The Joyous Cosmology
Alan W. Watts
T0 BEGIN WITH, this world has a different kind of time. It is the
time of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the clock.
There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus
dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom,
and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and
deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static
present. It is a dancing present—the unfolding of a pattern which has no
specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and
arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower. There
is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely
greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as
overlook them. The eye sees types and classes—flower, leaf, rock, bird,
fire—mental pictures of things rather than things, rough outlines filled with
flat color, always a little dusty and dim.
But here the
depth of light and structure in a bursting bud go on forever. There is time to
see them, time for the whole intricacy of veins and capillaries to develop in
consciousness, time to see down and down into the shape of greenness, which is
not green at all, but a whole spectrum generalizing itself as green—purple,
gold, the sunlit turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the
emerald. I cannot decide where shape ends and color begins. The bud has opened
and the fresh leaves fan out and curve back with a gesture which is
unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, "Thus!" And
somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The meaning is
transparent in the same way that the color and the texture are transparent,
with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be
right inside the structure and color. Which is of course where it is, for
light is an inseparable trinity of sun, object, and eye, and the chemistry of
the leaf is its color, its light.
But at the same time color
and light are the gift of the eye to the leaf and the sun. Transparency is the
property of the eyeball, projected outward as luminous space, interpreting
quanta of energy in terms of the gelatinous fibers in the head. I begin to
feel that the world is at once inside my head and outside it, and the two,
inside and outside, begin to include or "cap" one another like an infinite
series of concentric spheres. I am unusually aware that everything I am
sensing is also my body—that light, color, shape, sound, and texture are terms
and properties of the brain conferred upon the outside world. I am not looking
at the world, not confronting it; I am knowing it by a continuous process of
transforming it into myself, so that everything around me, the whole globe of
space, no longer feels away from me but in the middle.
This
is at first confusing. I am not quite sure of the direction from which sounds
come. The visual space seems to reverberate with them as if it were a drum.
The surrounding hills rumble with the sound of a truck, and the rumble and the
color-shape of the hills become one and the same gesture. I use that word
deliberately and shall use it again. The hills are moving into their
stillness. They mean something because they are being transformed into my
brain, and my brain is an organ of meaning. The forests of redwood trees upon
them look like green fire, and the copper gold of the sun-dried grass heaves
immensely into the sky. Time is so slow as to be a kind of eternity, and the
flavor of eternity transfers itself to the hills—burnished mountains which I
seem to remember from an immeasurably distant past, at once so unfamiliar as
to be exotic and yet as familiar as my own hand. Thus transformed into
consciousness, into the electric, interior luminosity of the nerves, the world
seems vaguely insubstantial—developed upon a color film, resounding upon the
skin of a drum, pressing, not with weight, but with vibrations interpreted as
weight. Solidity is a neurological invention, and, I wonder, can the nerves be
solid to themselves? Where do we begin? Does the order of the brain create the
order of the world, or the order of the world the brain? The two seem like egg
and hen, or like back and front.
The physical world is
vibration, quanta, but vibrations of what? To the eye, form and color; to the
ear, sound; to the nose, scent; to the fingers, touch. But these are all
different languages for the same thing, different qualities of sensitivity,
different dimensions of consciousness. The question, "Of what are they
differing forms?" seems to have no meaning. What is light to the eye is sound
to the ear. I have the image of the senses being terms, forms, or dimensions
not of one thing common to all, but of each other, locked in a circle of
mutuality. Closely examined, shape becomes color, which becomes vibration,
which becomes sound, which becomes smell, which becomes taste, and then touch,
and then again shape. (One can see, for example, that the shape of a leaf is
its color. There is no outline around the leaf; the outline is the limit where
one colored surface becomes another.) I see all these sensory dimensions as a
round dance, gesticulations of one pattern being transformed into
gesticulations of another. And these gesticulations are flowing through a
space that has still other dimensions, which I want to describe as tones of
emotional color, of light or sound being joyous or fearful, gold elated or
lead depressed. These, too, form a circle of reciprocity, a round spectrum so
polarized that we can only describe each in terms of the others.
Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of
gestures as a woven texture. Light, sound, touch, taste, and smell become a
continuous warp, with the feeling that the whole dimension of sensation is a
single continuum or field. Crossing the warp is a woof representing the
dimension of meaning—moral and aesthetic values, personal or individual
uniqueness, logical significance, and expressive form—and the two dimensions
interpenetrate so as to make distinguishable shapes seem like ripples in the
water of sensation. The warp and the woof stream together, for the weaving is
neither flat nor static but a many-directioned cross-flow of impulses filling
the whole volume of space. I feel that the world is on something in somewhat
the same way that a color photograph is on a film, underlying and connecting
the patches of color, though the film here is a dense rain of energy. I see
that what it is on is my brain—"that enchanted loom," as Sherrington called
it. Brain and world, warp of sense and woof of meaning, seem to interpenetrate
inseparably. They hold their boundaries or limits in common in such a way as
to define one another and to be impossible without each other.
