Well then, it has been announced that I will talk to you about the psychology of mystical experience. I have—through all my life, really—been a disciple of William James, who, as you know, wrote a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. I was always fascinated by his approach to this problem because it involved a way in which we might understand the dynamics of various different accounts of people’s visions of God, of their place in the universe. Sometimes these visions might sound very different. Some people seem to experience God as extremely far out and other, up there; as something to be venerated, adored, and obeyed. And other people wanted to experience God as something completely inside that is the essence of what you really (when you come down to it) call yourself. And it seemed, therefore, that there was a conflict between these two forms of experience.

But likewise, when you change this to another domain of experience, some people will describe a pain as a cold sting. And others will describe it as a hot pang. Because very, very cold is pain, and very, very hot is pain. But it’s really—when it comes down to it—it’s the same kind of pain. And then, when you get into other weird extremes of human experience—ecstasy: think of absolute pleasure—so that there is a domain where pleasure and pain reach each other. So that we weep for joy and shudder with delight.

So therefore, I am very, very suspicious about these accounts of religious experience. Whether the people who experience God as the extremely transcendent—like Isaiah, where he sees the lord high and lifted up, and the cherubim are veiling their faces with their wings—that experience, and the experience of the Upanishads—tat tvam asi; “you’re it”—whether they’re not two different forms of the same thing described in different kinds of language, just as we could describe ecstasy in the language of pleasure, and we can describe it in the language of pain.

And by this sort of thinking I seek to unify the quarrels between religions. Because I will as willingly sit in meditation with Buddhists (where they cross their legs and look exactly like the image of their venerated being, the Buddha) on the one hand, and on the other hand Christians or Jews or Muslims, who will bow before the unseen transcendent presence. I’ll go with either one. But what it comes to, and what is, I think, a vital interest to every one of us is that we are all aware of being alive at the end of time; in what the Hindus call Kali Yuga. Things are running out.

We are haunted by an insuperable set of problems: overpopulation, pollution, the nuclear bomb, irreconcilable political conflicts. And every one of us has the sense, the haunting feeling, that these problems cannot be solved and that probably we have only about thirty more years of life on this planet. It may not be so, we may muddle through. But he fact of the matter remains that withing thirty or seventy years from now, all of us will be dead anyway. And we know that, and it’s a haunting idea in the back of our minds—and then what?

See, I’m closer to it than I used to be. I’m now 57 years old. And a lot of people are dead at 57. And I look at this problem with complete fascination. And you all have to face it. You’re all going to evaporate and turn into bones and dust. And instead of avoiding that, instead of looking the other way, instead of saying, “Oh well, later,” let’s look at it. What would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? Every child thinks about this. Philosophers disdain the question, because they say, “Oh, well that’s a meaningless speculation. You’re just using words.” But for a child, as it is for an essential person, it’s very real to think about what would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up?

Now, let’s face facts. Let’s not dream of reincarnation or of heaven or of devachan or of worlds beyond. But supposing it’s very real that when you’re dead, you’re dead. You’re never going to wake up again. Well, I think I’d scratch my head and I’d say, “Well, that’s not going to be like going into the dark forever.” Because darkness is something I can imagine. It’s not going to be like being buried alive, it’s going to be like nothing. It’s going to be like as if I never had existed at all, and never anything else had existed at all. It’s just going to be like it never was.

And that makes me think, on the one hand, of—well, wasn’t that the way it was before I was born? When I think backwards in time I can remember it to a certain distance, and then I come to a blank. Total blank. And yet, here we are. We all came out of it. The other thing it makes me think of is that if I want to realize total blankness as best as I can right now, I’m going to try and look at my head with my eyes. And no matter how I turn around, I can’t see my head. And it isn’t that there is a black spot behind my eyes, there is a total blank. Same kind of total blank, nothingness, as that out of which I came into this world.

And then I look around me at night into the universe, and I look at the stars. I see these vividly real energetic points of fire scattered all over the sky in the middle of black nothingness. Now, how would the stars look if there were no space? How would space look if there were no stars? You see? The two go together. You cannot realize what you mean by “is” unless you have also along with it a thing that you understand as “isn’t.” Void goes with form. The Buddhist sutra says: shiki soku ze kū, kū soku ze shiki, which means “that which is form, that exactly is voidness; that which is voidness, that exactly is form.”

