It’s always interesting to me to see how often psychologists and psychotherapists talk about the problem of reconciling opposites. Anybody who knows anything at all about the elementary principles, say, of psychoanalysis, knows that, according to the ideas of both Freud and Jung—who are in a way the great patriarchs of what we call depth psychology—that according to their ideas there is a kind of compensatory relationship between what is conscious and what is unconscious in our mental life, and that to the degree that one is, as it were, light above, one is dark below, or to the degree that one is dark above, one is light below. And it’s often pointed out that very many people who wrote the most scurrilous books, such as Rabelais, led the most exemplary lives, whereas on the other hand a lot of people who wrote very pious and holy books actually led disreputable lives.

And I think there is a great deal of truth in the way Freud so often points out that what is expressed in the world of dreams is the opposite side of life to that which one is living consciously. And that, therefore, the problem of integrating a person, of making him whole—and it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the word “whole” is etymologically related to the word “holy”—but the problem of making a person whole is to get together his two apparently opposed sides. And underneath all this there is the recognition that so many things which seem, at one level, to be opposed to each other are, at another level, mutually necessary. And this is something that’s terribly difficult for us to admit. We don’t like to uncover the basic harmony which very often underlies things that we would rather prefer to see in opposition to each other.

Take, for example, the fundamental opposition of life and death. Isn’t it perfectly extraordinary the way we manage to conceal—or most people manage to conceal—the fact that they keep alive by death day in and day out. After all, we are constantly transforming dead animals and plants into the shape of our own organisms. But all this kind of thing, you know, is conveniently put away: the slaughterhouse is somewhere in the back district of Chicago, and we just don’t get to see what goes on. And of course we conceal death in so many ways. The whole art of the mortician (as he likes to style himself) is to conceal death. And therefore, because death is constantly repressed, we begin to forget how much life and death go together.

And so, to the degree that we fail to recognize the inseparability of things that we call opposites, to that degree we keep running into problems that baffle us and that we don’t understand. We don’t understand, for example, how necessary our enemies are to us, how the things that we fight against are things which stimulate us and call out our images. And while, in other words, it seems to be necessary to muster all our strength to oppose certain things, if we should overdo it and muster too much strength and succeed in getting rid of our enemies, we might very well collapse. And I think that an insight into that fact underlies the celebrated saying of Jesus: “Love your enemies.” Interesting. It doesn’t necessarily say—does it?—“make friends of your enemies.” It says: “Love your enemies.”

And so something of this kind underlies the very, very usual idea in Eastern philosophy of the truth lying in the middle. In other words, in Confucianism: one of the cardinal principles of Confucianism is the so-called Doctrine of the Mean. And interpreted at one level, this is rather just a platitudinous doctrine of moderation: that one should be moderate in all things. And, in the same way, Buddhism is called the Middle Way. And that, too, at a certain low level of interpretation, means nothing more than that this is a doctrine of moderation.

You see, in the Buddha’s own time—roughly 600 years before Christ—one of the main forms of Indian spirituality was the search for liberation through extreme self-mortification. When Gautama the Buddha himself was a young man, he was the son (as you probably know) of a North Indian tribal king in the clan of the Sakyas. And his father had, at the child’s birth, consulted the soothsayers, and they had foretold that he would either be a great monarch or else he would be a Buddha. And the father didn’t want his son, you know, to get mixed up in this religious business, and did everything to encourage him to follow in his father’s way. He surrounded him with luxuries, and enclosed him in a palace where he should never see any sight or hear any sound that would make him think about the so-called problem of life. But the story goes that, by chance, he caught glimpses of suffering, of death, of disease, of poverty, and this so plagued his mind he just had to find out why such things should happen to human beings. And the story goes on to say that he finally arranged to escape from the palace, that he cut off his hair, shed all his luxurious garments and donned rags, and became a mendicant. In other words, he followed for seven years those teachers who said that wisdom and peace ultimately lie only through extreme mortification of the desires of the flesh.