I am listening to the music of an organ. As leaves seemed to
gesture, the organ seems quite literally to speak. There is no use of the
vox humana stop, but every sound seems to issue from a vast human
throat, moist with saliva. As, with the base pedals, the player moves slowly
down the scale, the sounds seem to blow forth in immense, gooey spludges. As I
listen more carefully, the spludges acquire texture—expanding circles of
vibration finely and evenly toothed like combs, no longer moist and
liquidinous like the living throat, but mechanically discontinuous. The sound
disintegrates into the innumerable individual drrrits of vibration.
Listening on, the gaps close, or perhaps each individual drrrit becomes
in its turn a spludge. The liquid and the hard, the continuous and the
discontinuous, the gooey and the prickly, seem to be transformations of each
other, or to be different levels of magnification upon the same thing.
This theme recurs in a hundred different ways—the
inseparable polarity of opposites, or the mutuality and reciprocity of all the
possible contents of consciousness. It is easy to see theoretically that all
perception is of contrasts—figure and ground, light and shadow, clear and
vague, firm and weak. But normal attention seems to have difficulty in taking
in both at once. Both sensuously and conceptually we seem to move serially
from one to the other; we do not seem to be able to attend to the figure
without relative unconsciousness of the ground. But in this new world the
mutuality of things is quite clear at every level. The human face, for
example, becomes clear in all its aspects—the total form together with each
single hair and wrinkle. Faces become all ages at once, for characteristics
that suggest age also suggest youth by implication; the bony structure
suggesting the skull evokes instantly the newborn infant. The associative
couplings of the brain seem to fire simultaneously instead of one at a time,
projecting a view of life which may be terrifying in its ambiguity or joyous
in its integrity.
Decision can be completely paralyzed by
the sudden realization that there is no way of having good without evil, or
that it is impossible to act upon reliable authority without choosing, from
your own inexperience, to do so. If sanity implies madness and faith doubt, am
I basically a psychotic pretending to be sane, a blithering terrified idiot
who manages, temporarily, to put on an act of being self-possessed? I begin to
see my whole life as a masterpiece of duplicity—the confused, helpless,
hungry, and hideously sensitive little embryo at the root of me having
learned, step by step, to comply, placate, bully, wheedle, flatter, bluff, and
cheat my way into being taken for a person of competence and reliability. For
when it really comes down to it, what do any of us know?
I am listening to a priest chanting the Mass and a choir of
nuns responding. His mature, cultivated voice rings with the serene authority
of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of the Faith once and for
all delivered to the saints, and the nuns respond, naively it seems, with
childlike, utterly innocent devotion. But, listening again, I can hear the
priest "putting on" his voice, hear the inflated, pompous balloon, the
studiedly unctuous tones of a master deceptionist who has the poor little
nuns, kneeling in their stalls, completely cowed. Listen deeper. The nuns are
not cowed at all. They are playing possum. With just a little stiffening, the
limp gesture of bowing turns into the gesture of the closing claw. With too
few men to go around, the nuns know what is good for them: how to bend and
survive.
But this profoundly cynical view of things is only
an intermediate stage. I begin to congratulate the priest on his gamesmanship,
on the sheer courage of being able to put up such a performance of authority
when he knows precisely nothing. Perhaps there is no other knowing than the
mere competence of the act. If, at the heart of one's being, there is no real
self to which one ought to be true, sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the
unabashed vigor of the pretense.
But pretense is only
pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the
agent. In the priest's voice I hear down at the root the primordial howl of
the beast in the jungle, but it has been inflected, complicated, refined, and
textured with centuries of culture. Every new twist, every additional
subtlety, was a fresh gambit in the game of making the original howl more
effective. At first, crude and unconcealed, the cry for food or mate, or just
noise for the fun of it, making the rocks echo. Then rhythm to enchant. then
changes of tone to plead or threaten. Then words to specify the need, to
promise and bargain. And then, much later, the gambits of indirection. The
feminine stratagem of stooping to conquer, the claim to superior worth in
renouncing the world for the spirit, the cunning of weakness proving stronger
than the might of muscle—and the meek inheriting the earth.
As I listen, then, I can hear in that one voice the simultaneous presence of
all the levels of man's history, as of all the stages of life before man.
Every step in the game becomes as clear as the rings in a severed tree. But
this is an ascending hierarchy of maneuvers, of stratagems capping stratagems,
all symbolized in the overlays of refinement beneath which the original howl
is still sounding. Sometimes the howl shifts from the mating call of the adult
animal to the helpless crying of the baby, and I feel all man's music—its pomp
and circumstance, its gaiety, its awe, its confident solemnity—as just so much
complication and concealment of baby wailing for mother. And as I want to cry
with pity, I know I am sorry for myself. I, as an adult, am also back there
alone in the dark, just as the primordial howl is still present beneath the
sublime modulations of the chant.
