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You say “process,” et cetera. And he is equally vague. You can always describe events in terms of things, and equally, you can describe things in terms of events.
If I want to say, ordinary, “While the cat sat on the mat, the dog went for a walk around the house.” That’s noun-verb language. But I can equally say, “While the catting sat on the matting, the dogging went walking around the dwelling.” And I’ve changed the whole sentence into verbs, and it’s still as clear as it was in the beginning. Or I can turn it all into nouns: “The cat seat upon the mat, the dog upon the walk around the house.” It’s all nouns.
But in a noun world, of course, you will have a static world. In the verb world you will have a dynamic world. But there aren’t—for example, if you take the word “fist,” is a fist a noun?
Yes. But it describes a process. It’s not properly a noun, because this noun suddenly vanishes.
This thing, called fist, disappears the minute I open my hand. What happened to it? See, I stopped fisting and I went into handing.
So the verb language has a little edge over the noun language as being better suited to the kind of process that nature is. So when you realize that you can discuss the whole of nature in the verb language, you don’t have to ask the question, “Who started it?” You don’t, in other words, have to seek for a noun as the explanation of the verbs. You don’t have to seek for something that is not-process to start process off.
So this, then, is the language I’m using when I talk about patterning as the basic goings-on of the physical world. And patterning can be described and measured and so on and so forth. So then, the other point that I was making particularly was: in in the spectrum you have the extremes of the spectrum.
The sound and the silence, the light and the dark, space and solid. And I was showing how, by the yin-yang philosophy of the Chinese, these extremes are not opposites but poles. They go together.
They require each other. You know one in terms of the other. And so, in this way, you don’t have the world as an opposition of light and darkness, of being and non-being, in such a way that one of the poles could exist alone—either being or non-being, non-being or being—because the whole nature of poles is that without both of them that are neither.
And so, if we have a polar universe, then you don’t, as it were, have to worry (as if this was something to worry about) that the play, the music of existence, might cease forever and ever and ever. In that kind of cosmology argument that’s now going on—you know, there are two dominant theories of cosmology among physicists. One is the steady-state theory and the other is the explosion theory.
The steady-state people want to make out that free hydrogen in space is all the time, as it were, coagulating and forming itself into new bodies. Whereas the explosion theory people, who have the edge of the argument at the moment, say there was originally an enormous concentration of energy which blew up and expelled all the galaxies from it, which went floating out, and the whole thing is gradually dissipating itself, radioactively, until it will reach a state of quiescence. And, of course, if you have a Judeo-Christian mind which thinks of time in a linear way instead of a circular way, you’ll think that’s awful.
Because the whole thing is running down, and when it’s finished that’ll be it. But, you see, I always want to ask the question: what was it like before the big bang went off in the beginning? Probably pretty much the same state of affairs as when it all petered out in the end.
In other words, whatever happened once can always happen again—given enough time or given enough something or other. So I’ll settle for either the steady-state theory or the big bang theory. Doesn’t make much difference, except by way of describing the pattern; how it happens.
The question of whether it happens—I always figure that whatever did happen could happen again. You know, think about myself: well, I’m a kind of a funny phenomenon that this universe is doing. And it’s done me this time.
It may be to me again later on; maybe a million years from now it’ll do me again. Not quite the same way, but rather like me, near enough to be me. You know, like you play the piano, and you play a certain piece and then you stop, and the piece is dead.
Then you think, well, let’s play it again. You play the same piece again. It’s the same piece, but it’s a different playing.
Play the tape recorder. I’ve got the tape on here. I can play it.
Then it stops. Then, several days later, we put it on and play it again. It’s a little different, probably, but the same process.
And every time the universe plays any one of you, each one of you it plays is I. See, everybody calls himself “I,” and you feel your “I” just as much as I feel I’m “I.” That is to say, that you are the middle, the sensitive center, out of which everything looks. And you call yourself “I.” Well, that’s my name.
