I want to start by reading you two quotations. The first is from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents:

Originally, the ego includes everything. Later it detaches itself from the external world. The ego feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.

So much for Freud. The second is from Gardner Murphy, Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, and from his book Personality:

If, moreover, we are serious about understanding all we can of personality, its integration and disintegration, we must understand the meaning of depersonalization. Those experiences in which individual self-awareness is abrogated, and the individual melts into an awareness which is no longer anchored upon selfhood. Such experiences are described by Hinduism in terms of the ultimate unification of the individual with the Atman, the super-individual cosmic entity which transcends both selfhood and materiality. Some men desire such experiences, others dread them. Our problem here is not their desirability, but the light they throw on the relativity of our present-day psychology of personality. Personality, ordered largely with reference to self-awareness, has until recently appeared to be the fundamental reality. But it must be seen against the background of a wide variety of cross-cultural conditions and of developmental, dissociational, and degenerative states in our own culture. Some other mode of personality configuration, in which self-awareness is less emphasized or even lacking, may prove to be the general or the fundamental.

End of quote.

I have read these two quotations just to suggest that it’s not only so-called mystics and devotees of oriental religions who feel that there is something a little wrong or unnatural about our ordinary way of feeling ourselves and the surrounding world. For the psychologist as well as the mystic may easily hit upon the idea that human beings are bedeviled by a fundamental twist of perception, a distortion of their whole feeling of life, which lies at the root of a large constellation of moral, psychological, and spiritual problems.

As you know, the detection and straightening out of this twist is the great preoccupation of Indian and Chinese philosophy. As Gardner Murphy says: they look towards a state of consciousness in which individual self-awareness is abrogated, and the individual melts into an awareness which is no longer anchored upon selfhood. This is not, however, to be understood as a kind of trance in which the individual is incapable of relating himself to the practical affairs of everyday life. It is rather the perception of the same everyday world from a new standpoint; a standpoint from which the same facts and events have an entirely different sense.

To a considerable extent, the philosophers of India and China have—though with some exceptions—looked upon this transformation of awareness as the fruit of an arduous course of spiritual and psychological discipline; a discipline so rigorous and prolonged that it puts it beyond the attainment of all but a few spiritual heroes extraordinarily gifted with courage and willpower. In East and West alike, however, men are always looking for shortcuts—or better, simplifications—of these difficult tasks. Some of them are perhaps no better than the phony correspondence courses which lure subscribers with promises of being able to amaze your friends after only six weeks’ study of some marvelous easy way of becoming a genius at the piano. Maybe the oriental equivalent is the prayer wheel.

Nevertheless, laziness is the mother of invention as well as self-deception. For time and time again, we find that we have made a certain problem incredibly difficult for ourselves by failing to understand it clearly or failing to find the right technique for handling it. Think of the difficulty of doing a complex multiplication or long division with Roman numerals, of moving heavy loads without wheels, or of computing the movements of the planets before Copernicus’s simplified view of the solar system.

As a naturally lazy person, I have always been intrigued with the possibility of the simplification of this whole basic problem of the changing of man’s awareness. So often in these talks I have minimized the role of effort and willpower and struggle in this task, thus earning the disdain of Puritans and muscular religionists, who do not realize that in many respects laziness is as creative as brawn and vigor. I suppose the trouble with these people is basically an economic view of the spiritual life: as if it were subject to the law of supply and demand, so that whatever becomes common or unusual becomes cheap—as if sages would become fools by being as plentiful as fools. Yet I don’t think that this economic analogy is at all proper. I would rather compare the kind of awareness I am thinking about to something like eyesight: just about everyone has it, and yet to everyone it is incredibly precious. There may be a great deal of difference in value between what people do with their eyes—between, oh, looking at TV commercials and looking at great works of art—but in both cases we are aware of the marvel and the worth of sight itself.

I would like, then, to talk about what is probably a very foolish notion of mine, just as if I were thinking out loud in a very tentative and experimental way. It may be my natural laziness and nothing but that, and yet it is one of my strongest intuitions—has been for years—that it is basically a very simple matter for man to shift from (what I will call) the egocentric to the universal mode of awareness. I’m quite sure that there are undoubtedly very difficult ways of doing it; that in time past men have come upon these ways and embodied them in traditions handed down to others. We easily assume that the way we learned to do something is the only way to learn it, for the most tortuous path up a mountain is the only path, if you know no other.

For example, if you’ve watched Hindu dancing, you will have noticed the curious and fascinating gesture of moving the head from side to side so that it seems to float above the shoulders detached from the neck. Now, you can spend months and almost sweat blood to learn this trick, unless someone points out that it comes quite naturally if you will hold up your arms and then try to touch your biceps with your ears. It’s a little awkward at first, but you very soon get the hang of it—though I have heard it described as a strange dislocation of the neck which no westerner can ever learn. It’s the old story of the mysterious east, which is not really so mysterious after all. But part of the apparent mystery is that eastern teachers of any art—whether dancing or yoga—will always tend to make you find out things for yourself, and often let you persist for ages on a completely wrong track.