But after seven years he found out it didn’t work. It hadn’t brought him any peace at all. And so, after some time, during which he felt that he really had discovered the secret of the problem, he proclaimed what he called the Middle Way. And, as I said, at a kind of low level, this signified simply that, on the one extreme, there was this mortification of desire and of the flesh. At the other extreme there was hedonism: the attempt to solve the problem of life by getting as much sensuous pleasure as possible. And so he took the Middle Way between these extremes. But that, as I said, is only part of the point. Because what the Middle Way really comes to is not moderation. It isn’t compromise, but really a profound understanding of the unity that underlies all oppositions.

You know, so often we think logically that life consists fundamentally in oppositions—that, as it were, conflict is the most fundamental reality that there is. We look upon life, in other words, as an encounter. This happens in all sorts of different ways: the encounter of spirit and matter, the encounter of mind and body, and also the encounter of oneself and the world—as if these things came from unimaginable distances apart and suddenly met each other. And by reason of being, as it were, logically opposed to each other, there is thereupon conflict.

But obviously there can’t be a battle unless there’s a battlefield. It’s often said: it’s very difficult to arrange a battle between a tiger and a shark, because they have no common field. Wherever there is a battle, preceding the conflict, prior to it, underlying it, is something in common—as the very fact that two people who are having a fight have something in common that is something they both want to get, and so are fighting over it. What they want to get, they have in common. And because they have the same desire, they have the same kind of creature, they have that life in common. And so, underlying every contest there is a fundamental agreement—as in Alice: Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle.

So the real meaning of the Middle Way—and Buddhism is often simply called the Middle Way—is to go down underneath conflict to discover harmony. And I would like to talk a little bit about two kinds of following of the Middle Way which have occurred in the history of Buddhist philosophy. And these might also be called dialectic. Now, the word “dialectic” has, as it were, a sort of double sense. It’s related to dialogue, to a conversation—as, say, between a teacher and his pupil. The Socratic method: the teacher, as it were, eliciting understanding from his pupils by a dialogue in which the teacher asks the right questions. The other side of the meaning of “dialectic is that there are opposed positions: thesis on the one hand, antithesis on the other. And as a result of the dialectic between these two opposites, we arrive at a synthesis. And in both these senses of the word, the Middle Way is a dialectic.

As you know, Eastern teachers don’t advertise for students, because their basic attitude is really: they haven’t anything to teach. That may seem surprising, but it is based on the insight that, at the deepest level, beneath conflict, prior to conflict, because it’s prior to conflict, life isn’t a problem. This is a very obviously difficult thing to understand. But most people feel it is a problem, and therefore constantly go around looking for someone who will tell them how to solve it. And so it is in this way that the inquirer comes across the sage. We’ll say the inquirer comes across—going back, now, into the history of ancient India—comes across such a man as the Buddha, and says to him: “My problem is that I suffer, and I want to know how to stop suffering.” This was the whole problem with which the Buddha dealt. And if we start from this raising of the question by the student, we can then follow out the steps of a dialectic so that the student is brought to the Middle Way—that is to say: to the point where the conflict expressed in his suffering is reduced to the harmony that underlies it.

So the first thing that happens, then, is: the student comes, the questioner comes, and poses the problem: “I want not to suffer.” And the teacher answers with a counter proposition and says: “You suffer because you desire.” A lot of people think that’s all the Buddha really said—that if suffering is the result of desire, all you’ve got to do is stop desiring, and you won’t suffer. Simple, yeah. But this wasn’t the point at all. This was simply the first step in a dialogue. And so the next step is that if the student takes that to be the answer, he comes back with the question, “Well, how am I to stop desiring?” And so the next question from the teacher might well be: “Do you really want to?” And this would make the student scratch his head a little, because he realizes that if it’s true (as the Buddha seems to say) that in order not to suffer, one must cease desiring, surely, if I want not to desire, this is also desire. So to escape that trap the student must answer: “Well, yes and no. I want to make an end of the kind of desires that lead to suffering, but I don’t want to make an end of the desire to do that.” So the next step in the dialogue is the teacher says: “Well, suffering comes from desiring more than you’re going to get. So don’t desire more than you’re going to get. Desiring more than you’re going to get—more than you have or can get—that is anguish.” And the student thinks that one over for a while, and then comes back with this question: “Yes, but supposing I fail in not desiring more than I have or can get, won’t that lead to anguish, too?” And the teacher comes back with a proposition: “Don’t desire to succeed in this enterprise more than you can succeed or will succeed.”