And everyone is “I.” The only trouble about being “I” is that you can only be one at a time. See, when a child asks, “Who would I have been if my father had been someone else, mommy?” Well, the funny questions children ask. Well, you have to be someone in order to be anyone.
But every someone is “I.” And it’s all, as it were, the same “I” looking out through different “I”s. Like, you put an electric light inside a black sphere and make holes in the sphere, and all the holes are different, but the light at the bottom of it’s the same. Something like that.
That’s a kind of a rough analogy. But anyone knows from a physical point of view that every organism is simply a pattern of behavior which can’t be separated from the pattern of behavior which we call its environment. It’s all one pattern.
Except the one pattern, like every one pattern—give me a pattern, and every pattern… look at these bamboos: there’s a pattern. And every pattern has wiggles in it. And sub-wiggles.
And sub-sub-wiggles. See, the main wiggle is the stem. Then the twigs come out as a sub-wiggle.
The leaf comes out as a sub-sub-wiggle. And if you look into the leaf, there are sub-sub-sub-wiggles. And that’s the way it goes.
They all belong to the pattern. It’s difficult, too, to say who’s wiggling what. Is the stem wiggling the leaves or are the leaves wiggling the stem?
Both arguments are equally valid. The universe is doing me and I’m doing the universe, because the universe depends on my optic nerves and all that structure to turn the sun into light. It wouldn’t be light if there weren’t any eyes.
Just like a hand on a drum: if there’s no skin on the drum, there will be no noise. Takes two to make love, to make an argument, and do anything. That’s the yang and the yin.
Well, now, let’s go through this spectrum—or begin to go through it; I’m not going to go all the way through it this afternoon. You begin at the end of sleep, torpor, and we’ll go as far as number three. Do you know that sleep is a very mysterious subject?
Scientific students of sleep are not yet at all sure what sleep is. Apparently people need it, but nobody really knows why they need it from a strictly scientific point of view. And we apparently need to dream in sleep, also.
People who are deprived of dreams get very, very restless and unhappy. But we’re not quite sure why we need dreaming. I mean, we’ve got all sorts of theories.
The Freudians and the Jungians, and so on. They think they know why we need to dream. But it hasn’t been really rigorously established, scientifically, why we do or why we need to sleep.
But from a naïve point of view, you can say, “Of course I need to sleep. Because after I’ve had a whole day of business and friends and work and so on, it’s just too much. There’s too much input.
I want to digest it. And while I’m digesting it, I don’t want any more input. I don’t want any more information.
So I want to be turned off.” That’s, you know, one of those simple, common-sense things that everybody knows, but has not yet been fully explained. So sleep is this marvelous thing that we have, which is a forgettery process that is apparently essential to our psychic health, every twelve hours or so. And if you don’t get it, you start getting worried.
As a matter of fact, insomnia is a thing that is rather curious. Because if you do get insomnia, the worst thing of all to do is to worry about it. Invariably, if I can’t sleep, I don’t try to go to sleep, I get up and work, or do something, or I read a very difficult book, especially one that is big and weighs a lot.
This is a good way to go to sleep. But if you have insomnia, don’t ever try to go to sleep. Nobody can try to go to sleep.
Lots of mothers think they can get their children, and they say, “Darling, try to go to sleep.” Didn’t your mother say to you: try to go to sleep? Because she wanted to get you out of the way. That was the only reason she said try to go to sleep.
She thought, perhaps, it was good for you and that you ought really to get your sleep. It’s like telling some child that it’s got to eat its spinach. And, you know, the child can start chewing and chewing and chewing on meat or spinach, which tastes of nothing, and it chews it into an absolute hard, stiff pulp.
And there’s just nothing to be done with it except spit it out. You know, they’ve already extracted by their teeth instead of their stomach all the vital juices of the thing, and all that remains is roughage. And you say to children, “You must go to the bathroom after breakfast, every day, regularly.” You must be regular, otherwise you’re constipated, and that’s bad.