Now, all mysticism is comprised in this. Mysticism—as we use it in an English word—comes from the Greek muin; mu. And that means “the finger on the lips.” “Quiet.” “Mum’s the word.” We can’t really say it. There is a secret. There is something that you’re not supposed to know, but that you should know for your sanity—and we’re going to pass it to you on the Q. T. In ancient times it really was on the Q. T., but nowadays nothing is on the Q. T. Everything has been published, all knowledge is available, and there’s no possibility anymore of there being anything esoteric. You know, everybody has smoked marijuana and taken LSD and practiced yoga, and so all this is a matter of public discussion. And it is of the essence of scientific honesty to make all information public.

And so, also, the essence of democracy. If we are a republic where all men are equal, everybody—every single citizen of the United States, however well or not well educated—has a right to the access to all information. That’s supposedly what we believe in. That is another way of saying—listen to this!—that is simply another way of saying that you are all God. There isn’t someone else who’s God, who’s the boss over you, because that would be a monarchy and not a republic. And the trouble with the United States is that this republic is peopled by a lot of people who believe that the universe is a monarchy, and therefore they take an attitude which is paternalistic, authoritarian, and are in conflict with the basic ideas upon which people like Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and so forth founded this republic. That’s the basic social conflict which we have to face. I could go into the history of this indefinitely, but let it stand at the moment.

Let’s go back to death. And we can see by a very simple process that when you’re dead, you go into the negative dimension of unconsciousness, like you do when you go to sleep every night. Now, sleep refreshes you. Isn’t that curious? Sleep is a very little understood phenomenon by psychologists. But being unconscious for a while, being nowhere, brings you back to life. Of course it does! Because you wouldn’t know you were alive unless you had once been dead, or unless you occasionally went to sleep. You wouldn’t have a feeling of reality, of hereness, of nowness, of sensitivity like this when you pinch yourself, unless it can be contrasted with nowhere, with nothingness. All our knowledge, all energy, is a phenomenon of contrasts—like a wave. Supposing energy itself is basically a wave phenomenon: there’s the crest and there’s the trough, and it goes yooee-yooee-yooee-yooee-yooee-yooee-yooee. And it’s upstanding, convex. And downstanding, concave. And this, of course, is the difference between the male and the female. And if we understand this we’re not going to have any more fights about women’s lib. The male is upstanding. The female is hollow. See? And you cannot realize the one without the other.

This is absolutely basic. You cannot see the figure without the ground. You cannot understand what is important—“imp,” it’s rather mischievous—without what is unimportant, fades into the background. All logic, all discourse, all thought, all imagination, all consciousness depends upon this contrast. And the secret of it is—this is the thing that I was talking about as mum’s the word; muin—is that the two go together. That what appear to be things opposed, unrelated, fighting, are really things that can’t do without each other.

When I saw Jung in 1958, just before he died, we had a long talk in his summer house on the edge of Lake Zürich, and there were swans around there. And as we walked out at the end of the talk I said to him, “Is it true that swans are monogamous?” He said, “Yes. It is curious that they are monogamous. And do you know another interesting fact about swans is that when the male and the female begin to make love to each other, they start by fighting until they discover what they’re supposed to be doing.” He said, “This has been of great help to some of my female homosexual patients.” He didn’t explain it further, he just dropped it and left it at that.

But “make love, not war,” you see, is a very great statement—not of an ideal, but of a necessity. Something that we’re going to have to do, whether we like it or not. Because the opposites, the things that we seem to see as an absolute conflict—consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, black and white—are absolutely essential to each other. And we can take this—you can flip it, certainly, into any dimension of human experience.

Just take black people and white people. This is a caricature, because there aren’t really black people and white people. There are brown people and grayish-pink people. But nevertheless, call it black and white, and we realize the richness of experience just because there is this differentiation. The way black people swing and behave wouldn’t be realizable unless it were in contrast with the way white people behave. And the two groups have to learn to be grateful to each other for their difference. Like man and woman. It’s the same thing. Vive la petite différence!

So, also, all in-groups—people who consider themselves elect, and saved, right, like the Church—must realize they could only understand that in terms of an out-group who are the damned; the awful people who live on the other side of the tracks who are in hell. Even St. Thomas Aquinas gives away the secret that the saints in heaven occasionally walk to the edges of the battlements and look down at the squirming, burning sufferings of the damned in hell, and give praise to God for the administration of divine justice—he said that!—so that by contrast with the sufferings of the damned, they know in what bliss they are.

