|
by Alan Watts
Once upon a time,
there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem to his teacher,
which says:
The voices of torrents
are from one great tongue, the lions of the hills are the pure body of
Buddha. 'Isn't that right?' he said to the teacher. 'It is,' said the
teacher, 'but it's a pity to say so.'
It would be, of
course, much better, if this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all,
and if I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I
should hit the microphone with my fan and leave. But I somehow have the
feeling that since you have contributed to the support of the Zen Center,
in expectation of learning something, a few words should be said, even
though I warn you, that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject
you to a very serious hoax.
Because if I allow you
to leave here this evening, under the impression that you understand
something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen
is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any
concept whatsoever, so that any concepts, any ideas, any words that I
shall put across to you this evening will have as their object, showing
you the limitations of words and of thinking.
Now then, if one must
try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by way of
introduction, I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a
doctrine. There's nothing you're supposed to believe in. It's not a
philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual
net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of
reality is more like water--it always slips through the net. And in water
you know when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to. All this
universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And
when you're thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the
dry land, you're not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the
water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. The only
way to survive in the water, and this refers particularly to the waters of
modern philosophical confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical
propositions are meaningless, and there's really nothing to hang on to,
because we're all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those
circumstances is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go,
you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the
right way. And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a
certain way you become the water. And so in the same way, one might say if
one attempted to--again I say misleadingly--to put Zen into any sort of
concept, it simply comes down to this:
That in this universe,
there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. People have tried
various names for it, like God, like *Brahmin, like Tao, but in the West,
the word God has got so many funny associations attached to it that most
of us are bored with it. When people say 'God, the father almighty,' most
people feel funny inside. So we like to hear new words, we like to hear
about Tao, about Brahmin, about Shinto, and __-__-__, and such strange
names from the far East because they don't carry the same associations of
mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past. And actually, some of
these words that the Buddhists use for the basic energy of the world
really don't mean anything at all. The word tathata, which is translated
from the Sanskrit as 'suchness' or 'thusness' or something like that,
really means something more like 'dadada,' based on the word _tat_, which
in Sanskrit means 'that,' and so in Sanskrit it is said tat lum asi, 'that
thou art,' or in modern America, 'you're it.' But 'da, da'--that's the
first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world, because the baby
looks around and says 'da, da, da, da' and fathers flatter themselves and
think it's saying 'DaDa,' which means 'Daddy,' but according to Buddhist
philosophy, all this universe is one 'dadada.' That means 'ten thousand
functions, ten thousand things, one suchness,' and we're all one suchness.
And that means that suchess comes and goes like anything else because this
whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it's the yang and
the yin, and therefore it consists of 'now you see it, now you don't, here
you are, here you aren't, here you are,' because that the nature of
energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs, only we,
being under a kind of sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is
going to overcome the wave or the crest, the yin, or the dark principle,
is going to overcome the yang, or the light principle, and that 'off' is
going to finally triumph over 'on.' And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by
indulging in that illusion. 'Hey, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn't
that be terrible!' And so we're constantly trembling and thinking that it
may, because after all, isn't it odd that anything exists? It's most
peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy, and it would have been
so much easier for there to have been nothing at all. Therefore, we think
'well, since being, since the 'is' side of things is so much effort' you
always give up after a while and you sink back into death. But death is
just the other face of energy, and it's the rest, the not being anything
around, that produces something around, just in the same way that you
can't have 'solid' without 'space,' or 'space' without 'solid.' When you
wake up to this, and realize that the more it changes the more it's the
same thing, as the French say, that you are really a train of this one
energy, and there is nothing else but that that is you, but that for you
to be always you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is
arranged that you stop being you after a while and then come back as
someone else altogether, and so when you find that out, you become full
energy and delight. As Blake said, 'Energy is eternal delight.' And you
suddenly see through the whole sham thing. You realize you're That--we
won't put a name on it-- you're That, and you can't be anything else. So
you are relieved of fundamental terror. That doesn't mean that you're
always going to be a great hero, that you won't jump when you hear a bang,
that you won't worry occasionally, that you won't lose your temper. It
means, though, that fundamentally deep, deep, deep down within you, you
will be able to be human, not a stone Buddha--you know in Zen there is a
difference made between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha. If you go up
to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head, nothing happens. You
break your fist or your stick. But if you hit a living Buddha, he may say
'ouch,' and he may feel pain, because if he didn't feel something, he
wouldn't be a human being. Buddhas are human, they are not devas, they are
not gods. They are enlightened men and women. But the point is that they
are not afraid to be human, they are not afraid to let themselves
participate in the pains, difficulties and struggles that naturally go
with human existence. The only difference is--and it's almost an
undetectable difference--it takes one to know one. As a Zen poem says,
'when two Zen masters meet each other on the street, they need no
introduction. When fiends meet, they recognize one another instantly.' So
a person who is a real cool Zen understands that, does not go around 'Oh,
I understand Zen, I have satori, I have this attainment, I have that
attainment, I have the other attainment,' because if he said that, he
wouldn't understand the first thing about it.