This is a form of the double bind, you know? You are required to do that which will be good only if it’s done voluntarily. So try to go to sleep.
It is impossible. Sleep has to happen because it’s a spontaneous activity. And can be helped, as we shall see, when we come to consider torpor.
But, by and large, sleep is a spontaneous activity, and is a way of turning yourself off to get away from the bombardment of awareness and forget. Because forgetting renews. And that also is a function of all demolitions, of deaths, of destruction of patterns, of knocking down buildings, of the whole change process in the universe.
Because we want to do what we’ve done before over again. Only, if you remember it too often, it’ll become boring. So if you forget, then you can do it again, and it’ll be just as amazing as it was the first time.
And so there absolutely has to be a forgettery built into this universe in just the same way and for just the same reasons that there must be an eliminative process in the body as well as an eating process. And both are vitally important. And, you see, we have very different attitudes to the two.
Eating is something we do socially, eliminating is something we do privately. Eating we consider—we want all the good smells and all that kind of thing. Eliminating is all bad smells and that kind of thing.
Well, this is largely social conditioning that tells us this. But nevertheless, these are the two sides of the game we play, and there’s a spectrum between the two. So, in the same way here, you have to forget just as you have to eliminate.
So that everything is renewed because it can happen again without being boring. Things that happen all the time in any way begin to pass out of consciousness. For example, if there is a constant noise going on while we’re talking, it will annoy us at first, but after a while we shall cease to notice it—if it’s constant.
But if it keeps varying, coming on in different volumes and different rhythms, it’ll hold our attention all the time. So anything that just goes, Diggity-ding, diggity-ding, diggity-ding, diggity-ding, diggity-ding, diggity-ding, diggity-ding, diggity-ding, you will eventually cease to notice. So then, sleep is the renewer because it’s the state of forgetfulness.
I’m not going to go, in this seminar, into the whole problem of dreams. That would lead us very far afield. Now, torpor describes something approaching sleep.
But this also is a valuable state because it’s very comfortable. In sleep you’re not aware of sleeping, but in torpor you are aware of the comfort of tiredness and minified consciousness. It is a sort of pseudo-return to the womb.
And so when, after a hard day’s work where people have been irritating and combative, you go home or you go to the local bar, and you down a number of martinis, they turn you off and they put you into a state of near torpor, or what is quite correctly and scientifically called (this learned and funny word) narcosis. Narcosis. Narcissus, you know, is connected with narcosis.
It means torpor. Reduced consciousness. Reduced sensory input.
And the reason why Narcissus is associated with narcosis is that Narcissus, when he saw his reflection in the water, didn’t know it was himself. And he became so fascinated by this image in the water that he became unaware of everything else. He got hung up, or, shall we say (to use current slang), hooked on his own image, and he didn’t know it was his own image.
That was the only reason he could get hooked on it. So Narcissus and narcosis are associated. And so the permissive narcotic in our culture is alcohol.
And other narcotics like opiates exist. But you must remember that you can only correctly use the word narcotic, or something inducing the state of consciousness, which is torpor. Now, you can do it by massage, by relaxation exercises, by hot tubs.
Many, many ways of inducing torpor. I mean, in torpor you’re not truly relaxed, because you tend to lose muscular tonus, which you always retain in true relaxation. But you begin to go like a limp rag.
Now, there’s a place for that in life. And it’s good as an way of sleep induction for people who have insomnia and are so anxious that they don’t allow themselves to be turned off. I would want to say, in general, a good word for sleep and torpor, because a lot of people are against them.
Ouspensky, who was Gurdjieff’s, sort of, Saint Paul—and as much a misinterpreter, in a way, too—always felt that his life was a war against sleep. That intense light consciousness should conquer darkness. Now, that’s a stupid idea.
To be a human being you have to love the light, but you also must trust yourself to the darkness. Be able to let yourself go in the faith that you’ll arrive back all in one piece. I have a friend who—her name is Charlotte Selver, and she does the kind of work for which there is no name.