You poor baby! And yet—you
selfish little bastard! As I try to find the agent behind the act, the
motivating force at the bottom of the whole thing, I seem to see only an
endless ambivalence. Behind the mask of love I find my innate selfishness.
What a predicament I am in if someone asks, "Do you really love me?" I can't
say yes without saying no, for the only answer that will really satisfy is,
"Yes, I love you so much I could eat you! My love for you is identical with my
love for myself. I love you with the purest selfishness." No one wants to be
loved out of a sense of duty.
So I will be very frank. "Yes,
I am pure, selfish desire and I love you because you make me feel wonderful—at
any rate for the time being." But then I begin to wonder whether there isn't
something a bit cunning in this frankness. It is big of me to be so sincere,
to make a play for her by not pretending to be more than I am—unlike the other
guys who say they love her for herself. I see that there is always something
insincere about trying to be sincere, as if I were to say openly, "The
statement that I am now making is a lie." There seems to be something phony
about every attempt to define myself, to be totally honest. The trouble is
that I can't see the back, much less the inside, of my head. I can't be honest
because I don't fully know what I am. Consciousness peers out from a center
which it cannot see—and that is the root of the matter.
Life seems to resolve itself down to a tiny germ or nipple of
sensitivity. I call it the Eenie-Weenie—a squiggling little nucleus that is
trying to make love to itself and can never quite get there. The whole
fabulous complexity of vegetable and animal life, as of human civilization, is
just a colossal elaboration of the Eenie-Weenie trying to make the
Eenie-Weenie. I am in love with myself, but cannot seek myself without hiding
myself. As I pursue my own tail, it runs away from me. Does the amoeba split
itself in two in an attempt to solve this problem?
I try to
go deeper, sinking thought and feeling down and down to their ultimate
beginnings. What do I mean by loving myself? In what form do I know myself?
Always, it seems, in the form of something other, something strange. The
landscape I am watching is also a state of myself, of the neurons in my head.
I feel the rock in my hand in terms of my own fingers. And nothing is stranger
than my own body—the sensation of the pulse, the eye seen through a magnifying
glass in the mirror, the shock of realizing that oneself is something in the
external world. At root, there is simply no way of separating self from other,
self-love from other-love. All knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and
all knowledge of other knowledge of self. I begin to see that self and other,
the familiar and the strange, the internal and the external, the predictable
and the unpredictable imply each other. One is seek and the other is
hide, and the more I become aware of their implying each other, the more I
feel them to be one with each other. I become curiously affectionate and
intimate with all that seemed alien. In the features of everything foreign,
threatening, terrifying, incomprehensible, and remote I begin to recognize
myself. Yet this is a "myself" which I seem to be remembering from long, long
ago—not at all my empirical ego of yesterday, not my specious personality.
The "myself" which I am beginning to recognize, which I had
forgotten but actually know better than anything else, goes far back beyond my
childhood, beyond the time when adults confused me and tried to tell me that I
was someone else; when, because they were bigger and stronger, they could
terrify me with their imaginary fears and bewilder and outface me in the
complicated game that I had not yet learned. (The sadism of the teacher
explaining the game and yet having to prove his superiority in it.) Long
before all that, long before I was an embryo in my mother's womb, there looms
the ever-so-familiar stranger, the everything not me, which I recognize, with
a joy immeasurably more intense than a meeting of lovers separated by
centuries, to be my original self. The good old sonofabitch who got me
involved in this whole game.
At the same time everyone and
everything around me takes on the feeling of having been there always, and
then forgotten, and then remembered again. We are sitting in a garden
surrounded in every direction by uncultivated hills, a garden of fuchsias and
hummingbirds in a valley that leads down to the westernmost ocean, and where
the gulls take refuge in storms. At some time in the middle of the twentieth
century, upon an afternoon in the summer, we are sitting around a table on the
terrace, eating dark homemade bread and drinking white wine. And yet we seem
to have been there forever, for the people with me are no longer the humdrum
and harassed little personalities with names, addresses, and social security
numbers, the specifically dated mortals we are all pretending to be. They
appear rather as immortal archetypes of themselves without, however, losing
their humanity. It is just that their differing characters seem, like the
priest's voice, to contain all history; they are at once unique and eternal,
men and women but also gods and goddesses. For now that we have time to look
at each other we become timeless. The human form becomes immeasurably precious
and, as if to symbolize this, the eyes become intelligent jewels, the hair
spun gold, and the flesh translucent ivory. Between those who enter this world
together there is also a love which is distinctly eucharistic, an acceptance
of each other's natures from the heights to the depths.