So it is Zen that, if
I may put it metaphorically, *Jon-Jo said 'the perfect man employs his
mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but
does not keep.' And another poem says of wild geese flying over a lake,
'The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has
no mind to retain their image.' In other words this is to be--to put it
very strictly into our modern idiom--this is to live without hang-ups, the
word 'hang- up' being an almost exact translation of the Japanese bono and
the Sanskrit klesa, ordinarily translated 'worldly attachment,' though
that sounds a little bit--you know what I mean--it sounds pious, and in
Zen, things that sound pious are said to stink of Zen, but to have no
hang-ups, that is to say, to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like
water, seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion, a plane of energy,
and that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Fundamentally. You
will be afraid on the surface. You will be afraid of putting your hand in
the fire. You will be afraid of getting sick, etc. But you will not be
afraid of fear. Fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud will be
reflected in the mirror. But of course, the mirror isn't quite the right
illustration; space would be better. Like a black cloud flows through
space without leaving any track. Like the stars don't leave trails behind
them. And so that fundamental--it is called 'the void' in Buddhism; it
doesn't mean 'void' in the sense that it's void in the ordinary sense of
emptiness. It means void in that is the most real thing there is, but
nobody can conceive it. It's rather the same situation that you get
between the speaker, in a radio and all the various sounds which it
produces. On the speaker you hear human voices, you hear every kind of
musical instrument, honking of horns, the sounds of traffic, the
explosions of guns, and yet all that tremendous variety of sounds are the
vibrations of one diaphragm, but it never says so. The announcer doesn't
come on first thing in the morning and say 'Ladies and gentlemen, all the
sounds that you will hear subsequently during the day will be the
vibration of this diaphragm; don't take them for real.' And the radio
never mentions its own construction, you see? And in exactly the same way,
you are never able, really, to examine, to make an object of your own
mind, just as you can't look directly into your own eyes or bite your own
teeth, because you ARE that, and if you try to find it, and make it
something to possess, why that's a great lack of confidence. That shows
that you don't really know your 'it'. And if you're 'it,' you don't need
to make anything of it. There's nothing to look for. But the test is, are
you still looking? Do you know that? I mean, not as kind of knowledge you
possess, not something you've learned in school like you've got a degree,
and 'you know, I've mastered the contents of these books and remembered
it.' In this knowledge, there's nothing to be remembered; nothing to be
formulated. You know it best when you say 'I don't know it.' Because that
means, 'I'm not holding on to it, I'm not trying to cling to it' in the
form of a concept, because there's absolutely no necessity to do so. That
would be, in Zen language, putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch,
or as we would say, gilding the lily.
Now you say, 'Well,
that sounds pretty easy. You mean to say all we have to do is relax? We
don't have to go around chasing anything anymore? We abandon religion, we
abandon meditations, we abandon this, that, and the other, and just live
it up anyhow? Just go on.' You know, like a father says to his child who
keeps asking 'Why? Why, Why, Why, Why, Why? Why did God make the universe?
Who made God? Why are the trees green?' and so on and so forth, and father
says finally, 'Oh, shut up and eat your bun.' It isn't quite like that,
because, you see, the thing is this:
All those people who
try to realize Zen by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately
to find it, and they're on the wrong track. There is another Zen poem
which says, 'You cannot attain it by thinking, you cannot grasp it by not
thinking.' Or you could say, you cannot catch hold of the meaning of Zen
by doing something about it, but equally, you cannot see into its meaning
by doing nothing about it, because both are, in their different ways,
attempts to move from where you are now, here, to somewhere else, and the
point is that we come to an understanding of this, what I call suchness,
only through being completely here. And no means are necessary to be
completely here. Neither active means on the one hand, nor passive means
on the other. Because in both ways, you are trying to move away from the
immediate now. But you see, it's difficult to understand language like
that. And to understand what all that is about, there is really one
absolutely necessary prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking. Now, I am
not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual, because I
think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and am a sort of half-baked
scholar. But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what
anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you'll have to talk about is
your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time.
