails, a person whom we would define as mentally deranged is regarded with a certain respect. The village idiot is looked upon with reverence, because it is said his soul is not with his body, it is with Allah. And because his soul is with Allah, you must respect this body and care for it, not as something that is to be sort of swept away and put out of sight, but as something of a reminder that a man can still be living on Earth while his soul is in heaven. A very different point of view. Also in India, there is a certain difference in attitude to people who would be called [???], because—there is an ancient poem of the Hindus which says, “Sometimes naked, sometimes mad. Now as a scholar, now as a fool. Thus they appear on Earth, the free men.”

But, you see, we, in our attitude to this sort of behavior—which is essentially in its first inception harmless—these people are talking what we regard to be nonsense, and to be experiencing nonsense. We feel threatened by that because we are not secure in ourselves. A very secure person can adapt himself with amazing speed to different kinds of communication. In foreign countries, for example, where you don’t speak the language of the people you are staying with, if you don’t feel ashamed of this, you can set up an enormous degree of communication with other people through gesture—and even something most surprising, people can communicate with each other by simply talking. You can get a lot across to people by talking intelligent nonsense; by, as it were, imitating a foreign language, speaking like it sounds. You can communicate feeling, emotion, like and dislike of this, that, and the other very simply. But if you are rigid and are not willing to do this type of playing, then you feel threatened by anybody who communicates with you in a funny way.

And so this rigidity sets up a kind of vicious circle. The minute, in other words, somebody makes an unusual communication to you about an unusual state of consciousness, and you back off, the individual wonders, “Is there something wrong with me? I don’t seem to be understood by anyone.” Or he may wonder, “What’s going on? Has everybody else suddenly gone crazy?” And then, if he feels that, he gets frightened. And to the degree that he gets more frightened, he gets more defensive. And they eventually end up with being catatonic, which is a person who simply daren’t move.

And so then, what we do is: we whiffle him off to an institution where he is captured by the inquisitors. These are the very special priesthood, and they have all the special marks that priesthoods have always had. They have a special vestment. Like the Catholic priest at mass wears a chasuble, the mental doctor (like every physician) wears a long white coat, and may carry something that corresponds, shall we say, so a stole, which is a stethoscope around his neck. He will then, under his authority—which is often in total defiance of every conceivable civil liberty—will incarcerate this incomprehensible person and, as Laing has pointed out, he undergoes a ritual of dehumanization. And he’s put away. And because the hospitals are so crowded with people of this kind, he’s going to get very little attention.

And it’s very difficult to know, when you get attention, how to work with it. You get into this Kafka-esque situation which you get, say, in the state of California, if you are sent to such an institute as Vacaville Prison, which is—as you drive on the highway from San Francisco to Sacramento, you will encounter Vacaville about halfway between. You will see a great sign which says “California State Medical Facility.” The state of California is famous for circumlocution. When you go underneath a low bridge, instead of saying “Low Bridge,” it says “Impaired Vertical Clearance.” Or when you’re going to cross a toll bridge, instead of saying, plainly, “Toll Bridge,” it says “Entering Vehicular Crossing.” And when it should be saying, plainly, “Prison,” it says either “California State Medical Facility,” or “California State Correctional Facility,” as it does at Soledad.

Now, Vacaville is a place where people get sent on what they call a one- to ten-year sentence. And there is a supervising psychiatric medical sort of social service staff there, who examine the inmates—once in a while, because they have such a large number. It’s actually a maximum security prison, much more ringed around with defenses than even San Quentin. And I went there to lecture to the inmates some time ago. They wanted someone to talk to them about meditation and yoga. And one of the inmates took me aside—a very kind of clean-cut, all-American boy—and he had been put in there probably for smoking pot; I’m not absolutely sure in my memory what the offense was. He said, “You know, I am very puzzled about this place. I really want to go straight and get out and get a job and live like an ordinary person.” He said “I simply don’t know how to go about it. I’ve just been refused release. I went up before the committee, I talked to them. But I don’t know what the rules of the game are.” And, incidentally, the members of the committee doesn’t, either.

So we have these situations, you see, of confusion, so that when a person goes into a mental hospital and feels, first of all, perhaps, that he should try to sort himself out and talk reasonably with the physician, there is introduced into the communications system between them a fundamental element of fear and mistrust. Because I could talk to any individual—if I were malicious—and interpret every sane remark you make as something deeply sinister. That would simply exhibit my own paranoia. And a psychiatrist can very easily get paranoid, because the system that he is asked to represent, officially, is paranoid.

I talked with a psychiatrist in England just a few weeks ago. One of the most charming women I’ve come across—an older woman, very intelligent, quite beautiful, very reasonable—and she was discussing with me the problem of the LSD psychosis. I asked her what sort of treatments they were using, and all sorts of questions about that, and she appeared at first to be somewhat on the defensive about it. Then we got onto the subject of the experience of what is officially called depersonalization, where you feel that you and your sensuous experience—that is to say, all that you do experience: the people, the things, the animals, the buildings around you—that it’s all one. And I said, “Do you call this a hallucination? After all,” I said, “it fits the facts of science, of biophysics, of ecology, of biology much better than our ordinary normal experience fits it.” She said, “That’s not my problem.” She said, “That may be true, but I am employed by a society which feels that it ought to maintain a certain average kind of normal experience. And my job is to restore people to what society considers normal consciousness. I have no alternative but to leave it at that.”