Ella, who planted the garden, is a beneficent Circe—sorceress, daughter of the
moon, familiar of cats and snakes, herbalist and healer—with the youngest old
face one has ever seen, exquisitely wrinkled, silver-black hair rippled like
flames. Robert is a manifestation of Pan, but a Pan of bulls instead of the
Pan of goats, with frizzled short hair tufted into blunt horns—a man all
sweating muscle and body, incarnation of exuberant glee. Beryl, his wife, is a
nymph who has stepped out of the forest, a mermaid of the land with swinging
hair and a dancing body that seems to be naked even when clothed. It is her
bread that we are eating, and it tastes like the Original Bread of which
mother's own bread was a bungled imitation. And then there is Mary, beloved in
the usual, dusty world, but in this world an embodiment of light and gold,
daughter of the sun, with eyes formed from the evening sky—a creature of all
ages, baby, moppet, maid, matron, crone, and corpse, evoking love of all ages.
I try to find words that will suggest the numinous,
mythological quality of these people. Yet at the same time they are as
familiar as if I had known them for centuries, or rather, as if I were
recognizing them again as lost friends whom I knew at the beginning of time,
from a country begotten before all worlds. This is of course bound up with the
recognition of my own most ancient identity, older by far than the blind
squiggling of the Eenie-Weenie, as if the highest form that consciousness
could take had somehow been present at the very beginning of things. All of us
look at each other knowingly, for the feeling that we knew each other in that
most distant past conceals something else—tacit, awesome, almost
unmentionable—the realization that at the deep center of a time perpendicular
to ordinary time we are, and always have been, one. We acknowledge the
marvelously hidden plot, the master illusion, whereby we appear to be
different.
The shock of recognition. In the form of
everything most other, alien, and remote—the ever-receding galaxies, the
mystery of death, the terrors of disease and madness, the foreign-feeling,
gooseflesh world of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy labyrinth of my own
insides—in all these forms I have crept up on myself and yelled "Boo!" I scare
myself out of my wits, and, while out of my wits, cannot remember just how it
happened. Ordinarily I am lost in a maze. I don't know how I got here, for I
have lost the thread and forgotten the intricately convoluted system of
passages through which the game of hide-and-seek was pursued. (Was it the path
I followed in growing the circuits of my brain?) But now the principle of the
maze is clear. It is the device of something turning back upon itself so as to
seem to be other, and the turns have been so many and so dizzyingly complex
that I am quite bewildered. The principle is that all dualities and opposites
are not disjoined but polar; they do not encounter and confront one another
from afar; they exfoliate from a common center. Ordinary thinking conceals
polarity and relativity because it employs terms, the terminals or
ends, the poles, neglecting what lies between them. The difference of front
and back, to be and not to be, hides their unity and mutuality.
Now consciousness, sense perception, is always a sensation of
contrasts. It is a specialization in differences, in noticing, and nothing is
definable, classifiable, or noticeable except by contrast with something else.
But man does not live by consciousness alone, for the linear, step-by-step,
contrast-by-contrast procedure of attention is quite inadequate for organizing
anything so complex as a living body. The body itself has an "omniscience"
which is unconscious, or superconscious, just because it deals with relation
instead of contrast, with harmonies rather than discords. It "thinks" or
organizes as a plant grows, not as a botanist describes its growth. This is
why Shiva has ten arms, for he represents the dance of life, the omnipotence
of being able to do innumerably many things at once.
In the
type of experience I am describing, it seems that the superconscious method of
thinking becomes conscious. We see the world as the whole body sees it, and
for this very reason there is the greatest difficulty in attempting to
translate this mode of vision into a form of language that is based on
contrast and classification. To the extent, then, that man has become a being
centered in consciousness, he has become centered in clash, conflict, and
discord. He ignores, as beneath notice, the astounding perfection of his
organism as a whole, and this is why, in most people, there is such a
deplorable disparity between the intelligent and marvelous order of their
bodies and the trivial preoccupations of their consciousness. But in this
other world the situation is reversed. Ordinary people look like gods because
the values of the organism are uppermost, and the concerns of consciousness
fall back into the subordinate position which they should properly hold. Love,
unity, harmony, and relationship therefore take precedence over war and
division.
For what consciousness overlooks is the fact that
all boundaries and divisions are held in common by their opposite sides and
areas, so that when a boundary changes its shape both sides move together. It
is like the yang-yin symbol of the Chinese—the black and white fishes
divided by an S-curve inscribed within a circle. The bulging head of one is
the narrowing tail of the other. But how much more difficult it is to see that
my skin and its movements belong both to me and to the external world, or that
the spheres of influence of different human beings have common walls like so
many rooms in a house, so that the movement of my wall is also the movement of
yours. You can do what you like in your room just so long as I can do what I
like in mine. But each man's room is himself in his fullest extension, so that
my expansion is your contraction and vice versa.