That means, when I use the word 'think,' talking to yourself, subvocal
conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and
words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you'll find
that you've nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have
to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to
find out what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking, you come
into immediate contact with what Korzybski called, so delightfully, 'the
unspeakable world,' that is to say, the nonverbal world. Some people would
call it the physical world, but these words 'physical,' 'nonverbal,' are
all conceptual, not a concept either, it's (bangs stick). So when you are
awake to that world, you suddenly find that all the so-called differences
between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain, are all
conceptual, and they're not there. They don't exist at all in that world
which is (bangs stick). In other words, if I hit you hard enough, 'ouch'
doesn't hurt, if you're in a state of what is called no-thought. There is
a certain experience, you see, but you don't call it 'hurt.' It's like
when you were small children, they banged you about, and you cried, and
they said 'Don't cry' because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry at
the same time. People are rather curious about the things the do like
that. But you see, they really wanted you to cry, the same way if you
threw up one day. It's very good to throw up if you've eaten something
that isn't good for you, but your mother said 'Enough!' and made you
repress it and feel that throwing up wasn't a good thing to do. Because
then when you saw people die, and everybody around you started weeping and
making a fuss, and then you learned from that that dying was terrible.
When somebody got sick, everybody else got anxious, and you learned that
getting sick was something awful. You learned it from a concept.
So the reason why
there is in the practice of Zen, what we did before this lecture began, to
practice Za-zen, sitting Zen. Incidentally, there are three other kinds of
Zen besides Za-zen. Standing Zen, walking Zen, and lying Zen. In Buddhism,
they speak of the three dignities of man. Walking, standing, sitting, and
lying. And they say when you sit, just sit. When you walk, just walk. But
whatever you do, don't wobble. In fact, of course, you can wobble, if you
really wobble well. When the old master *Hiakajo was asked 'What is Zen?'
he said 'When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep,' and they said, 'Well isn't
that what everybody does? Aren't you just like ordinary people?' 'Oh no,'
he said, 'they don't do anything of the kind. When they're hungry, they
don't just eat, they think of all sorts of things. When they're tired,
they don't just sleep, but dream all sorts of dreams.' I know the Jungians
won't like that, but there comes a time when you just dream yourself out,
and no more dreams. You sleep deeply and breathe from your heels. Now,
therefore, Za-zen, or sitting Zen, is a very, very good thing in the
Western world. We have been running around far too much. It's all right;
we've been active, and our action has achieved a lot of good things. But
as Aristotle pointed out long ago--and this is one of the good things
about Aristotle. He said 'the goal of action is contemplation.' In other
words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what's it all about? Especially
when people are busy because they think they're GOING somewhere, that
they're going to get something and attain something. There's quite a good
deal of point to action if you know you're not going anywhere. If you act
like you dance, or like you sing or play music, then you're really not
going anywhere, you're just doing pure action, but if you act with a
thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to
arrive at someplace where everything will be alright. Then you are on a
squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call samsara,
the round, or rat-race of birth and death, because you think you're going
to go somewhere. You're already there. And it is only a person who has
discovered that he is already there who is capable of action, because he
doesn't act frantically with the thought that he's going to get somewhere.
He acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point, you see,
where we walk not because we are in a great, great hurry to get to a
destination, but because the walking itself is great. The walking itself
is the meditation. And when you watch Zen monks walk, it's very
fascinating. They have a different kind of walk from everybody else in
Japan. Most Japanese shuffle along, or if they wear Western clothes, they
race and hurry like we do. Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk,
and you have the feeling they walk rather the same way as a cat. There's
something about it that isn't hesitant; they're going along all right,
they're not sort of vagueing around, but they're walking just to walk. And
that's walking meditation. But the point is that one cannot act
creatively, except on the basis of stillness. Of having a mind that is
capable from time to time of stopping thinking. And so this practice of
sitting may seem very difficult at first, because if you sit in the
Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners start to fidget;
they find it very boring to sit for a long time, but the reason they find
it boring is that they're still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you
wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from
being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly
interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture
of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being
named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's
somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing
them. Because say when a person says 'I see a leaf,' immediately, one
thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with
flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves--leaves are not green.
That's why Lao-Tzu said 'the five colors make a man blind, the five tones
make a man deaf,' because if you can only see five colors, you're blind,
and if you can only hear five tones in music, you're deaf. You see, if you
force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you're
blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound.
And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and
the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.