The central difficulty of almost all forms of spiritual discipline is that they require prolonged and intense concentration, usually upon objects that are as confined and uninteresting as anything can be, day and night. Think of nothing except the word om or mu or, as in eastern orthodoxy, the name of Jesus. Somehow, in a fashion that is never clearly explained, intense concentration over a period of time brings about a fundamental alteration in the very structure of consciousness. Some say that it brings the surface consciousness to a state of such calm that one can, as it were, see down to the deepest levels of the mind, to a mode of consciousness more basic and natural than that to which we are accustomed. Others say that it’s a form of self-hypnotism, giving the power to control one’s own mind in such a way that you can think or feel anything you want. Others, again, say that concentration brings about a state of identity between subject and object, knower and known, in which the sense of the separate ego, the isolated self-conscious subject, disappears.

When I first began to study these things, I was a student in England and, naturally, most of my time had to be given to reading. I was puzzled as to how a concentration of this kind could be carried on in the midst of intellectual study, and I therefore laid my difficulty before a Japanese Zen master and was amazed to receive the following reply—and I quote:

It is difficult to conceive the exact idea of exercising Buddhist concentration or meditation in the West. No one can possibly concentrate intentionally upon a given object. That is a truth. Try it. Occasionally, one should concentrate on something without one’s own intention. That concentration is deep and strong and lasts a long time. Sometimes it reaches to samādhi.

If we speak philosophically, we might say that we are concentrating constantly, every day. We concentrate on every smallest thought that comes into and passes through our brain. Though it comes and passes so quickly, nevertheless, we never fail to concentrate ourselves in each of those thoughts. In fact, we focus our attention, concentrate on the strongest thought, that which arouses most interest, which presents itself at any moment. If it were not the strongest, we, of our own intention, using our everyday conscious mind, could not possibly concentrate upon it. Our concentration is always absorbed into the strongest thought. Speaking logically, we say: no, it is of no use to try to concentrate on a given thing. Yet, we should concentrate every moment while we are living.

In the first stage of meditation, we understand that our egoistic intention to concentrate on anything is impossible. Therefore, we train ourselves to concentrate according to the power which is beyond our everyday consciousness and which is yet within us. So, we yield entirely to our true or real nature, which connects with all nature.

To practice this, one must give up one’s own intention, shut off, as it were, one’s own brain action, cease to drive one’s mind in an egoistic sense. Just let go as you go with a stream, not rowing your boat with your own strength or purpose. Go with the stream of nature. Do not try to go against the stream. This is practice for a beginner, but using it, you will find entrance into the Way.

End of quote.

For me, this answer was an eye-opener. Three things stood out from it. The first, which I had already realized, was that to the degree that the act of concentration upon anything is intentional, it is self-frustrating. It is concentrating on concentrating. The second was the (to me) odd notion that we are really concentrating all the time; upon every successive thought, however brief. In other words, concentration—the absorption of the subject in the object or vice versa—is the natural state of our consciousness. The third isn’t quite so easy to express because it seems paradoxical. The idea of training oneself to concentrate without intention, according to the power of nature which is beyond our everyday consciousness and yet within us.

Yet, this apparent paradox becomes intelligible if one has correctly understood the first two points. The reason why trying intentionally to concentrate is self-frustrating is that it is what the Zen people call putting legs on a snake. It is a confusing irrelevance, trying to do what one is already doing. For the second point was that the mind is necessarily and always concentrated. The problem is not so much to concentrate as to prolong concentration in any one thought or impression. But this must be done naturally, according to the mind’s innate mode of functioning and not by force. If, in other words, I understand that forced or intentional concentration is impossible, if I really know this to be so and thus give it up, I immediately and automatically acquire the feel of the mind’s innate and natural concentration, and so am enabled to use it.

Now, what is the connection of all this with the egoistic predicament, and with the alteration of a normal mode of human consciousness from the egocentric to the universal? I think this becomes clear if we look at the idea of intentional concentration in a wider context as something more than an occasional attempt to perform a mental exercise. In this wider context, intentional concentration is the mind’s almost habitual attempt to concentrate upon or identify itself with whatever is pleasurable: the attempt to concentrate or force one’s thoughts and feelings into constantly gratifying channels. Furthermore, it’s the attempt to force as much out of the pleasing moment as possible, to attend to it with all one’s might, and in general to dominate the mind with the mind. For this is to misuse the mind: to try to work it in a way that is against its natural functioning—like forcing a saw through wood instead of letting it do its own cutting. Like sucking and blowing instead of letting the lungs breathe by themselves.

You’ll see from these analogies that the natural use of the mind is something quite different from a merely uncontrolled and disorderly wool-gathering. For the good carpenter, though letting the saw cut by itself, neither stops cutting nor lets his saw wander from the line. He continues his work as before, but it has a different feel. For he is working with the nature of his instruments and media, not against it. This, then, is what the master meant by shutting off one’s own brain action and ceasing to drive one’s mind in an egoistic sense. But this is a shutting off which is not the outcome of rigorous effort. On the contrary, it happens automatically—to the degree that it becomes clear that forcing and driving the mind gets nowhere faster and faster.