So then, when someone is introduced into this situation, and it’s very difficult to get attention, you feel terrified. The mental hospital, often in its very architecture, suggests some of the great visions of madness, of—you know that feeling of, to use Sir Francis Thompson’s phrase, the corridors of the mind? That you got lost in a maze and you couldn’t get back. And you’re not quite sure who you are, or whether your father and mother are your real father and mother, or whether in the next ten minutes you’re still going to remember how to speak English. You feel very lost. And the mental hospital, in its architecture and everything, represents that situation: endless corridors, all the same. Which one are you in? Where are you? Will you ever get out? And it goes on monotonously, day after day after day after day. And somebody who talks to you occasionally doesn’t have a straight look in his eye. He doesn’t treat you as quite human. He looks at you as if you’re weird. What are you to do? The only thing to do is get violent, if you really want to get out. And then they say, “Well, that’s proof that you’re crazy.” And then, as you get more violent, they put you off by yourself, and the only alternative you have, the only way of expressing yourself, is to throw shit at the walls. And then they say, “Well, that’s conclusive. The person isn’t human.”

Well, the question has been raised a great deal in the last few days on the television, as to whether this is a sick society. And I have listened to a perfectly beautiful psychoanalyst with a thick German accent. Oh, marvelous thing! You know: “It is quite obvious that the society is hopeless, you see.” And I have listened to full red-blooded Americans saying, “Most people in this society are good people, and it’s a good society, but we have a very sick minority.” See? Eugh!

Now, so what I want to do in, certainly, this first part of the seminar, is to call in question, very fundamentally, all of our basic ideas about what is sickness and what is health, what is sanity and what is insanity. Because I think we have to begin from the position of humility: that we really don’t know. It’s reported that, shortly before he died, Robert Oppenheimer, looking at the picture of technology, especially nuclear technology, said, “It’s, I’m afraid, perfectly obvious that the world is going to hell. It’s going to destroy itself, it’s on collision course. The only way in which it might not go to hell is that we do not try to prevent it from doing so.” Think that one over. Because it can well be argued that the major troublemakers in the world today are those people with good intentions. Like the professor of theology at the University of Seville, professor of psychiatry at wherever you will. The idea that we know who is sick, who is wrong.

Now, we are living in a political situation right now where a most fantastic thing is occurring. Everybody knows what they’re against; nobody knows what they’re for. Because nobody is thinking any longer in terms of: what would be a great style of life? The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There’s no earthly reason—there’s no physical, technical reason—for there being any poverty at all anywhere. But, you see, there are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money. They don’t know how to use it, they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination. I’m announcing—not the date, but the intention of conducting—a seminar for extremely rich people entitled Are You Rich and Miserable? Because you very probably are. Some aren’t, but most are.

Now, the thing is that we are living in this situation where everybody knows what they’re against. And even if they say, “I’m against the war in Vietnam. I am against discrimination against colored people, or against any different race than the discolored race,” and so on. Yeah, so what? But it’s not enough to feel like that. That’s nothing. You must have some completely concrete vision of what you would like, and therefore I’m making a serious proposition that everybody who goes into college should, as his entrance examination, have the task of writing an essay on his idea of heaven, in which he is asked to be absolutely specific. He is not allowed, for example, to say, “I would like to have a very beautiful girl to live with.” What do you mean by a beautiful girl? Exactly how, and in what way? Specifically. You know, down to the last wiggle of the hips, and down to every kind of expression of character and sociability and her interests and all. Be specific! And about everything like that. “I would like a beautiful house to live in.” Just exactly what do you mean by a beautiful house? Well, you’ve suddenly got to study architecture. You see? And finally, this preliminary essay on “My Idea of Heaven” turns into his doctoral dissertation.

So in a situation where we all know what we’re against, and we don’t know what we’re for, then we know who we’re against. We’re defining all sorts of people as non-human. We say they’re totally irrational. They’re totally stupid. People will say, “Oh, those [black people], they’re completely uneducated. They’ll never learn a thing. There’s nothing you can do about it. They’re hopeless! Get rid of them!” The Birchers are saying the same sort of thing. Other people, liberals, are saying the same thing about the Birchers. “They’re stupid, get rid of them!” The only result, then—anything anybody can think of in this sort of situation is: “Get your gun.” And this sets up a vicious circle, because everybody else gets his gun.

And the point from which we have to begin, then, is that we don’t know who is healthy and who is sick, who is right and who is wrong. And furthermore, we have to start, I think, from the assumption that because we don’t know, there isn’t anything we can do about it. There’s a Turkish proverb that I like to quote: “He who sleeps on the floor cannot fall out of bed.” Therefore, we should make it a basic assumption about life that even, supposing you could improve society, and you could improve yourself, you were never sure that the direction you moved it in would be an improvement.

A Chinese story, kind of a Taoistic story, about a farmer. One day his horse ran away, and all the neighbors gathered in the evening and said, “That’s too bad.” He said, “Maybe.” Next day, the horse came back and brought with it seven wild horses. “Wow!” they said. “Aren’t you lucky!” He said, “Maybe.” The next day, his son grappled with one of these wild horses and tried to break it in, and he got thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbors said, “Oh, that’s too bad that your son broke his leg.” He said, “Maybe.” The next day, the conscription officers came around, gathering young men for the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And the visitors all came around and said, “Isn’t that great! Your son got out!” He said, “Maybe.”