I am looking at what I would ordinarily call a confusion of
bushes—a tangle of plants and weeds with branches and leaves going every which
way. But now that the organizing, relational mind is uppermost I see that what
is confusing is not the bushes but my clumsy method of thinking. Every twig is
in its proper place, and the tangle has become an arabesque more delicately
ordered than the fabulous doodles in the margins of Celtic manuscripts. In
this same state of consciousness I have seen a woodland at fall, with the
whole multitude of almost bare branches and twigs in silhouette against the
sky, not as a confusion, but as the lacework or tracery of an enchanted
jeweler. A rotten log bearing rows of fungus and patches of moss became as
precious as any work of Cellini—an inwardly luminous construct of jet, amber,
jade, and ivory, all the porous and spongy disintegrations of the wood seeming
to have been carved out with infinite patience and skill. I do not know
whether this mode of vision organizes the world in the same way that it
organizes the body, or whether it is just that the natural world is organized
in that way.
A journey into this new mode of consciousness
gives one a marvelously enhanced appreciation of patterning in nature, a
fascination deeper than ever with the structure of ferns, the formation of
crystals, the markings upon sea shells, the incredible jewelry of such
unicellular creatures of the ocean as the radiolaria, the fairy architecture
of seeds and pods, the engineering of bones and skeletons, the aerodynamics of
feathers, and the astonishing profusion of eye-forms upon the wings of
butterflies and birds. All this involved delicacy of organization may, from
one point of view, be strictly functional for the purposes of reproduction and
survival. But when you come down to it, the survival of these creatures is the
same as their very existence—and what is that for?
More and
more it seems that the ordering of nature is an art akin to music—fugues in
shell and cartilage, counterpoint in fibers and capillaries, throbbing rhythm
in waves of sound, light, and nerve. And oneself is connected with it quite
inextricably—a node, a ganglion, an electronic interweaving of paths,
circuits, and impulses that stretch and hum through the whole of time and
space. The entire pattern swirls in its complexity like smoke in sunbeams or
the rippling networks of sunlight in shallow water. Transforming itself
endlessly into itself, the pattern alone remains. The crosspoints, nodes,
nets, and curlicues vanish perpetually into each other. "The baseless fabric
of this vision." It is its own base. When the ground dissolves beneath me I
float.
Closed-eye fantasies in this world seem sometimes to
be revelations of the secret workings of the brain, of the associative and
patterning processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and
thinking. Unlike the one I have just described, they are for the most part
ever more complex variations upon a theme—ferns sprouting ferns sprouting
ferns in multidimensional spaces, vast kaleidoscopic domes of stained glass or
mosaic, or patterns like the models of highly intricate molecules—systems of
colored balls, each one of which turns out to be a multitude of smaller balls,
forever and ever. Is this, perhaps, an inner view of the organizing process
which, when the eyes are open, makes sense of the world even at points where
it appears to be supremely messy?
Later that same afternoon,
Robert takes us over to his barn from which he has been cleaning out junk and
piling it into a big and battered Buick convertible, with all the stuffing
coming out of the upholstery. The sight of trash poses two of the great
questions of human life, "Where are we going to put it?" and "Who's going to
clean up?" From one point of view living creatures are simply tubes, putting
things in at one end and pushing them out at the other—until the tube wears
out. The problem is always where to put what is pushed out at the other end,
especially when it begins to pile so high that the tubes are in danger of
being crowded off the earth by their own refuse. And the questions have
metaphysical overtones. "Where are we going to put it?" asks for the
foundation upon which things ultimately rest—the First Cause, the Divine
Ground, the bases of morality, the origin of action. "Who's going to clean
up?" is asking where responsibility ultimately lies, or how to solve our
ever-multiplying problems other than by passing the buck to the next
generation.
I contemplate the mystery of trash in its
immediate manifestation: Robert's car piled high, with only the driver's seat
left unoccupied by broken door-frames, rusty stoves, tangles of chicken-wire,
squashed cans, insides of ancient harmoniums, nameless enormities of cracked
plastic, headless dolls, bicycles without wheels, torn cushions vomiting
kapok, non-returnable bottles, busted dressmakers' dummies, rhomboid
picture-frames, shattered bird-cages, and inconceivable messes of string,
electric wiring, orange peels, eggshells, potato skins, and light bulbs—all
garnished with some ghastly-white chemical powder that we call "angel shit."
Tomorrow we shall escort this in a joyous convoy to the local dump. And then
what? Can any melting and burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising
mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning
to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away? The only
answer seems to be that of the present group. The sight of Robert's car has
everyone helpless with hysterics.
The Divine Comedy. All
things dissolve in laughter. And for Robert this huge heap of marvelously
incongruous uselessness is a veritable creation, a masterpiece of nonsense. He
slams it together and ropes it securely to the bulbous, low-slung wreck of the
supposedly chic convertible, and then stands back to admire it as if it were a
float for a carnival. Theme: the American way of life. But our laughter is
without malice, for in this state of consciousness everything is the doing of
gods. The culmination of civilization in monumental heaps of junk is seen, not
as thoughtless ugliness, but as self-caricature—as the creation of
phenomenally absurd collages and abstract sculptures in deliberate but kindly
mockery of our own pretensions. For in this world nothing is wrong, nothing is
even stupid. The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits
into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an
event belongs—a play which seems quite improper at level 28 may be exactly
right at level 96. I am speaking of levels or stages in the labyrinth of
twists and turns, gambits and counter-gambits, in which life is involving and
evolving itself —the cosmological one-upmanship which the yang and the
yin, the light and the dark principles, are forever playing, the game
which at some early level in its development seems to be the serious
battle between good and evil. If the square may be defined as one who takes
the game seriously, one must admire him for the very depth of his involvement,
for the courage to be so far-out that he doesn't know where he started.