So I’m sort of making jokes and giving parables to express the point that we know what is, what is reality, what it is to be alive, and to exist, always by contrast with nothingness, space, emptiness, and death. Just as we see the stars as points of brilliant, vibrant energy only by contrast with the blackness of the night and the emptiness of space. One gives the other. Look at it in this way. What do you mean by the word “clarity?” Clarity. What do you think of when you say “clear?” Well, one thing you might think of is clear in the sense of zhwwwwt, wiped clean. Transparency. Empty space. A finely polished mirror. A perfect flawless lens. Clear. The next thing you think of with the word clear is completely articulate form: something where the outlines are perfectly definite, totally in focus. Do you see now? This is a fascinating thing. That in the one idea of clear you have emptiness wiped clean and form in perfect expression. So this is the meaning, of course, of that Buddhist saying shiki soku ze kū, kū soku ze shiki—“emptiness is form, form is emptiness.” All embraced in the idea of clarity.

So therefore, we go on. Another fundamental contrast in experience, like form and space, is the voluntary and the involuntary: what you do on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. Now this is absolutely basic to most of us. We know—or we think we know—that there is a thing called “what I’m doing,” “my influence on it,” and on the other hand “its influence on me.” Self and other. And our big conflict is to make self win over other. It’s what we call the conquest of nature. Collectively, humanity (as self) wants to subdue, beat down, and control what is called other.

Now, we don’t really want that. Because if we succeeded in that enterprise, if we made the element of experience—the thing that happens to us that is not in our control—if we put that completely under our control, we would be bored to death. It would be like screwing a plastic woman. Nobody wants that. When you love someone, you want them to come at you in an unexpected way—not too unexpected, but anyway fairly unexpected! You want to feel that there’s something out there that is different, see? That will surprise you. Well so, in exactly the same way, you wouldn’t be able to experience the sensation that you call “self,” being a source of action more or less in control, unless it had the contrasting field of something “other” that is not in control, that you never know what it’s going to do. See, these two sensations go together. They’re back and front of the same coin.

And so the whole technological enterprise of the West (which is designed to control the universe by technological methods) is in the end not sufficiently conscious of itself to know where it’s going, and it is all moving towards—because, you see, we don’t understand: it is not part of our education that we understand this relationship between opposites. We are so frantic to survive and so terrified of the night of death that we are going to destroy the planet out of our anxiety to survive. The whole colossal military enterprise that is wasting the energies of the Earth—the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese are wasting their substance in the most appalling way in creating so-called “defensive” technologies; instruments to protect themselves from each other which can only destroy all of us. They can do nothing else. They protect no one!

You know, like, in the next war: “join the Air Force and be safe.” You’re the only people who will be, because you’ll be miles up in the air or way under the ground somewhere. Women and children can go hang. Nobody’s going to protect them anymore. The whole technology of the military world is completely wasteful and destructive. But it’s all being financed in the name of survival. In other words, you want to survive so badly that you’re going to have to commit suicide.

So the point is: you don’t need to survive! We don’t really have to go on living. Because the nothingness of death—being the opposite of life—simply generates it. Like the empty space of the sky is what is generating the stars. Like the womb generates the living being, the emptiness is the form. That’s not in our logic. It was left out of our education. We never saw it! And therefore we have anxiety all the time. We think, “to be or not to be, that is the question.” It isn’t! “To be” is “not to be,” and “not to be” is “to be.” They imply each other. They are the background to the figure, the figure to the background. So stop worrying.

And I’m saying this not just to be a kind of a sophist and play at you with funny ideas, but to suggest that it is very important at this time that human beings cool it, that we reduce the volume of our anxiety and take things easy. That we eat less, run around less, fuss less about being there. I really seriously suggest this.

Now look: a lot of people don’t know they’re alive unless they’re making a tremendous vibration. A lot of people need to get behind the wheel of a car or a plane that goes wrrroooom! And then they really know they’re there. They’re wrooomm, you know? And that’s it! “Oh my, I’m a man!” You know? And this is fouling the atmosphere and creating an immense noise. It’s making a great impression, yes. But really, seriously, do you have to expend all that energy to realize you’re there? Or they have to hit someone. They have to get in a fight. They have to know: I can knock you down! And that tells me that I’m real! When is this necessary?

And I would suggest instead that you can equally well know that you’re real—instead of going to watch a spectacle of prize fighting, instead of making a colossal din, you can equally well realize reality and its energy by simply humming to yourself, or humming with other people. You know, we can all have a mutual hum. Aaaauuuuuuummmmmmm. You can dig that. You can get with it. You can get right into it, see? And you can feel that soft, deep energy. And you won’t have to go roaring around, knocking people over their head, and so on, because you just get with this. That that is the life thing going. That is God. That is the energy. And you can hold hands and sit around in a circle and go aaaaauuuuummmmmmmmm. And it sounds silly to Americans. They say, “What will happen to progress if people do that?” Well, as G. K. Chesterton said, “Progress is finding a good place to stop!”