You see, you never really know in which direction progress lies. And this is today a fantastic problem for geneticists. The geneticists, you know, because they think they are within some degree of controlling the DNA and RNA codes, believe that it is really possible, perhaps, to breed the kind of human beings that we ought to have. And they say “Hooray!” But they think one moment and they think, “Ah, a, ah, ah, ah! But what kind of human being?” So they’re very worried. And just a little while ago, a national committee of graduate students and geneticists had a meeting at the University of California, and they asked a group of psychologists, theologians, and philosophers to come and reason with them about this and give them some advice. And I was included—that means that they are really desperate. So I said, “I’ll tell you what, the only thing you can do is to be quite sure that you keep a vast variety of different kinds of human beings. Because you never know what’s going to happen next.” And therefore we need an enormous, shall I say, varied battery of different kinds of human intelligence and resources and abilities, so that there will always be some kind of person available for any emergency that might turn up.

So, you see, there’s a total fallacy in the idea of preaching to people. This is why I abandoned the ministry, as I’ve often said, not because the church didn’t practice what it preached, but because it preached. Because you cannot tell people what sort of pattern of life they ought to have. Because if they followed your advice, you might have a breed of monsters. So let’s look at it from the point of view that the human race is a breed of monsters.

I was thinking about it this afternoon, driving from Monterey down to here, and looking at the freeways, and all these little cars going along them, and I was wondering if I considered that the planet was a physical body like my own: whether I might not feel that this was some sort of an invasion of weird bacteria that were eating me up. Whether it may be that the birds and the bees and the flowers, and the animals in general, are kind of healthy bacteria, you see. But there suddenly come into the system—bees and birds sort of wander about, generally mix in with the forest and the fields, and carry on a rather disorganized but highly interesting pattern of life, whereas human beings go kchheoww: they cut straight lines across everything; railways. They cover themselves with junk. A bird may have a little nest, but it doesn’t have to surround itself with automobiles and books and buildings and phonograph records and universities and clutter up the whole landscape with a lot of bric-a-brac. Human beings pride themselves on this, you see. This is culture. This is a great achievement. Build a building, you know? It’s all you can get money for. You can’t get money for professors, but you can get them for new buildings. And so we cover the Earth with clutter. And so the Earth could feel just as if we might feel if suddenly we got a disease which, instead of leaving us soft-skinned, covered us with crystalline scabs. And this would be proliferating all over the place—a pox! Are we a pox on the planet? Don’t be too sure that we’re not.

Consider simply this: there is a good argument—let me remind you, I’m saying these things to provoke you; to make you a little insane by being in doubt of all the assumptions which you think are firmly true. It is quite possible, you see, that the whole enterprise of man to control events on the Earth by his conscious intelligence, by his language, by his mathematics, and by his science is a disaster. We say: look at his successes. Look how much disease we have cured, look how much hunger has been abolished, look how we have raised the standard of living. Yeah. But in how long a time?

Well, even if we say this started with the dawn of known history, it’s a tiny little fragment of time as compared with the time in which the human species has existed. And if it’s the Industrial Revolution, it narrows down to the teeniest, weeniest little bit of time. How do we know this is progress? How do we know that this is a success? It may be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It may be. But the truth is we don’t know.

Of course, it could be possible that every star in the heavens was once a planet, and that planet developed intelligent life, which in due course discovered the secrets of atomic energy, blew itself up into a chain reaction, and as it exploded throughout various masses which began in due course to spin around it, became planets, and after a while developed intelligent life. After millions of years, as the central star cooled off, they blew themselves up in turn, and that’s the way the thing goes on. That’s of course the theory of the Hindus—not literally, but they do have the theory, you see, that life, every manifestation of the universe, begins in a glorious way, and then it deteriorates. But of course everything does. Isn’t everything always falling apart and getting older and fading out? Why shouldn’t various species, why shouldn’t various planets, why shouldn’t various universes be going through the same course? You see, that’s a totally upside-down view with respect to our common sense. We think everything ought to be growing and improving and getting better and better and better and better and better. Look at it the other way around. It might be quite different.

Then there’s another thought. We know that, really, the truth, the way things are, is an interaction—or better, transaction—between the physical world and our sense organs. And that, therefore, what we know as existence is a relationship. It is the way certain (what we will call for the moment) electrical vibrations make impression upon sense organs of a certain structure. Now, that’s a limited way of talking about it, but it’ll do for the moment. Therefore, according to the structure of the sense organs, the vibrations will appear or be manifested in different ways. In other words, I can move my finger, like this, and if it happens to pluck the string of a violin, it will go plunng. In which case my finger and its motion will be manifested as plunng. But if it should so happen that I strike the string of a bass fiddle, it will go, bonnng, and so the finger will be bonnng. But if the same motion should strike the skin of a drum, thunk. So the finger will be thunk.

Now, what is it really? What is that motion truly? It’s whatever it interacts with. If it goes across somebody else’s skin, it’ll be something that I can’t make a noise about. It’d be a feeling. If it does it in front of an eye, it will be what we call a motion. So depending on the structure of (shall we say for the moment) the receptor organs, so will the reality be.

