The World as Emptiness II, Part 3: Raising the Alarm

I was talking a great deal yesterday afternoon about the Buddhist attitutde to change, to death, to the transience of the world, and was showing that preachers of all kinds stir people up in the beginning by alarming them about change. That’s like somebody, you know, actually raising an alarm, just in the same way as if I want to pay you a visit I ring the doorbell, and then we can come in and I don’t need to raise an alarm anymore. So in the same way, it sounds terrible, you see, that everything is going to die and pass away, and here you are, thinking that happiness, sanity, and security consist in clinging on to things which can’t be clung to, and in any case there isn’t anybody to cling to them. The whole thing is a weaving of smoke.

So that’s the initial standpoint. But as soon as you really discover this, and you stop clinging to change, then everything is quite different. It becomes amazing. Not only do all your senses become more wide awake, not only do you feel almost that you’re walking on air, but you see, finally, that there is no duality; no difference between the ordinary world and the nirvāṇa world. They’re the same world, but what makes the difference is the point of view. And, of course, if you keep identifying yourself with some sort of stable entity that sits and watches the world go by, you don’t acknowledge your union, your inseparatability, from everything else that there is. You go by with all the rest of the things. But if you insist on trying to take a permanant stand, on trying to be a permanant witness of the flux, then it grates against you, and you feel very uncomfortable.

But it is a fundamental feeling in most of us that we are such witnesses. We feel that, behind the stream of our thoughts, of our feelings, of our experiences, there is something which is the thinker, the feeler, and the experiencer. Not recognizing that that is itself a thought, feeling, or experiece, and it belongs within and not outside the changing panorama of experience. It’s what you call a cue signal. In other words, when you telephone, and your telephone conversation is being tape recorded, it’s the law that there shall be a beep every so many seconds. And that beep cues you in to the fact that this conversation is recorded. So, in a very similar way, in our everyday experience there’s a beep which tells us this is a continuous experience which is mine. Beep!

In the same way, for example, it is a cue signal when a composer arranges some music, and he keeps in it a recurrent theme, but he makes many variations on it. Or, more subtle still, he keeps within it a consistent style, so you know that it’s Mozart all the way along, because that sounds like Mozart. But there isn’t, as it were, a constant noise going all the way through to tell you it’s continuous—although, in Hindu music, they do have something called the drone. There is, behind all the drums and every kind of singing, something that goes Nnnneeeeeeoooooooiiiinnggg, and it always sounds the note which is the tonic of the scale being used. But in Hindu music, that drone represents the eternal Self, the Brahman, behind all the changing forms of nature. But that’s only a symbol. And to find out what is eternal you can’t make an image of it; you can’t hold on to it. And so it’s psychologically more conducive to liberation to remember that the thinker—or the feeler, or the experiencer—and the experiences are all together. They’re all one. But if, out of anxiety, you try to stabilize—keep permanent—the separate observer, you are in for conflict.