I approach this whole matter because of my interest in the Chinese and Japanese philosophy of nature, wherein there is not this sense of hostility between the human organism and its environment, but rather a sense of being one with it and collaborating with it. And thus it’s been my particular interest to see in what way this Far Eastern attitude to nature—based originally on the philosophy of Taoism—is applicable in a technological civilization.
It is possible for human beings, once again, to become aware in a certain way of this substratum. Not, however, as an object—not as something you can take out and look at—but nevertheless to be very strongly and almost sensuously aware of it and, in so doing, regain a new sense of one’s own identity, one’s own being: not as one of many things, one little event among many events that are all coming and going and temporary, but a sense of one’s actual self as being this single energy field—which can’t be, however, defined or identified—and, through realizing that, to take away the frantic anxiety that we have to secure ourselves as separate organisms, and to fight with other organisms, and play these elaborate games of one-upmanship, and—above all—to overcome the anxiety which leads us to regard nature itself as our enemy that has to be conquered and subjugated.
Intelligence is a function of the degree to which you realize that your behavior is one with the behavior of the rest of the world.
In our ordinary awareness we overlook the connections that go between so-called things and so-called events and make them, actually, nothing but aspects of one event.
If you see that the idea of separate things is an abstraction—let’s call it that—then this most of all applies to you as an organism: you are not a separate thing.
The relationship of all of us together, of all society, constitutes every one of us. We are—as individuals, as personalities—what we are in terms of a human community and of an interlocking complex of communities.
We are just as tied together as the molecules in our hands.
What you are—really—is the energy field, and it keeps doing you! It keeps peopleing. And it’s you who keep peopleing. Who else is responsible?
Our differentiation between separate things and events is an abstraction and the whole world is an inseparable unity.
If you really get in touch with your senses, with the so-called physical world, you’re in for many surprises.
There isn’t anything missing. It’s all here, but nobody is here to see it; everybody is wandering off to something else in the distance.
To eat in order to live—sort of, that it’s good for you—is… what do you mean, “good for you?” It means that it helps you to go on into the future. But what is the point of going on into the future when all the meals ahead of you are these unappetizing things that are just going to enable you to go on into the future?
Onions are living creatures, and if you cut up an onion for dinner you should reverence the onion, you should respect it. Because if you don’t have a feeling of love for the onion, for the fish, for whatever you eat, you won’t cook it properly and you won’t enjoy it. Cooking is a process of loving. And it is a paying of respect to these marvelous beings which we ingest in order to go on living. So this entirely futuristic, dietetic attitude to food is—again, you see—a question of purely quantitative thinking, of lack of relation to the material world.
The fact that—yes—the real-world now is always unseizable. It’s changing. You can’t grasp it; there’s nothing to hold on to. But that’s why it’s spiritual. When you lean on it, it collapses. But don’t lean on it. Live in it, but don’t lean on it; don’t try to hold it. Because in just the same way as when you embrace someone and you try to hold too hard—you squeeze the breath out of them and therefore you strangle them—so, in the same way, you don’t grab hold of the world. You can’t sense it that way. I cannot feel whatever this is by [Alan hits the object] doing this, you see? I can’t get the maximum taste out of beef by grinding it to pieces with my teeth and forcing my tongue against it. Because what I do is I dull the nerve ends. It’s a kind of a light touch; you let it flow through your fingers.
The physical world—right here and now, this absolutely concrete moment—is everything that you could ever have imagined the beatific vision to be.
Now, if you try to find it here, and say, “Now, golly! Let’s do this right now! I’ve really gotta pay attention to Now.” See? And you try to look at that, you see, and bring Now into focus and really look at it: you’re still pushing it away. It has to come to you by—you can’t seek Now, because the moment you seek it, you’re not looking at the real Now, you’re looking at one just ahead. See? So in some, this necessity of relating to the material present is one of the cardinal components of a good ecological attitude. Because greed—which is, essentially, discontent with the present (admittedly, some people living on the edge of poverty have an inadequate material present from a physical point of view)—but it is the greed of the well taken care of that is so terrifying: people who have enough to eat, and wear, and’re clothed, and are still greedy, and therefore go out to exploit this Earth and drag every last ounce of wealth out of it—which is immediately turned into rubbish and poisoned gas—because they can’t be alive here at the moment.