She calls it “sensory awareness.” And one of her experiments is to get a person to lie on the ground, and simply she says to them, “Now, it’s alright. The ground is going to hold you up. So just just lie down.
And there’s nothing else you need to do, because the ground is firm and it will hold you there.” Then she examines the person’s body after a while and says, “Look, do you know what you’re doing? You’re trying to hold yourself together. As if your skin weren’t strong enough to contain you.
And you’re doing this all the time to keep yourself from falling apart. Why? You think, do you, that if you don’t hold yourself together you’re just going to go bleah and disappear into some kind of frightful green jello?
No, you won’t.” In the same way, a lot of people—that’s why we would wear such ridiculous clothes. Especially women. Men are pretty bad, but women….
The men and do it around the neck. You know, the necktie: the symbol of slavery. It’s a noose to strangle you.
But you feel tight; really held in here, and held in by the belt. And women wear girdles, eeeh! hold them in like this.
And krrrk! the coat that fits your body. Jacket, you know: put it on and it fits and you’re squeezed.
Or you get these tight pants that hug you, and you know you’re there. Other people, of course, don’t know they’re there till they’re sitting on spikes. Then they really know they’re there.
And a lot of people make trouble for themselves in order to be able to sit on spikes, so that they know they’re there. Now, supposing, instead, you switch to another kind of clothes—you wear Japanese clothes. I often wear Japanese clothes because they happen to be, for men, the most comfortable form of clothing ever devised.
There’s only one place where it holds you, and that’s at the belt. But you wear the belt not ’round your waist, but below your belly, and you wear it rather loose. Otherwise, the garments are flowing.
They don’t interfere with the nature of the cloth. Because the cloth is woven on erect a linear pattern. See?
Cloth is straight, like this. So when you get a Japanese kimono, it folds up instantly for packing. But you try to pack a a western man’s jacket or a woman’s suit jacket, and there’s absolutely no way of folding the thing at all.
So it always comes out of your suitcase needing to go to the pressing. But you take a kimono and you put it on, and it falls exactly according to its own nature around you, and they’re very dignified. But you don’t feel closed in.
Now, that makes some people terribly uncomfortable if they don’t feel pinched and pulled together, they don’t feel dressed, and feel this is: I’m going around in a bathrobe. And a lot of people can’t wear a bathrobe beyond a certain hour of the day, because they don’t feel that they’re respectable. I mean, you can perfectly well get up and put yourself into the most beautiful, any kind of gorgeous bathrobe you want to, and run around and do your work if you don’t have to go to the office.
Even if you had to go to the office, they ought to allow you to wear interesting robes. And furthermore, I once asked a Japanese why he didn’t wear a kimono anymore. And he said, “You can’t run for a bus in a kimono.” Well, it’s perfectly true—unless you hoist it up and tie it into the belt, you can’t.
And that’s rather undignified. But the thing is that in this age that is now forthcoming, when we’re going to cut down the working hours because of automation, people have got to learn to saunter and dawdle. Otherwise, they’ll get into mischief.
And so, forms of clothing which are supremely comfortable but which require a kind of a sauntering attitude to life are going to be very important for the future of civilization. This is a pitch for the kimono. But this is all to do with letting yourself go into the earth—into the darkness, as it were—and trusting the world that lies below you as much as you might trust the world that lies above you.
Drop. Fall freely in space. That’s a marvelous sensation.
It’s like floating. That’s why people do skydiving. Because, just until they pull that parachute, they have the sensation of flying.
Even though they’re dropping very fast, they get the sensation. Total freedom. Eeeeeeeh!
See? That’s what everybody’s looking for. So we get that, in a way, in sleep.
The arms of Morpheus. And the idea of sleep as healing—some psychiatrists are very keen on the idea of putting their patients (by hypnosis and other methods) into long, long periods of sleep where they feel completely secure, looked after, nothing to worry about. I have a favorite sleeping place.
