The Web of Life, Part 11: A Perfectly Genuine Act

Jung had a tremendous humor. And he knew that nobody can be completely honest. That you will try, and you'll have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark, unconscious depths, but there will be a certain point at which you will say, Well, I've had enough of that! You know? And, do you see how, in a strange way, there's a certain sanity in that? When a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity, of deception, there is something—you all laughed when I said that—there's something humorous about it.

And this humor is [a] very funny thing. Basically, humor is an attitude of laughter about one's self. There is malicious humor, which is laughing at other people. But real, deep humor is laughter at one's self. Now why, fundamentally, do you laugh about yourself? What makes you laugh about yourself? Isn't it because you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside? That if I hint, you see, that your inside is the opposite of your outside, it makes people laugh—if I don't do it unkindly. If I get up in the attitude of a preacher and say, You're a bunch of miserable sinners and you ought to be different, nobody laughs. But if I say, Well, after all, boys will be boys, girls will be girls, we all know; then, people laugh.

Now, you see, what's happening when we do that? I passed you around a lot of embroidery to look at before we started. And I'm perfectly sure that you got the point that there's a big difference between the front and the back. In some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front because people take shortcuts. In the front everything is orderly, and it is supposed to be kind of messy on the backside. See? Which side will you wear? You've got to be sure you get the front in the front and the back in the back. And the back has all the little tricks in it, all the shortcuts, all the lowdown that people don't acknowledge, see?

And it's exactly the same with the way we live. You know, like sweeping the dust under the carpet in a hurry, just before the guests come. I mean, we do ever so many things like that. And if you don't do it, if you don't think you do it, and you think, Well, really, my embroidery is the same on both sides. See? Well, you're deceiving yourself, because what you're doing is you're taking the shortcuts in another dimension, which you're keeping out of consciousness. Everybody takes the shortcuts, everybody plays tricks, everybody has in himself an element of duplicity, of deception.

Because, you see, from this point of view that I'm discussing, where the web is the trap, to be is to deceive. Think of camouflage. The chameleon who changes its color. Think of the butterfly pretending it has eyes. Think of the flower saying to the bee, Like my honey? The bee says, Wow! But then that means that the bee has to be, and it has to go on living, and all the trouble it takes to go around collecting honey, and raising other bees, and organizing itself, and doing that dance which tells the other bees where there's more honey—all that stuff to do, because the flower was deceptive.

Now, in the same way, I've often said life is a drama, and a drama is a deception. It's a big act. When you peel an onion, and you don't really understand the nature of an onion, you might look for the pit in the center, like any ordinary fruit has. But the onion doesn't have a center. It's all skins. And so, when you get right down, there's nothing but a bunch of skins. You say, Well, that was kind of disappointing. But, of course, you have to understand that the skins were the part that you eat.

Well, in rather the same way, you see, you find—when you explore yourself, and your motivations, and you go through and through—and you try to find out that thing which is really genuine. That's why, in Zen discipline, they give you kōans which require a perfectly genuine act. An act of total and absolute sincerety. And people knock themselves out trying to do this thing, but they always know that the master is going to catch them, because he reads their thought. Do you know that story of von Kleist, about the man who had a fight with a bear? And the bear could read his thoughts, so that the only way of hitting the bear was to do so not on purpose—because the bear would know in advance. So it's the same in working with a Zen master. You have to do the genuine act not on purpose. But since you're put in a situation where it's rather formal, and you're supposed to do it on purpose, you're stuck, you see? So you explore the onion, and you go in, and in, and in, and then you find—well, it's all a deception!

Now then, the question arises: who's deceiving who? Who's fooling who? I'm fooling me? What is fooling? Fooling is playing like you're there when you're not. You know, getting somebody else to answer your name in the roll call. So we're all—you see, this is the metaphysical basis of it, this is what the Hindus mean by māyā: the world-illusion. The world is playing it's there when it isn't. And it's a trap. And it sucks you in. And you can't get out of it. And it's a thorough, big trap, too.

But always, when you get an idea like this, or a feeling like this, follow it to its extreme. Don't back out from it. If you find you're selfish, go to the extreme of what selfishness means. Confusion largely results from not following feelings or ideas to their depth. You know, people think they want to be immortal; they'd like to live forever. Do you really want to do that? Think about it. Really go into it, what it would be like. People say they want this, that, and the other; they want this kind of car, they want this kind of dress, or so on, and this much money, and so on—it's always a good idea to think it right through. What it would involve to be in that situation, to have those desires fulfilled? Also, when you form a relationship to another person, think it through, too. You see? How inconvenient would they be, however attractive? And always turn the embroidery around and look at the underside, but don't get caught doing it. See, that's something one does on the side, in secret. Because otherwise you play the game that everything is as it's supposed to be on the front. But that makes you humorous, and that makes you human