It is not, you see, that your own individual organism is the puppet of everything else, responding to it as a billiard ball responds to being hit by a cue. It is not also that you, as an individual, are an independent source of energy which pushes the world around. Both these views are based on a false assumption that the individual organism is really separate from the world; that’s the false assumption.
We have to realize that the external universe is just as much ourself as our own body.
We live for the future mainly because our present is inadequate. And it’s inadequate because we are not seeing it fully; we’re seeing it in terms of abstractions. And if your present is inadequate and is, matter of fact, only an abstract version of life, you’re like a person with a non-nutritive diet. You always, therefore, feel hungry, and you keep eating because you want more! So, in the same way: “More life, please!” “More time, please!” More! More! More! More! Because sometime or other, it’s gotta be alright; the thing I’ve been looking for must happen—I hope! But, of course, it never does. Not if you live that way. Because when all your goals in life are attained and you are at the top of your profession, or you’ve got beautiful children, or you—whatever it was you wanted—you feel the same as you always felt. You’re still looking for something in the future. And there isn’t any future! Not really. Therefore, I often say that only people who live in a proper relationship to the material present have any use for making any plans at all. Because then the plans work out; then they’re capable of enjoying them. The other people aren’t.
You are expressing the total power of the field of forces which is expressing itself in the form of skillful action through the agency of you as a human organism.
They felt that nature was organic. They saw, so vividly, that it was a single living organism of immense complexity.
Just at this moment of the development of technology—when we suddenly see it’s a lot more complicated than we thought it was, and that our project to change the universe is not going to be as easy as even H. G. Wells imagined—it’s just at this moment that this Chinese wisdom becomes available to the West. And we can understand it because it’s now talking our language. It’s talking of the language of relativity. The whole Zhuangzi book starts out with an absolutely marvelous chapter on relativity: relativity of the opposites, the interdependence, the mutual interpenetration of everything that happens. And we’ve discovered it.
There is [the possibility], then—isn’t there, at this point in history?—of civilizing technology. Let’s put it that way. You could almost say naturalizing technology.
We have to think of new political ideas altogether; ideas that’ve never been heard of. But the way of thinking about politics, as of thinking about technics, is by an organic model instead of the mechanical model. The world as one body. But a body, you see, is a highly diversified system with all kinds of division of function, and yet, all one. It is not like an anthill. It’s much more differentiated.
The human being collaborates with nature—but he does so by virtue of having great awareness of the field of forces in which he is situated. This takes us back, of course, to the point that I made right at the beginning: that you really are the field of forces in which your organism is situated. Self-realization is, in fact, realizing—as a sensuous experience—that you are that field of forces; that you are both your outside and your inside.
We always feel frustrated. We think we’re supposed to comprehend the world that way, and manage it that way, and a lot of people are not satisfied until you’ve given them an explanation. But it should be obvious that there never will be an explanation—in those terms, in the terms of words—because you can talk about the simplest object in the world forever and not fully describe its attributes. Words have a use, but they only have that use when they are operating in subordination to a kind of understanding that doesn’t depend on words at all. Words are like claws on the end of an arm, and the claws are no good unless subordinate to the more subtle organization of the arm and the rest of the body. So words are the claws in which we tear life to pieces and arrange it in certain ways, just as you have to bite—and therefore separate—the bits of a piece of meat in order to digest them. So, to make the world digestible in a certain way, you need to claw it apart.
I can discuss water with you without having to bring some into the room and show it to you. So words provide this kind of a shorthand. And very much, in so many ways, they have the advantages and disadvantages of money. Money helps us to transfer wealth, words help us to organize experience and communicate about it with each other. But beyond that, when we try to put our experience into words and—in terms of words—comprehend experience, then we run into insuperable difficulties.
The eye, the brain, the organization of a plant are obviously intelligent. What do I mean, “intelligent?” I say they’re obviously intelligent because anyone can see it. I would even go so far as to say they’re not products of intelligence—as if some intelligent fellow had been around and left this as a kind of track of his competence—the growth of a plant is intelligence itself.
When ministers became corrupt, then only did one hear of loyal ministers and wise councilors.
You remember that you can’t hold on. That’s the only way to let go. You can’t hold on; there’s nothing to hold on to, no one to hold it. It’s all one system, one energy.