It’s a house on top of the hills in Hollywood. There’s a great eucalyptus tree, and underneath this there is a deck. And I like to get a sleeping bag and lie on my back underneath this eucalyptus tree, and look up at the stars through the shadows of the leaves, and just go.
See? That’s a marvelous feeling. Well, now we come to the things of sleep, where I will say this one thing about dreaming and about torpor.
We know the motto in vino veritas: “in wine, the truth comes out.” Of course, it also has a subtle double take meaning. All popular sayings have many levels of meaning. And it’s a Christian saying; in vino veritas.
Belongs to the Western culture. It also means “in the wine is the true blood of Christ.” The Catholic mass. That refers to the fact that life requires death; the drinking of blood.
But in the sense, in vino veritas, the person reveals himself, lets go of himself, lets his unconscious come out when he is drunk, or also in sleep, when the dreams come out, and show the inner side of things. You will see, in that way, that these two states can, in a certain sense, be creative. They let things come up which are normally put down.
Because [the] number three spectrum, the waking state of what we will call symbolic consciousness, is highly guarded. It is the most guarded of all these states. Now then, I want you to understand, then, that the ordinary state of consciousness—what you call normal consciousness—is by no means a frank, objective awareness of the real world.
Not by any means at all. It is a state of highly cultivated, hothouse-reared, special ways of perceiving the world in accordance with symbolic formulae. And it all depends on your orientation to the physical world as to what you see in it.
You know the story of a tailor who went to see the pope, and they asked him, “What was he like?” And he said, “He was a 41.” Or a woman who says to a man, “You saw Mrs. So-and-so today?” “Yeah.” “What was she wearing?” “Gee, I have no idea!” You didn’t notice, but you saw. But you didn’t pay attention, because you weren’t interested in what she had on, but what she had off—or whatever it be. So we notice according to what we are programmed or conditioned to notice by our social conditioning—that is to say: our upbringing, our education, our professional needs, our survival needs.
So do we notice what’s happening? Now, supposing somebody from an entirely different planet came into this room and started looking at us, and he wasn’t programmed to notice the things that we notice, he would ask the most amazing questions about what we are doing. He’d notice that most of us have standard ways of holding our hands.
Why do some of you sit like this? Why do some of you sit like this? Why do some of you sit like this?
Why don’t you do this? Wouldn’t that be the obvious thing to do with your hands? Just let ’em hang.
Very few people ever do that because they feel a funny feeling; that they’ve got a couple of wet fish down here. They don’t know what to do with them. See?
Then he’d notice all sorts of funny things about us that would never occur to us to think about. And he would notice, for example, you might say, “Well, what color is a human face?” You know, the comic strip artists tell you: pink or brown. They do a black outline and then they color the whole face pink.
Now, for a change, take a real good look at a face and you’ll start seeing that it just doesn’t have a particular color. Not only does it depend where the face is in relation to the available light, and what it’s reflecting, but also it’s a patchwork of all kinds of subtle color changes, and it’s full of funny hairs and spots and all sorts of things which we are not supposed to see—especially on ladies; girls. Men don’t care so much if they have a hair somewhere.
But girls carefully pluck hairs out with tweezers and make them disappear so as to get as smooth a texture as possible. The Japanese go so far as for a beauty to cover herself completely with the white paste so that she’s got complete pancake makeup. Dead white.
And when a Japanese photographer takes a picture of you, you’ll never recognize yourself because he he works out every wrinkle, every shadow, and presents you as a complete mask. Because it’s inauspicious to have shadows. When a Westerner first painted one of the emperors with the shadows showing, they said, “But you can’t paint the emperor that way!
His face is not dirty. And besides, it’s inauspicious to have a shadow fall on the imperial visage.” So you can see shadows. The artist Rembrandt taught you to see shadows.
Leonardo taught you to see shadows. But modern painters have discovered that shadows aren’t darkness, shadows are light, shadows are color, shadows are full of vitality. So you’ll begin to get vivid purple shadows.