Now, behind the receptor organs—the senses are not at all simple—behind the senses they are inseparable from an extraordinarily complex neurological structure. And not only that, but a system of cultural standards as to what events are to be noticed and what events are to be ignored: what is important for a certain reason (such as survival), and what is unimportant. And therefore we further modify the selectivity of the sense organs, and of the nervous system as a whole, with a selective system of what is considered culturally real or unreal, important or unimportant.

So we end up, you see, with the possibility that so complex a selective system may have very great variations, and that people that we call crazy have a different system of evaluation. They may have a difference of neural structure, as would obviously be the case if there were lesions caused by syphilis, or by brain tumors. But what about something not quite at that level, but at the level of the selectivity they imply which would correspond to what I’ve called social conditioning?

Now, we know the proverb that “genius is to madness close allied.” And how do we know whether a certain modification in the structure of the whole sensory perceptive system is a sickness, or whether it is the growing edge, some kind of new improvement, of the human being? Well, we have certain very, very rough standards which we apply to this. But we can never be quite sure, because what we call sanity is mob rule. Sanity is simply the vote of organisms that recognize themselves to be human, and they get together and say, “Well, the way we see it is the way it is.” And you will remember in Kipling’s story in the Jungle Book called “Kaa’s Hunting” how the monkeys, the Bandar-log, are laughed at, because every so often they get together in a meeting and shout, “We all say so, so it must be true!”

But herein, you see, lie the deepest political problems. How is the majority to tolerate, to absorb, to evaluate, a minority? It’s an academic problem. We have standards as to who are sound scholars, reliable scientists. We give them a PhD: thunk! And they all get together and uphold the standards. [Audio cut] realize that they’re getting a little narrow, and that things aren’t going on, and suddenly somebody says one day, “Old So-And-So, who we always thought quite mad and very, very unorthodox, has suddenly come up with an idea that we’ve got to think about.”

So one would say that every university faculty has to include in its membership at least five percent screwballs. Every culture has to tolerate within its domain a lot of weird people. Now, there’s no possibility that everybody in the United States is going to be a hippie. But the fact that a large number of young people are hippies should be a matter of congratulations, even if you don’t want to live that way yourself. Not to mention the various racial variations that we have among us: [black people], Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and so forth. All this is exceedingly important because, as I said to the geneticists, this preserves variety. And a culture which is insecure in itself—I’m getting back to a sort of starting point—cannot tolerate this.

Now, in England—as I remember it—they were much more secure. When I was a boy, fifteen years old, in a very orthodox Church of England school, I announced that I was a Buddhist. Nobody turned a hair. Here, if somebody announces that he’s something strange, they have to go before the principal, and there’s a big problem, and the FBI is brought in, and this, that, and the other. But they said “Jolly wot, the man’s a Buddhist!” And positively encouraged me in my deviant interest, and gave me the first prize in the divinity class. Now, exactly the same kind of relaxed attitude is necessary here.

There’s no possibility that, is it really—let’s ask a few questions that don’t need answers. Is the American family such a drag that a few kids living in free-love communes are a fundamental threat to it and will pervert all our nice boys and girls to live that way? Are American universities so boring that a few students who drop out and form their own universities are a threat to the total system, and will pervert all the other nice children in there? Are a few kids going around in elegant beards and long hair going to turn all our boys into—are they going to beguile them and turn them all into weirdos?

Say, I had a funny experience. When I was in England I attended services at Westminster Abbey. I took my wife there because I really wanted to her to see this thing, because it’s the heart and soul of British establishment. The dean of Westminster is like the Dalai Lama almost. They had this very elegant Victorian service. Beautiful vestments, choir, and everything. And as they were coming out in procession, the choir came first, which were little boys with proper haircuts and all those surplices, and red cassocks on. And suddenly I saw before my eyes an apparition. There were a number of older boys wearing surplices—there’s a special kind of surplice that is worn by a scholar of a British public school. You know, the public schools are not public schools, they’re very private schools, very exclusive schools. And the school of Westminster is one of the top, like Eaton or Harrow. Suddenly, these boys in surplices turn up, with these enormous Beatles haircuts swishing all over the place. I couldn’t believe my eyes, because I used to be a King’s Scholar, and in our day, we were very proper and all wore mortarboards over short hair. And then, behind these surpliced boys, there were the commoners of the school, who were not King’s Scholars and therefore didn’t wear surplices, but wore striped black pants, black coats, wing collars, and black ties. And we always used to walk in procession as we came out, sort of like this. But here were these boys with a similar hairdo coming out! I thought, “My god, what’s going on? This is Westminster Abbey!” But the dean of Westminster doesn’t turn a hair. He takes it all in stride. He’s perfectly secure. He knows he is who he is. He was ordained by Apostolic succession by Jesus Christ and everything else, and it’s alright. And if some few nuts want to come in and do something different, so what?

Now, you see, that’s the attitude that we have to have in regard to everything deviant, psychotic, and weird. Because we are not sure what’s right, who’s sane, which end is up. So I mean by the fundamental image that, in a relativistic universe, you don’t cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is: it’s kind of a relaxed attitude to the water in which you don’t keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it. And it’s just the same with relationships to people all around.