The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or
anything seems to be, the more I am moved to marvel at the ingenuity with
which divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this
cosmic joie de vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a
corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the regular
Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy,
the flatness so reassuring—nothing around here but just us folks! I can see
people just pretending not to see that they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and
Shiva, that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust
isn't a haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not
understanding me if I were to step up and say, "Well, who do you think you're
kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't
fool me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that
divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be.* When
people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way
out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until
they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his
eye speaks to the unconscious—"You know....You know!"
In the contrast world of ordinary consciousness man feels himself, as will, to
be something in nature but not of it. He likes it or dislikes it. He accepts
it or resists it. He moves it or it moves him. But in the basic
superconsciousness of the whole organism this division does not exist. The
organism and its surrounding world are a single, integrated pattern of action
in which there is neither subject nor object, doer nor done to. At this level
there is not one thing called pain and another thing called myself, which
dislikes pain. Pain and the "response" to pain are the same thing. When this
becomes conscious it feels as if everything that happens is my own will. But
this is a preliminary and clumsy way of feeling that what happens outside the
body is one process with what happens inside it. This is that "original
identity" which ordinary language and our conventional definitions of man so
completely conceal.
The active and the passive are two
phases of the same act. A seed, floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts
across the sky, sighing with the sound of a jet plane invisible above. I catch
it by one hair between thumb and index finger, and am astonished to watch this
little creature actually wiggling and pulling as if it were struggling to get
away. Common sense tells me that this tugging is the action of the wind, not
of the thistledown. But then I recognize that it is the "intelligence" of the
seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk that, in an environment of
wind, it can move. Having such extensions, it moves itself with the wind. When
it comes to it, is there any basic difference between putting up a sail and
pulling an oar? If anything, the former is a more intelligent use of effort
than the latter. True, the seed does not intend to move itself with the wind,
but neither did I intend to have arms and legs.
It is this
vivid realization of the reciprocity of will and world, active and passive,
inside and outside, self and not-self, which evokes the aspect of these
experiences that is most puzzling from the standpoint of ordinary
consciousness: the strange and seemingly unholy conviction that "I" am God. In
Western culture this sensation is seen as the very signature of insanity But
in India it is simply a matter of course that the deepest center of man,
atman, is the deepest center of the universe, Brahman. Why not?
Surely a continuous view of the world is more whole, more holy, more healthy,
than one in which there is a yawning emptiness between the Cause and its
effects. Obviously, the "I" which is God is not the ego, the consciousness of
self which is simultaneously an unconsciousness of the fact that its outer
limits are held in common with the inner limits of the rest of the world. But
in this wider, less ignore-ant consciousness I am forced to see that
everything I claim to will and intend has a common boundary with all I pretend
to disown. The limits of what I will, the form and shape of all those actions
which I claim as mine, are identical and coterminous with the limits of all
those events which I have been taught to define as alien and external.
The feeling of self is no longer confined to the inside of
the skin. Instead, my individual being seems to grow out from the rest of the
universe like a hair from a head or a limb from a body, so that my center is
also the center of the whole. I find that in ordinary consciousness I am
habitually trying to ring myself off from this totality, that I am perpetually
on the defensive. But what am I trying to protect? Only very occasionally are
my defensive attitudes directly concerned with warding off physical damage or
deprivation. For the most part I am defending my defenses: rings around rings
around rings around nothing. Guards inside a fortress inside entrenchments
inside a radar curtain. The military war is the outward parody of the war of
ego versus world: only the guards are safe. In the next war only the air force
will outlive the women and children.
I trace myself back
through the labyrinth of my brain, through the innumerable turns by which I
have ringed myself off and, by perpetual circling, obliterated the original
trail whereby I entered this forest. Back through the tunnels—through the
devious status-and-survival strategy of adult life, through the interminable
passages which we remember in dreams—all the streets we have ever traveled,
the corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables and
chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the womb,
the fountainous surge through the channel of the penis, the timeless
wanderings through ducts and spongy caverns. Down and back through
ever-narrowing tubes to the point where the passage itself is the traveler—a
thin string of molecules going through the trial and error of getting itself
into the right order to be a unit of organic life. Relentlessly back and back
through endless and whirling dances in the astronomically proportioned spaces
which surround the original nuclei of the world, the centers of centers, as
remotely distant on the inside as the nebulae beyond our galaxy on the
outside.