Now, the constant strain and frustration of forcing the mind is for most human beings an enduring, basic sensation present in almost everything that we do. It is precisely this sensation which constitutes the individual ego, the separate self we believe ourselves to be. If this be true, spiritual disciplines involving prolonged efforts of concentration turn out to be very cumbersome and roundabout ways of self-transcendence, however effective in the long run. For what is needed is not so much the muscle power of the will as a clear intelligence: a clear and undoubted vision of the total absurdity and unnaturalness of using the mind in a forced way, of trying to control the controller by psychological violence. Compared with ordinary yoga exercises and like disciplines, this is relatively easy.

Furthermore, in relieving the constant strain sensation which we call the ego, it gives a new sensation of ease and indeed naturalness to the whole of everyday experience; an unblock sensation which may be interpreted or described as the feeling of voidness or oneness with the universe. If, however, you have a New England conscience, you will be quite certain that anything which is easy or which feels easy is wrong. You will glory in effort for its own sake, and babble about the inherent splendor of the struggle of the human spirit against nature, thinking it all the more glorious just because it is fundamentally tragic—the point being not so much to succeed as to do battle; not to conquer, but to toughen the character.

Perhaps this is to some extent a matter of taste, but for me all this kind of talk is pompous and asinine, and this may be just because I am an inherently lazy fellow. Yet, there seem to me to be times when verve and vigor come naturally; times when the use of force are with and not against nature; seeing that there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads on to fortune. But when the tide is not at its flood, when mere brawn is up against granite, the effort to go against nature does not seem to me so much tragically splendid as stupid. At best one could say with the French general of the charge of the Light Brigade: C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. [“It is magnificent, but it is not war.”]

It is based, I feel, on a valuation of man which exalts his animal strength over what is more characteristically human: his intelligence. It is perhaps the common resentment of intelligence by those who lack it as something tricky, cunning, and weak-spined. But all this reduces the standards of human character to standards more applicable to pachyderms and rocks than to men. For is the final test of character just how much suffering one can take? This always depends on how sensitive you are—and to be human is, above all, to be sensitive. And this means, I think, that the measure of character becomes, among other things, the quality rather than the quantity of one’s suffering. The most human people are capable of exquisite pain, but not for long.

Now, this leads me to a quite different matter with which I want to close this program. I am sure you all know by now that Lewis Hill, the man who founded and ran this station for so long, recently took his own life. Not, he said, for anger or for despair, but for peace. I know there are those who have shaken their heads, saying: too bad he couldn’t take it. For we have been drilled into the idea that to take one’s own life is at root a cowardly solution to a problem. Lewis Hill was a man who believed very much in the importance and necessity of struggle at the spiritual level, so much so that we have often had arguments about it. However, he was at the same time a pacifist and a poet and a great humanist—and this is simply to say that he was extremely sensitive. He was not made to take it as if he were a human punching bag. And thus life forced him to discover what Chesterton called the splendid limitations of being a man, for the depth and quality of human consciousness is outlined and defined by its borders, beyond which there are things which it cannot take. Thus, our very weaknesses are our strengths, and as Lao Tzu said: “Suppleness and tenderness are the concomitants of life. Rigidity and hardness are the concomitants of death.”

Now, believe me, it’s no easy matter to run a truly imaginative and creative institution in these times. Not only do the very people who have the imagination and creativity often lack the sheer business or administrative cunning which every institution now seems to require, but it’s also the very devil to find adequate money for any cultural enterprise which does not kowtow to the sacred cow of being academically and socially sound, which means merely dull. Although Lewis Hill was no businessman, he had an extraordinary gift for finding emergency funds, and repeatedly his genius saved KPFA from collapse.

Now, my friends, this genius is withdrawn, and tired as some of you may be of hearing it, the future of KPFA is again in danger. To the very best of my knowledge, there is no other radio station—not only in the United States, but in the world—over which one may speak as freely or as deeply as KPFA, let alone hear such music, drama, or poetry. The existence of this station is the unique privilege of the Bay Area, for in this, you have a cultural achievement enjoyed here alone. The maintenance of KPFA is not an expensive luxury; at most, it costs a measly hundred thousand dollars per year and could perhaps be run for less; less than the cost of a single fighting plane for the Air Force, less than the annual budget of even a small town education mill of a college. The strange thing is that it might be easier to find funds for KPFA if it cost a million a year to run, but then you may be sure it wouldn’t be the same kind of institution.

May I make, then, a very simple request? I don’t think that anyone listening at this point would have given his attention this long if this kind of program were not of considerable value to him. May I ask, then, that everyone now listening—and I mean everyone—scrape together five dollars, put it in an envelope, and send it to this station as a memorial to the brave man, the very sensitive man, who has fought for seven years to give you in Northern California the privilege of having the only really free and unashamedly creative and adventurous radio station in the world? You know the address: KPFA, Berkeley 4, California.