In the discussion last night I was explaining the problem of the relativity of sanity and of health, and the necessity of our having an attitude of great humility to what we consider to be right and wrong ways of behavior, and more especially of experiencing. And in course of discussion I raised the question that we had to entertain the possibility that the way man has civilized himself may, from one point of view, be a mistake. It might be a form of insanity. And therefore people who, in one way or another, break away from that form of life could be argued as being more sane than the rest of us. To use an image that Ronald Laing has employed in his book The Politics of Experience, if you see a squadron of airplanes moving across the sky, and then you notice that one of them peels off and goes in a different direction, which group is on course? We don’t know. Because the one that’s peeled off may have decided that the rest had lost their direction, and had reestablished a direction, and was (in a way) on the right course. And his whole theory of the treatment of schizophrenia, in particular, is that it is a painful symptom of readjustment to reality. Nobody’s going to say it’s fun to be schizophrenic, just as it isn’t fun to have a fever. But a fever is not a disease, it is a symptom of health; a symptom of the forces of the organism expelling an invading form of bacteria. And so if you suppress the fever, you’re liable to kill the patient.

So, in the same way, we don’t know whether schizophrenic behavior—and incidentally, schizophrenic behavior is such a vague term that it has really no exact or scientific meaning. So we must be open to the possibility that these things are to be studied from the point of view that they represent variations of reality just in the same way that we find variations in all insect, plant, and animal species. I was at one time an amateur entomologist, and I knew entomologists who were busy collecting varieties (as they call them) of common white butterflies, or various forms of sphinx moth, so on, all down the line in the fratillaries when it comes across the most interesting varieties of the standard species. And it’s interesting, you see" they just call them varieties. They didn’t call them deformed types or anything like that. They just had wing markings that departed from standard, and sometimes features of the antennae, and other things like that. So we have to realize that there may be varieties of experience among human beings that are simply varieties. Sometimes a variety represents a kind of intermediate form between two different species.

But I don’t know. there’s a certain sentimentality, I suppose, in the attitude that civilization is a departure from the sanity of nature. But there’s something about animals—wildlife particularly; I don’t mean domestic animals, except perhaps cats. Dogs have been spoiled by mankind; they’re turned into flatterers. But there’s something about the creatures of the wild wherein one sees an extraordinary dignity. I live on a ferryboat in Sausalito, and from my main window I watch all the time wild birds in great variety come and play around. And, for some reason or other, even gulls. I think sometimes gulls are just sort of winged hunger. They seem so rapacious. But even then, there’s something that I cannot quite put my finger on about these creatures that makes me feel that they have a sanity of an extraordinary kind.

Some animal species, in particular ants and bees, have followed their forms of life almost unvaried for millions of years. For they’re creatures that have no history. Because one day is just the same as another, one season just the same as another. But human beings are all terribly excited about history. And we think that in history—there are a lot of theologians who maintain that, in the course of history, we see the unfolding of the mighty acts of God. Somehow, history is a significant motion towards something extraordinarily good. As Tennyson put it: “That one far-off divine event to which all creation moves.” And I’ve been awfully suspicious of this for a long time. When I was in theological studies, I kept arguing with those Christians who insisted that history was, in a way, fundamental to an understanding of Christianity, because the incarnation of Jesus Christ was not a mythological event, but a historical event: something that did happen and initiated a new process in the development of mankind.

Well, I have an idea that history is a disease—at least I’m going to entertain this possibility. That, as Emerson put it in one of his essays: “These roses under my window do not meditate as to whether they are worse or better than former roses. The rose,” he says, “is the rose. It exists just that it is with God today. Whereas mankind, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future or to regret the past.” And I know a Zen master—he’s, I’m afraid, deceased—who told me that it was reading that passage in Emerson that enabled him to penetrate the meaning of the first kōan that his teacher gave him.

So history is this tremendous preoccupation with events in such a way that the movement of life, in its design from the past into the future, becomes (as it were) where it’s at. But when you are preoccupied with the design of motion in that particular way, you become preoccupied with events that you do not experience directly. The past is not here, except in the reflected form of memory. The future is not here, except in the imagined form of anticipation. And, as a consequence of that, one lives an impoverished present. Because the present is reduced to the hairline crosspoint that stands between the past (which has gone) and the future (which is not yet here).

And this, of course, is represented on the dial of the watch by the fact that this moment is indicated by a very thin hairline; as thin as possible to be consistent with visibility. And that represents in a highly symbolic and significant way the present in which most people live. This is the result of our being in a hurry, of living in constant anticipation (whether pleasant or painful), of being incapable, really, of being present, of being all here.

So we think when we consider the possibility of a non-historical civilization that it would be exceedingly boring. No progress. And we look at some places that we consider backwaters, or what we consider backward countries, and it’s always characteristic of such places that they are somewhat non-historical, that they are humdrum, that there isn’t a great deal of excitement. And as you read the chronicles of certain cultures of the past, you’re amazed to see that they have no sense of history at all.

This is particularly true of ancient India. It absolutely bedevils the scholars that, in these texts that are handed down from generation to generation, a long time before they were committed to writing, they were remembered, passed down orally. And thus when a certain king was named, and the historians would like to use that name as a means of dating the text, you’re never quite sure. Because in the oral transmission they may simply alter the name of the king to fit the present king, simply because, naturally, one does that because things are always the same. And so the king who is king today is really holding the same office, and in that sense is the same person (mask) as a king who lived long ago.