Down and at last out—out of the cosmic maze to
recognize in and as myself, the bewildered traveler, the forgotten yet
familiar sensation of the original impulse of all things, supreme identity,
inmost light, ultimate center, self more me than myself. Standing in the midst
of Ella's garden I feel, with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared with
all the world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the home behind
home, that I have come into the inheritance unknowingly bequeathed from all my
ancestors since the beginning. Plucked like the strings of a harp, the warp
and woof of the world reverberate with memories of triumphant hymns. The sure
foundation upon which I had sought to stand has turned out to be the center
from which I seek. The elusive substance beneath all the forms of the universe
is discovered as the immediate gesture of my hand. But how did I ever get
lost? And why have I traveled so far through these intertwined tunnels that I
seem to be the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness which is my
conventional self?
Going indoors I find that all the household furniture is
alive. Everything gestures. Tables are tabling, pots are potting, walls are
walling, fixtures are fixturing—a world of events instead of things. Robert
turns on the phonograph, without telling me what is being played. Looking
intently at the pictures picturing, I only gradually become conscious of the
music, and at first cannot decide whether I am hearing an instrument or a
human voice simply falling. A single stream of sound, curving, rippling, and
jiggling with a soft snarl that at last reveals it to be a reed
instrument—some sort of oboe. Later, human voices join it. But they are not
singing words, nothing but a kind of "buoh—buah—bueeh" which seems to
be exploring all the liquidinous inflections of which the voice is capable.
What has Robert got here? I imagine it must be some of his far-out friends in
a great session of nonsense-chanting. The singing intensifies into the most
refined, exuberant, and delightful warbling, burbling. honking. hooting. and
howling—which quite obviously means nothing whatsoever. and is being done out
of pure glee. There is a pause. A voice says. "Dit!" Another seems to
reply, "Da!" Then, "Dit-da! Di-dittty-da!" And getting gradually
faster. "Da-di-ditty-di-ditty-da!
Di-da-di-ditty-ditty-da-di-da-di-ditty-da-da!" And so on, until the
players are quite out of their minds. The record cover which Robert now shows
me, says "Classical Music of India," and informs me that this is a series
edited by Alain Danielou, who happens to be the most serious, esoteric, and
learned scholar of Hindu music, and an exponent. in the line of Rene Guenon
and Ananda Coomaraswamy, of the most formal, traditional, and difficult
interpretation of Yoga and Vedanta. Somehow I cannot quite reconcile Danielou,
the pandit of pandits, with this delirious outpouring of human bird-song. I
feel my leg is being pulled. Or perhaps Danielou's leg.
But
then, maybe not. Oh, indeed not ! For quite suddenly I feel my understanding
dawning into a colossal clarity, as if everything were opening up down to the
roots of my being and of time and space themselves. The sense of the world
becomes totally obvious. I am struck with amazement that I or anyone could
have thought life a problem or being a mystery. I call to everyone to gather
round.
"Listen, there's something I must tell. I've
never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn't matter a bit if you don't
understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you
don't know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is
making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to
go on happening. For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely
of itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is
making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of
life; it is completely purposeless play—exuberance which is its own end.
Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are
complications of it. There is no reason whatever to explain it, for
explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life
on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme
forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of
because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all.
The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a
curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation,
a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety."
Of course, to say that life is just a gesture, an action without agent,
recipient, or purpose, sounds much more empty and futile than joyous. But to
me it seems that an ego, a substantial entity to which experience happens, is
more of a minus than a plus. It is an estrangement from experience, a lack of
participation. And in this moment I feel absolutely with the world,
free of that chronic resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of
life and makes us move like muscle-bound dancers. But I don't have to overcome
resistance. I see that resistance, ego, is just an extra vortex in the
stream--part of it—and that in fact there is no actual resistance at all.
There is no point from which to confront life, or stand against it.
I go into the garden again. The hummingbirds are soaring up
and falling in their mating dance, as if there were someone behind the bushes
playing ball with them. Fruit and more wine have been put out on the table.
Oranges—transformations of the sun into its own image, as if the tree were
acknowledging gratitude for warmth. Leaves, green with the pale, yellow-fresh
green that I remember from the springtimes of my childhood in Kentish
spinneys, where breaking buds were spotted all over the hazel branches in a
floating mist. Within them, trunks, boughs, and twigs moist black behind the
sunlit green. Fuchsia bushes, tangled traceries of stalks, intermingled with
thousands of magenta ballerinas with purple petticoats. And, behind all,
towering into the near-twilight sky, the grove of giant eucalyptus trees with
their waving clusters of distinctly individual, bamboo-like leaves. Everything
here is the visual form of the lilting nonsense and abandoned vocal dexterity
of those Hindu musicians.
I recall the words of an ancient
Tantric scripture: "As waves come with water and flames with fire, so the
universal waves with us." Gestures of the gesture, waves of the wave—leaves
flowing into caterpillars, grass into cows, milk into babies, bodies into
worms, earth into flowers, seeds into birds, quanta of energy into the
iridescent or reverberating labyrinths of the brain. Within and swept up into
this endless, exulting, cosmological dance are the base and grinding
undertones of the pain which transformation involves: chewed nerve endings,
sudden electric-striking snakes in the meadow grass, swoop of the lazily
circling hawks, sore muscles piling logs, sleepless nights trying to keep
track of the unrelenting bookkeeping which civilized survival demands.