Now, I wonder if you’ve been able to notice what’s happening here. On the one hand, there is—first of all, we start from the student trying to control his desire. There’s a student and there is his desire, his hunger. And at each step in this question and answer, the Buddha (as the master of the dialogue) is taking the student to a higher level. At the lowest level, the conflict is simply between his own inner appetites and the state of affairs; the facts of life as we call them, the hard facts. But at the next step, he has made the student see that his own feeling is part of the facts. To put it in another way, if you learn not to desire more than you have or can get, you are learning to accept things as they are. But among things as they are, are your own feelings. And these may be, as it were, unacceptable or unpleasant feelings. So he turns the student’s attention to the fact that: “Alright, you’ve got to accept your own feelings as well.” So the student says, “Well, supposing I can’t accept my own feelings?” He says, “Well, don’t desire to accept them any more than you can.” And that goes up to another level. And you see what happens ultimately as the conversation goes on? The student comes to regard his whole inner life, his feelings—he’s become completely objective about them. They’ve become part of the world that was his problem.

And he suddenly wakes up one morning to find himself in a very strange situation. He thought that he stood opposed to the world. He identified himself with his desires. And there, outside him, was a world that negated him. Suddenly all this has gone bloop. It’s changed. His inside—his desires, his emotions, his feeling—and the outside world are all the same. And so where is left the person who had the problem? He is reduced, of course, for a moment, to nothing but a witness: a kind of passive observer of an outside world and his own inner life and his feelings, and they all go together. And at the last minute: flip! Even the one who seems to watch it turns out to be all one with what is being watched. That’s another way of saying: to be aware of something you don’t have to have, on the one hand, a knower and a known. The whole process can be described much more simply as a knowing.

The other form of dialectic is perhaps simpler to explain. And it’s based on a form of Buddhist philosophy which originated about 200 years AD. Now, in Indian logic, there are what are called four propositions. The first one is “yes.” The second one is “no.” The third one is “yes and no.” And the fourth proposition is “neither yes nor no.” And these are a kind of fundamental classification of statements that, we may say, for example, that the world exists or that it doesn’t exist, or that it both exists and doesn’t exist, or that it neither exists nor doesn’t exist. This sums up the whole possibilities of philosophy. In other words, this would be the person who is a realist, like say Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas, who equates the ultimate reality (God) with being. But this, on the other hand, would be a sort of Humean standpoint, where you would say there is no such thing as “being”—that is an abstraction. It’s just a concept. Here is number three, you would get a sort of Hegelian standpoint of synthesis between being and non-being. And in the fourth, you would get the extreme nihilist, agnostic, skeptic, or whatever.

Now then, the point of this particular dialectic is that it assumes that, deep down, every human being really clings to some such opinion, some metaphysical opinion, which can actually be put under one of those categories. One might not think this. One thinks that most people are sort of un-intellectual, and don’t think about these things, and have no philosophy. But scratch a human being carefully enough, and you will find out that there is some premise which he clings to fervently. And so what the dialectician does, he waits for someone with a problem to turn up, he scratches him to find out: what is the opinion to which he most deeply clings? And then, because the nature of this dialectic is a philosophy for refuting any opinion that anybody can hold, the philosopher himself has nothing to say. He says: “If you propose yes, I can show you that yes has no meaning without no. Any affirmation you make has no meaning without the denial.” And by such a means as this, he gets the person to become insecure. He doesn’t know what to cling to. And as he looks for a new opinion to cling to—to give himself a sense of psychological security—the philosopher destroys that one, too. So that, in the end, he has absolutely nothing left to hang on to.

And this is actually the bringing of a person to liberation and to health, because it is his clinging to life that is at the root of anxiety. And anxiety—which, in turn, is at the roots of all manner of discordant activity and problems—once he lets go and doesn’t try to cling to life with his mind, he is then released and talked out of his own self-strangulation.