But, you see, as I said: from our point of view that seems extraordinarily boring. But it would only be boring for those who lack a rich present. Obviously, if you don’t know how to be completely alive here and now, that kind of thing would be just devastatingly monotonous. But apparently, you see, for the bees and the ants it isn’t something awful, because they go on living rather successfully. And we despise them. We say of these creatures: they are mere bees, mere ants. And we think that, for example, if the communist idea of politics were to prevail, everybody would become ants. It simply isn’t true. Because nothing is more historical in its emphasis than Marxism. Marxism is entirely bound up with the philosophy that history has an inner momentum which will inevitably bring certain things about, and that the appearance of Marxism, the Marxist revolution, is (as they say) a historical necessity.

The real reason why we are contemptuous of bees and ants is that we don’t understand them. We look at them from a certain point of view which is selective and therefore there are many things about their lives which we either don’t notice or are incapable of noticing. When von Frisch discovered that bees have language, and that the language is conveyed by a dance, that may be only one form of bees’ language. But you should all read that very little short book he wrote called Bees, because, among other things, it is an absolutely perfect example of scientific reasoning and experimentation. Very simply and lucidly expressed. And there was a famous entomologist at UCLA who, when this book came out, said, “I have the most passionate reluctance to accept this evidence.” You see, it was something that exploded the myth that bees were mere insects.

Be warned that there are insects that are resistant to radioactivity. And that when we had at Northwestern an entomologist called Dr. Park, he was always terrifying his students with accounts of the powers of insects, and his prediction that they would eventually take over the world. And, you see, insects (in a way) give us the horrors. Imagine when you blow up an insect to enormous size, and we see these things like spiders with mandibles, and they have hard, crickly shells around them. They buzz, they bite, they jump unpredictably. And we feel absolutely weird. They are the complete denial of the human image. But I have a friend who lives in Big Sur who, when she moved here, found that she had black widow spiders all over the place in her house. And that every time she put her shoes on, she had to knock them to be sure there wasn’t a black widow in it. And she had the horrors. But she had a very smart idea. She bought a book about spiders, and she ordered from some lab biological specimens of black widow spiders encased in plastic. And she studied black widow spiders and found out everything about them she could. And her fear disappeared. She knew how to live with these creatures. And people who study spiders find them extraordinarily admirable beings. And it’s in exactly that way, you see. It’s that sort of approach which we should adopt towards various human deviations. Study it. Get acquainted with it.

I had a letter from a woman down in Santa Barbara who lives near an airport. And she said she simply cannot stand the constant interference of airplanes. Innumerable little buzzy private planes that go over a house and keep her in a frazzle all the time. So I said to her: “Get a book on airplanes, and learn to identify all the different types. And, if necessary, take flying lessons. And the problem will be solved.” Another way of getting friendly with insects—I’ve practiced this for quite a number of years—is to make friends with moths. It’s quite easy. And a moth is a very cuddly insect. It doesn’t bite. It’s only the caterpillar form of the moth that sometimes destroys things. A moth can be coaxed to land on your hand and stay there for quite a while. You just get a hand out to it and say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty. Don’t be frightened.” And it’ll come and sit on your hand. And they make rather good pets.

I suggest also, if you’ve never read it, that you get hold of a very strange book called Kinship with All Life. A little book written by a man down in Southern California, I forget his name—J. Allen Boone. And it has an astonishing story in it, among others, of his friendship with a fly which he called Freddy. Through everybody’s amazement, this fly would come whenever he called it. And, you know, it wasn’t that the house was full of flies; just this particular fly around.

There are great possibilities along these lines. And in dealing with creatures, don’t be afraid of anthropomorphism or the pathetic fallacy. You must talk to creatures just as if they were people, keeping up ordinary conversation. Because whether they get any communication from the actual language, they certainly get a communication from the attitude. So experiment with that. Also, there’s a woman on television now who is giving a wonderful series on gardening. She’s an English woman. And she quite shamelessly speaks to the plants. A botanist would of course be horrified at the idea that a plant has any purposiveness or intent or any such human quality. But she treats them all exactly as if they did. And this enables her to be an absolute genius.

So let’s not be unaware of the fact that what we call the scientific attitude—which (in a way) depersonalizes everything, including people—may be just a passing phase of mythology. Entertain that possibility. Don’t be close to it. Because my theory is—and this is, again, a little bit jocular—that every living creature thinks it’s human for the simple reason that, if it is sensitive, all sensitivity is feeling that you are the center of the world. And God is defined as that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Now, you see, there is no circumference to experience. It goes out indefinitely. We look out into space and wonder: where does it end? And the answer that astronomers give is sort of complicated. We think it’s a kind of double talk. It’s boundless and yet circular. You can represent that mathematically, but you can’t imagine it in a three-dimensional image. But every being that is sensitive is a particular expression of the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And I think we’re probably going to have to abandon the idea that there are superior and inferior expressions. As the Zen poem says:

In the spring scenery there is nothing superior, nothing inferior.

Flowering branches grow naturally; some short, some long.

And so it is with all the orders and species of nature and all their variations. But, you see, as you watch any given species, you see (as I said) sub-variations within the species. And the more intently you watch, the more subtle they become. That is because we watch human beings intently, that we see each one of us is different—whereas all flies look the same. But to flies who watch each other intently, they all know that they’re quite different. They have personalities, probably. All sorts of funny things going on.