So this, should I be
so bold as to use the word 'discipline,' of meditation or Za-zen lies
behind the extraordinary capacity of Zen people to develop such great arts
as the gardens, the tea ceremony, the calligraphy, and the grand painting
of the Sum Dynasty, and of the Japanese Sumi tradition. And it was
because, especially in tea ceremony, which means literally 'cha-no-yu' in
Japanese, meaning 'hot water of tea,' they found in the very simplest of
things in everyday life, magic. In the words of the poet *Hokoji,
'marvelous power and supernatural activity, drawing water, carrying wood.'
And you know how it is sometimes when you say a word and make the word
meaningless, you take the word 'yes'--yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes. It becomes funny. That's why they use the word 'mu' in Zen training,
which means 'no.' Mu. And you get this going for a long time, and the word
ceases to mean anything, and it becomes magical. Now, what you have to
realize in the further continuance of Za-zen, that as you-- Well, let me
say first in a preliminary way, the easiest way to stop thinking is first
of all to think about something that doesn't have any meaning. That's my
point in talking about 'mu' or 'yes,' or counting your breath, or
listening to a sound that has no meaning, because that stops you thinking,
and you become fascinated in the sound. Then as you get on and you
just--the sound only--there comes a point when the sound is taken away,
and you're wide open. Now at that point, there will be a kind of
preliminary so-called satori, and you will think 'wowee, that's it!'
You'll be so happy, you'll be walking on air. When Suzuki Daisetz was
asked what was it like to have satori, he said 'well, it's like ordinary,
everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.' But there's
another saying that the student who has obtained satori goes to hell as
straight as an arrow. No satori around here, because anybody who has a
spiritual experience, whether you get it through Za-zen, or through LSD,
or anything, you know, that gives you that experience. If you hold on to
it, say 'now I've got it,' it's gone out of the window, because the minute
you grab the living thing, it's like catching a handful of water, the
harder you clutch, the faster it squirts through your fingers. There's
nothing to get hold of, because you don't NEED to get hold of anything.
You had it from the beginning. Because you can see that, by various
methods of meditation, but the trouble is that people come out of that an
brag about it, say 'I've seen it.' Equally intolerable are the people who
study Zen and come out and brag to their friends about how much their legs
hurt, and how long they sat, and what an awful thing it was. They're
sickening. Because the discipline side of this thing is not meant to be
something awful. It's not done in a masochistic spirit, or a sadistic
spirit: suffering builds character, therefore suffering is good for you.
When I went to school in England, the basic premise of education was that
suffering builds character, and therefore all senior boys were at liberty
to bang about the junior ones with a perfectly clear conscience, because
they were doing them a favor. It was good for them, it was building their
character, and as a result of this attitude, the word 'discipline' has
begun to stink. It's been stinking for a long time. But we need a kind of
entirely new attitude towards this, because without that quiet, and that
non- striving, a life becomes messy. When you let go, finally, because
there's nothing to hold onto, you have to be awfully careful not to turn
into loose yogurt. Let me give two opposite illustrations. When you ask
most people to lie flat on the floor and relax, you find that they are at
full attention, because they don't really believe that the floor will hold
them up, and therefore they're holding themselves together; they're
uptight. They're afraid that if they don't do this, even though the floor
is supporting them, they'll suddenly turn into a gelatinous mass and
trickle away in all directions. Then there are other people who when you
tell them to relax, they go like a limp rag. But you see, the human
organism is a subtle combination of hardness and softness. Of flesh and
bones. And the side of Zen which has to do with neither doing nor not
doing, but knowing that you are It anyway, and you don't have to seek it,
that's Zen-flesh. But the side in which you can come back into the world,
with this attitude of not seeking, and knowing you're It, and not fall
apart--that requires bones. And one of the most difficult things--this
belongs to of course a generation we all know about that was running about
some time ago--where they caught on to Zen, and they started anything-goes
painting, they started anything-goes sculpture, they started anything-goes
way of life. Now I think we're recovering from that today. At any rate,
our painters are beginning once again to return to glory, to marvelous
articulateness and vivid color. There's been nothing like it since the
stained glass at Chartres. That's a good sign. But it requires that there
be in our daily use of freedom, and I'm not just talking about political
freedom. I'm talking about the freedom which comes when you know that
you're It, forever and ever and ever. And it'll be so nice when you die,
because that'll be a change, but it'll come back some other way. When you
know that, and you've seen through the whole mirage, then watch out,
because there may still be in you some seeds of hostility, some seeds of
pride, some seeds of wanting to put down other people, or wanting to just
defy the normal arrangements of life.