How unfamiliarly natural it is to see pain as no longer a
problem. For problematic pain arises with the tendency of self-consciousness
to short-circuit the brain and fill its passages with dithering
echoes—revulsions to revulsions, fears of fear, cringing from cringing, guilt
about guilt—twisting thought to trap itself in endless oscillations. In his
ordinary consciousness man lives like someone trying to speak in an
excessively sensitive echo-chamber; he can proceed only by doggedly ignoring
the interminably gibbering reflections of his voice. For in the brain there
are echoes and reflected images in every dimension of sense, thought, and
feeling, chattering on and on in the tunnels of memory. The difficulty is that
we confuse this storing of information with an intelligent commentary on what
we are doing at the moment, mistaking for intelligence the raw materials of
the data with which it works. Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes
us see ourselves double, and we mistake the double image for two selves—mental
and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus
instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering
about suffering.
As has always been said, clarity comes with
the giving up of self. But what this means is that we cease to attribute
selfhood to these echoes and mirror images. Otherwise we stand in a hall of
mirrors, dancing hesitantly and irresolutely because we are making the images
take the lead. We move in circles because we are following what we have
already done. We have lost touch with our original identity, which is not the
system of images but the great self-moving gesture of this as yet unremembered
moment. The gift of remembering and binding time creates the illusion that the
past stands to the present as agent to act, mover to moved. Living thus from
the past, with echoes taking the lead, we are not truly here, and are always a
little late for the feast. Yet could anything be more obvious than that the
past follows from the present like the wake of a ship, and that if we are to
be alive at all, here is the place to be?
Evening at
last closes a day that seemed to have been going on since the world began. At
the high end of the garden, above a clearing, there stands against the
mountain wall a semicircle of trees, immensely tall and dense with foliage,
suggesting the entrance grove to some ancient temple. It is from here that the
deep blue-green transparency of twilight comes down, silencing the birds and
hushing our own conversation. We have been watching the sunset, sitting in a
row upon the ridgepole of the great barn whose roof of redwood tiles, warped
and cracked, sweeps clear to the ground. Below, to the west, lies an open
sward where two white goats are munching the grass, and beyond this is
Robert's house where lights in the kitchen show that Beryl is preparing
dinner. Time to go in, and leave the garden to the awakening stars.
Again music—harpsichords and a string orchestra, and Bach in his most
exultant mood. I lie down to listen, and close my eyes. All day, in wave after
wave and from all directions of the mind's compass, there has repeatedly come
upon me the sense of my original identity as one with the very fountain of the
universe. I have seen, too, that the fountain is its own source and motive,
and that its spirit is an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned
dance of life. There is no problem left, but who will believe it? Will I
believe it myself when I return to normal consciousness? Yet I can see at the
moment that this does not matter. The play is hide-and-seek or lost-and-found,
and it is all part of the play that one can get very lost indeed. How far,
then, can one go in getting found?
As if in answer to my
question there appears before my closed eyes a vision in symbolic form of what
Eliot has called "the still point of the turning world." I find myself looking
down at the floor of a vast courtyard, as if from a window high upon the wall,
and the floor and the walls are entirely surfaced with ceramic tiles
displaying densely involved arabesques in gold, purple, and blue. The scene
might be the inner court of some Persian palace, were it not of such immense
proportions and its colors of such preternatural transparency. In the center
of the floor there is a great sunken arena, shaped like a combination of star
and rose, and bordered with a strip of tiles that suggest the finest inlay
work in vermilion, gold, and obsidian.
Within this arena
some kind of ritual is being performed in time with the music. At first its
mood is stately and royal, as if there were officers and courtiers in rich
armor and many-colored cloaks dancing before their king. As I watch, the mood
changes. The courtiers become angels with wings of golden fire, and in the
center of the arena there appears a pool of dazzling flame. Looking into the
pool I see, just for a moment, a face which reminds me of the Christos
Pantocrator of Byzantine mosaics, and I feel that the angels are drawing back
with wings over their faces in a motion of reverent dread. But the face
dissolves. The pool of flame grows brighter and brighter, and I notice that
the winged beings are drawing back with a gesture, not of dread, but of
tenderness—for the flame knows no anger. Its warmth and radiance—"tongues of
flame infolded"—are an efflorescence of love so endearing that I feel I have
seen the heart of all hearts.
* "Self-conscious man thinks he thinks.
This has long been recognized to be an error, for the conscious subject who
thinks he thinks is not the same as the organ which does the thinking. The
conscious person is one component only, a series of transitory aspects, of the
thinking person." L. L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (Basic
Books, New York, 1960), p. 59. (back)