So now, I’ve been thus far really enlarging on what I was saying last night. But I want to continue with a very serious problem that we have arising out of our study of nature, which is related to this question of tolerance for variations. There’s a famous French saying, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: “to understand everything is to forgive everything.” Because the more closely you examine the variations, the more you discover that they have a kind of inseparable relationship with each other. That you’re normally looking at life, as it were, through a Venetian blind; that there are certain areas that are covered in this way that you don’t think about the connections. You ignore the connections between certain events, certain things. But, as you study and become more aware, the Venetian blinds are pulled up and you see that one set of circumstances goes with another. You may say that event is absolutely deplorable and ought never to have happened, whereas that event is just great. That’s the sort of thing we want.

But as you study carefully, you realize that these two are part of a total process, one aspect of which does not exist without the other aspect. And then, the more you look, this doesn’t become simple. You notice that this relationship way doesn’t go simply, as it were, in a line between one event and another, but in a many-dimensioned network involving everything. And this, of course—this perception of the inseparable relationships of all events whatsoever—is what is sometimes called cosmic consciousness or mystical experience. And I must say it’s a fascinating thing.

I’ve recently found myself in this state of mind every morning when I wake—almost every morning. And you have an urge at that moment to get up and write. Get that thing that you saw. It was so marvellously clear! The total clarity as to what it’s all about. And then suddenly you want to put it down, and you really don’t know what to say. As a Chinese poet put it:

Picking chrysanthemums along the southern fence,

Gazing in silence at the eastern hills.

The birds are flying home through the soft mountain air of dusk.

In all these things there is a deep meaning,

But when we are about to express it, we suddenly forget the words.

I love to quote Saint Augustine’s saying, when he was asked, “What his time?” He said, “I know what it is. But when you ask me, I don’t.” It’s like asking, “What is reality?” We all know what it is. But when we think about it, we can’t find the words. And therefore there’s always a good laugh in this against the mystics. You know, the sort of attitude that when William James took nitrous oxide to see whether he could get a mystical experience, he certainly did. But he made some funny remark when he came out of it, which was… hmm. It’s so complicated, I can’t remember it! It was something like: “There are no differences except differences between various kinds of difference.” And of course any logician looks at that and says, “Ha-ha, the man’s out of his mind.”

But if any of you have ever had that sort of experience, you know perfectly well that that statement makes good sense. As well as some other one person said: “Well, everything in the world is the smell of burnt almonds.” All this universe is the smell of burnt almonds. It’s perfectly true. It’s absolutely obvious. Anybody who studied Zen knows exactly what that means. It’s, furthermore, if you’ve studied Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, it’s the doctrine of jiji muge, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events. In other words, the smell of burnt almonds implies everything else. Because every event in the universe implies all the rest; goes with all the rest.

If, in other words, a specimen of something—supposing there was some other universe altogether, and into that were transported one human tooth: scientists in that other universe would study that tooth and reconstruct the environment which such a tooth would represent. And from that tooth they would eventually infer the sun, moon, and stars, and all the galaxies in our universe. Just as laser beams can be used to take a tiny fragment of a photographic negative and reproduce the whole negative from which it was taken. Because every bit implies the totality.

Now, you see, when you feel that, you feel very funny. That’s why a lot of people who take psychedelic chemicals and get experiences of that kind feel very funny. If you’re not prepared for that kind of experience, it’s very disorienting. Because it seems that there is no right and no wrong. Everything is okay. Or everything is equally evil. And anyway, who’s in charge around here? What am I supposed to do? Am I the mere puppet of fate? Or am I God? If so, that’s a terrible responsibility. Really scares me! But, you see, it’s perfectly obvious that anybody who experiences the world in that way is, from our ordinary social point of view, quite mad. Because we are quite sure that that is not the way things are: that there are right things and wrong things, and that you can get rid of this and preserve that, and change it around so that it’s much better, and that there are important things and there are unimportant things. Because we’ve decided that the important thing, of course—around which we really, today, constellate all our values—is survival. It’s a good thing to go on living.

Well, we could question that. When Freud’s doctor suggested that he stop smoking—he died because of cancer of the mouth—he said, “As regards your injunction to stop smoking, I have decided not to comply. Do you think it’s such a good thing to live a long and miserable life?” Some people, you see, work on the idea that life should be like a skyrocket: a zhhwpp, and a glorious bang. Other people think it should be like a carefully protected candle into which the fuel is fed very slowly and the flame kept alive as long as possible. But that could never be a very bright one. Who is right? Would you rather go out with a bang or with a whimper? It’s, in a way, a matter of taste. But therefore, when it is seen that going off with a bang is just as good as going off with a whimper, and that, as the Zen poem says, “the morning glory blooms only an hour, but differs not at heart from the giant pine that lives for a thousand years.” You see that “a long thing is the long body of Buddha, and a short thing is the short body of Buddha.”

So you’re crazy. Because everybody knows that you have an instinct to survive as long as possible. Make the whole thing go on. Of course you have an instinct to survive, because you’ve been socially inculcated—whether you’re a bee or whether you’re human. Because they’re on the same kick. Pull it out as long as possible. Stretch it. But maybe the drosophila, the fruit flies, are not on that kick. They live very short lives, very quick, from our point of view—although maybe to them it seems just as long as ours. I don’t know if drosophila have a panic that they might live shorter than a few hours.