So that is why, in the
order of a Zen monastery, various duties are assigned. The novices have
the light duties, and the more senior you get, the heavy duties. For
example, the Roshi very often is the one who cleans out the benjo, the
toilet. And everything is kept in order. There is a kind of beautiful,
almost princely aestheticism, because by reason of that order being kept
all of the time, the vast free energy which is contained in the system
doesn't run amok. The understanding of Zen, the understanding of
awakening, the understanding of-- Well, we'll call it mystical
experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the world. And for a
person who cannot contain it, it's like putting a million volts through
your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you
go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyeka-
buddha--'private buddha'. He is one who goes off into the transcendental
world and is never seen again. And he's made a mistake from the standpoint
of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no
fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday
world. The bodhisattva, you see, who doesn't go off into a nirvana and
stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday
life to help other beings to see through it, too, he doesn't come back
because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all
that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are
the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a
phrase of G.K. Chesterton's, 'but now a great thing in the street, seems
any human nod, where move in strange democracies the million masks of
god.' And it's fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep
down, are enlightened. They're It. They're faces of the divine. And they
look at you, and they say 'oh no, but I'm not divine. I'm just ordinary
little me.' You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the buddha
nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it's not,
and saying it quite sincerely. And that's why, when you get up against a
great guru, the Zen master, or whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes.
When you say 'I have a problem, guru. I'm really mixed up, I don't
understand,' he looks at you in this queer way, and you think 'oh dear me,
he's reading my most secret thoughts. He's seeing all the awful things I
am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.' He isn't doing anything of the
kind; he isn't even interested in such things. He's looking at, if I may
use Hindu terminology, he's looking at Shiva, in you, saying 'my god,
Shiva, won't you come off it?'
So then, you see, the
_bodhisattva_, who is--I'm assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this
assembly--but the bodhisattva as distinct from the pratyeka-buddha,
bodhisattva doesn't go off into nirvana, he doesn't go off into permanant
withdrawn ecstasy, he doesn't go off into a kind of catatonic samadhi.
That's all right. There are people who can do that; that's their vocation.
That's their specialty, just as a long thing is the long body of buddha,
and a short thing is the short body of buddha. But if you really
understand that Zen, that buddhist idea of enlightenment is not
comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it comprehended
in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in terms
with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the
temporal, because they're all concepts. So, let me say again, I am not
talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and
methodical way as being schoolteacherish, and saying 'if you were NICE
people, that's what you would do.' For heaven's sake, don't be nice
people. But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of
a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of
liberation will blow the world to pieces. It's too strong a current for
the wire. So then, it's terribly important to see beyond ecstasy. Ecstasy
here is the soft and lovable flesh, huggable and kissable, and that's very
good. But beyond ecstasy are bones, what we call hard facts. Hard facts of
everyday life, and incidentally, we shouldn't forget to mention the soft
facts; there are many of them. But then the hard fact, it is what we mean,
the world as seen in an ordinary, everyday state of consciousness. To find
out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy,
well, it's rather like this:
Let's suppose, as so
often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light. There's a
Zen poem which says
A sudden crash of
thunder. The mind doors burst open,
and there sits the ordinary old man.
See? There's a sudden
vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee! And the doors of the mind are blown
apart, and there sits the ordinary old man. It's just little you, you
know? Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you've
missed seeing. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the
light, every mystic in the world has 'seen the light.' That brilliant,
blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in
everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you're seeing it. Like you see
aureoles around buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of
Dante's 'Paradiso.' Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the
clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond
light, it's so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the
edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a
rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great
mandala appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet, there's black.
Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer.
And again, blazing out of the black, as the yang comes from the yin, more
light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound.
There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear
it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with
the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down,
down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so
vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the
similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been watching a
kind of thing radiating out. 'But,' it says, 'you know, this isn't all I
can do,' and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts
waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves,
and they say, well, you've been looking at this this as I've been
describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let's add a third dimension;
it's going to come right at you now. And meanwhile, it says, we're not
going to just do like this, we're going to do little curlicues. And it
says, 'well, that's just the beginning!' Making squares and turns, and
then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense,
that all kinds of little subfigures are contained in what you originally
thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different,
amazing complexities if sound all over the place, and this thing's going,
going, going, and you think you're going to go out of your mind, when
suddenly it turns into... Why, us, sitting around here.
Thank you very much.
Scribbled down by Alan
Seaver.
-THE END-
Return to Table
of Contents
|
