The Inevitable Ecstasy, Part 4: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

So you have this process—which is quite spontaneous—going on. We call it life. It’s controlling itself! It’s aware of itself. It’s aware of itself through you. You are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself. And because it’s the universe looking at itself through you, there’s always an aspect of itself that it can’t see. So it’s just like that snake, you see, that is pursuing its tail. Because the snake can’t see its head, like you can’t. We always find—as we investigate the universe, make the microscope bigger and bigger—and we will find ever more minute things. Make the telescope bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and the universe expands because it’s running away from itself. It won’t do that if you don’t chase it.

So it’s a game of hide-and-seek. Really, when you ask the question, Who is doing the chasing? you are still working under the assumption that every verb has to have a subject. That when there is an action there has to be a doer. That’s what I would call a grammatical convention, leading to what Whitehead called The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Like the famous it in It is raining. So when you say, There cannot be knowing without a knower, this is merely saying no more than, There can’t be a verb without a subject, and that’s a grammatical rule, and not a law of nature.

Anything you can think of as a thing, as a noun, can be described by a verb. And there are languages which do that. It sounds awkward in English, but face it: when you look for doers as distinct from deeds, you can’t find them. Just as when you look for stuff underlying the patterns of nature: you can’t find any stuff. You just find more and more patterns. There never was any stuff; it’s a ghost. What we call stuff is simply pattern seen out of focus. It’s fuzzy, so we call it stuff. Like kapok!

So we have these words—energy, matter, being, reality, even Tao—and we can never find them. They always elude us entirely. Although we do have the very strong intuition that all this that we see is connected or related. So we speak of a universe, although that word really means one turn. It’s your turn now. Or, like, you make one turn to look at yourself, but you can’t make two turns and see what’s looking. So it’s very simple, therefore. You only have to understand that you can’t do anything about it. And as they say in Zen:

And in not being able to get it, you get it.

So all these trials that gurus put their students through have, as their ultimate object, convincing you that you can’t do anything. Only, it’s convincing you very thoroughly. It’s convincing you in more than a theoretical way. Now, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that—but you see, I’m not a guru in that I don’t give individual spiritual direction to people. And I give away the guru’s tricks. That may not be very good, but on the other hand, those tricks are only necessary in the sense that I would say to someone, It’s necessary for you to go see a psychiatrist if you think you must. And if you’re not going to be satisfied without going to Japan and studying Zen Buddhism from a Rōshi—okay, you better go. It isn’t necessary unless you say it is. If that’s the only thing that’ll satisfy you, and you feel that deep down inside you. If you got that yearn, then you’ve got that yearn. But if, on the other hand, you haven’t, you haven’t. And I’m not going to put you down on that account, you see?

The point is, what do you want to do? What is it in you to do? But there it is: that you can struggle, and struggle, and struggle, and indeed will do so as long as you have the feeling inside you that you are missing something. And people—your friends, all sorts of people—will do their utmost to persuade you that you’re missing something. Because they are missing something, and they think they are getting it through a certain way—and therefore, to assure themselves, they’d like you to do it, too. So there is this thing. And, you see, a clever guru beguiles his students by letting them have the feeling of success and accomplishment in certain directions.

A guru gives people exercises; A: that are difficult but can be accomplished, and B: that are impossible. You’ll always be hung-up on the impossible ones, but the possible ones, you will get the feeling of making progress, so that you will double your efforts to solve the impossible exercises. And then they range things in many, many ranks and levels through which you can advance. This state of consciousness, that stage of consciousness, or think of the degrees of masonry, or so on. Ranks, and learning things, the different belts in jūdō, and all that kind of jazz. You can do that, and it gives people this sense of competing with themselves, or even with others. Because of the feeling, inside, that there is just something I’m missing.

And, of course, if you are learning any sort of skill and you haven’t perfected the skill, there is indeed something you are missing. But in this thing that we are talking about that isn’t true. Because you, as the Buddhists say, are Buddhas from the very beginning. And all that searching is like looking for your own head, which you can’t see and therefore might conceivably imagine that you are lost. So that, indeed, is the point: that we don’t see what looks, and therefore we think we’ve lost it. And so we are in search of the Self, the ātman. Well, that’s the one thing we can’t find because we have it; we are it! But we confuse it with all these images.