But this, then, results in the fact that the person who has this experience very strongly tends to behave in conformity with it. And he gets an attitude which in Buddhism is called non-discrimination—that is to say, he lives in a sort of momentary way, does whatever comes to hand, and seems to make no choices. In other words, he acts almost always as if he were purely acting on caprice, and never stops to decide, to think something over. He just goes ahead. If you know some of our Zen characters around here, like Suzuki Rōshi, he acts that way. All the Zen masters that I know act immediately. You call them up on the telephone, say, “I’d like to see you.” He says, “When?” I said, “Have you got any time next week?” He says, “Why not now?” You know? Comes right over And there’s a certain attitude like that.

But, you see, the thing there is that they are very, very sophisticated in that they know what the regular world considers to be sanity, and they don’t offend against it. They live in two worlds at once. The difficulty with some people that we would call truly insane is that they cannot live simultaneously in the world of their vision and the world of our social vision. Therefore, because they can’t play back and forth between one and the other, we say, “Look, you’re not behaving properly in accordance with the rules of our game.”

So there’s a certain art—a certain (I would say) basic self-protection—that a mystic, or a glorious crazy man, has to learn. He has to learn to keep his cool. And especially, you see, when somebody doesn’t really keep his cool, I don’t think—Meher Baba has not kept his cool. He’s running around claiming to be personally in charge of the whole universe. And, well, maybe he is just as much as you and I are. But you really shouldn’t brag about that—at least I don’t think so. That may be just a matter of personal opinion. But if I were to set myself up as God, and sort of receive darshan and divine honors all the time, I’d start laughing. I’d think it was very funny indeed. And I don’t think I could keep it up.

Then, of course, there’s the other types of mystical lunatic who, instead of setting themselves up as God, set everybody else up as God. And when anybody greets them, they pay divine honors to them, and kiss their feet, and see the beloved in every human being. Well, maybe that’s a little excessive, too. But it’s an expression. It’s just as difficult, you see, to express this insight in a particular form of expressive action as it is to put it into words. But when you see things from that point of view, you could see it’s undoubtedly true, or at least it seems to be. It seems as real as anything else was real.

And I think I can put it in a perfectly logical way that is scientifically respectable and point out that this is obviously the way things are, and make it quite rational as well as mystical. But it is a little mad in the sense that, when you’ve come to see one thing is as good as another, one course of action is as good as another—short life, long life, everything goes together. Is this a deterministic state of affairs, or are you in charge? If you live a short life and go bang, it’s perfectly obvious in this state of consciousness that that’s a mere incident. It’s just that you abandon a personality, a certain set of memories, a certain accumulation of energies. You stop doing one pattern and do another somewhere else, because the whole thing’s you. Of course, there has to be that interval, which we call death, which is “forget completely” the pattern you were doing, let it fall apart. And then, when you start doing another, you don’t immediately remember the one you did before, because you have to figure it all out again, see, what to do. Everybody tells you: “Do this, do that, do the other, and then it’ll look like we do it. See? We do it this way, that way, that way, you see?” But this is going to boom. It disappears and then it all starts again. Because all this dancing of energy is occurring within a field that we call space, which isn’t just nothing. It’s the Self. It’s what there is. Space/energy: it’s really a unity manifesting itself as the separate space and solid which we think we see.

So perhaps, if you haven’t had that kind of experience, you can at least imagine how it would feel to see things that way, and then to wonder what on Earth you would do about it when you see perfectly clearly that there’s nothing special that you should do or not do. You see, that’s what’s scary. It’s like being—as the Zen master I quoted earlier on said—in the middle of the Sahara desert with a high-powered car. Which way are you going to go? And he gave me this image when I asked him the meaning of a certain bodhisattva. See, very often the Buddha is shown with two attendant bodhisattvas on either side of him. One is called Manjushri and the other is called Samantabhadra. Manjushri stands for wisdom and Samantabhadra for activity or compassion. And in Sanskrit upāya, in a way, this word means.

Now, Manjushri is the person who, by intuitive wisdom (called prajñā) sees that everything is really one process, inseparable, and neither good nor bad, but just that. Samantabhadra is the other bodhisattva, who then moves into action on the basis of Manjushri’s insight. And he therefore represents, shall I say, total freedom. And yet, if you’ve got total freedom, you can only manifest that freedom by being specific. As God said in the beginning, “You must draw the line somewhere.”

1:27:16

Watts

Where do you want me to begin? I say: to express freedom, you have to do something specific. As God said in the beginning, “You must draw the line somewhere.” If you’re going to draw a line, you know, you create a somewhere by drawing it. The moment you take a step, well, that’s the step. It is distinct from some other step.

So the moment you are doing, in the moment you are acting in the context of freedom, it’s simply like drawing a brush over white paper. And then the minute you’ve done that, the minute you’ve set that brush in motion, you’ve already implied a certain patterns. You’ve arranged the space in a certain way. And so the game is: what kind of an interesting thing can we do? That’s the beginning of art. And therefore you can look upon all species and creatures as works of art. And you can apply perhaps some of the great ideas of art history and art criticism to nature.

Aesthetics is really a much better approach to ethics than is theology. Especially a theology whose fundamental concepts are legal. That’s why we, in the West (as I’ve often said) have so much trouble with mystical experience. Because we have a legal conception of God, a royal conception. And so to experience that you are God is a form of subversion. It’s democracy in the kingdom of heaven. That certainly can’t be allowed!