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Anybody, as a matter of fact, can become aware that he is one with the eternal ground of the universe. But since that’s what you are anyway, I’m going to ask: so what? When a hero goes on an adventure, and he leaves his people and is going to a strange land, he can go away and just hide himself around the corner in an obscure house and then appear a year later and say, “I’ve been on a heroic journey” and tell all sorts of tales.

And they say, “Prove it!” Because they expect him to bring back something, something which nobody has seen before. Then they believe you’ve been on the journey. So, in the same way exactly, anybody who goes on a spiritual journey must bring something back.

Because if you just say, “Oh man, it was a gas!”—anyone can say that! Now this is why, in the doctrines of Buddhism, there is a differentiation between two kinds of enlightened beings. They are both forms of Buddha—which is to say, the word Buddha means somebody who has awakened, who has discovered the secret behind all this; in other words, all this thing we call life with its frantic concerns is a big act which you, in your unconscious depths, are deliberately setting up.

So you can do one of two things when you discover this. You can become what’s called a pratyekabuddha—that means a private Buddha who doesn’t tell anything—or you can become a bodhisattva. Pratyekabuddha goes off into his ecstasy and never is seen again.

Bodhisattva is one who comes back and appears in the everyday world and plays the game of the everyday world by the rules of the everyday world, but he brings with him upāya. He brings with him some way of showing that he’s been on the journey, that he’s come back, and he’s going to let you in on the secret, too. If you—if, if, if!—you’ll play it cool and also come back to join in the everyday life of everyday people.

Because this is the rule: if the world is dramatic, if the world—as the Hindus say—is a big act put on by the divine Self, one of the rules of coming on stage is that you don’t come on as yourself. You come on as the part that you’re going to play. It’s very bad form if an actor always acts the same way.

That’s what’s called a star as distinct from an actor. A real actor can become anything, but in private life… well, he’s just Mr. Jones. But he doesn’t come on the stage that way.

So, in the same way, if you know that—behind the scenes, in the depths, fundamentally—you are it, you don’t come on that way. It always comes on as something else. That’s the rule of the stage, because without that there wouldn’t be a play.

It would only be reality; no illusion. And the whole point of life is illusion. From the word, in Latin, ludere: “to play.” Showbiz.

The show must go on, so don’t give it away. But truth has a way of leaking. It gets out.

But then the important thing is, you see: when the truth gets out, those who catch hold of it must find a way of staying in contact with what society calls reality. That is to say, if you have a radio you don’t only need an antenna, you also need a ground. So what happens in the world of mysticism, of psychedelic visions, and so on, needs to be grounded.

So then, there are always two directions in which such a discipline works. One: preparatory. In other words, those who taught disciplines for awakening in the Orient were always careful to screen—first of all, to screen—those who applied, and then, after screening them, to make them sensible so that they knew how to handle the game of ordinary human existence and play it by the ordinary human rules.

In other words, they had strength of character and were not the sort of people who would be wiped out—because they had no strength of character—by an overwhelming experience. Then they let them in. But there are certain disciplines, such as Zen, where you get in to the essential secret very early on in the discipline.

And after that they are concerned with much more training in showing you how to use it. How to use the power, to use the vision which you have acquired. And so it is with the current—what we will call—LSD scene that is raging through the United States: it unfortunately lacks discipline.

And I’m not trying to say this in a kind of severe, authoritarian, paternalistic way, but only that it would be so much more fun if it had it. In other words, when people try to express what they have seen in this kind of changed state of consciousness, they show five movies going on at once projected upon torn bedsheets with stroboscopic lights going as fast as possible at the same time and eleven jazz bands playing. And they’re going to blow their minds, baby!

Everybody else who hasn’t seen this thing looks around and says, “Well, it’s a mess! I don’t like the looks of it.” Let’s suppose that while you were very, very high on LSD you looked into a filthy ashtray and you saw the beatific vision—which is, of course, the case because wherever you look (if your eyes are open) you will see the face of the divine. Then you come out of your ecstasy with the dirty ashtray and say to everybody, “Here it is.” No.

There is a possibility—if you are an extraordinarily skillful painter, or even photographer—of presenting the dirty ashtray so that everybody else will see almost what you saw in it. But you will have to have a technique which will translate every grain of ash into a jewel, because that’s what you actually saw. But that requires mastery of an art.

And I’m afraid people think that all that’s necessary to do is… just throw out any old thing, because under that transformed state of consciousness any old thing is the works. But nobody else can see it if they haven’t shared that point of view. So then, this becomes—for us, in the United States—an extremely important social problem.

The cat is out of the bag. We are living in a scientific world where secrets cannot be kept. And anyone, anytime, can pick up something which will short-circuit all the ancient religious techniques—yoga practice, meditation, et cetera, et cetera.

This is all very embarrassing, but it will happen—not for everybody, but for a lot of people—and they will see what all those sages, and Buddhas, and yogis, and prophets saw in ancient times, and it will be very clear. So what? So, you see, you can say, “Look at all these people who haven’t seen it.” This is a temptation.

Look at them all going about their business: earning money and grinding it out at the bank, or the insurance office—or whatever it is—every day, and how serious they look about it, and they don’t really know it’s a game. And you can cultivate a certain contempt for people like that. But it’s very, very bad to do that.

Because, of course, don’t forget: they have a certain contempt for you. You see—always—the nice people in town, who live in the best residences, they know that they’re nice because there are some people on the other side of the tracks who are not nice. And so, at their cocktail parties, they have a lot to say about the people who are not nice because that boosts their collective ego.

There would be no other way of doing it. You don’t know that you’re a law-abiding citizen unless there are some people who aren’t. And if it’s important to you to congratulate yourself on being law-abiding, you therefore have to have some criminal classes—outside the pale, of course, of your immediate associates.

On the other hand, the people who are not nice, they have their parties and they boost their collective ego by saying they are the people who are really in, whereas these poor squares who deliver the mail faithfully, and who carry on what you call responsible jobs, they’re just dupes. When they earn their money, all they do is they buy toy rocket ships with it and go roaring around, and so on, and they think that’s pleasure. So the people who are not nice boost their collective ego in that way.

Neither of them realizing that they need the other just as much as a flower needs a bee and a bee needs a flower. So when you see the people who you think are not in on the secret—if you really understand, you have to revise your opinion completely and say that the squares are the people who are really far out, because they don’t even know where they started. See, an enlightened Hindu or Buddhist looks at the ignorant people of this world and says, “My respects.

Because here I see the divine essence having altogether forgotten what it is and playing the most far out game of being completely lost. Congratulations! How far out can you get?” So if you understand that you don’t start a war with people you might say are square.

Don’t challenge them, don’t bug them, don’t frighten them. The reason is not because they are immature, because they are babies and you mustn’t scare babies. It’s nothing to do with that.

You mustn’t frighten them because they are doing a very far out act. They’re walking on a tightrope, miles up, and they’ve got to do that balancing act. And if you shout they may lose their nerve.

See? That’s what we call the responsible people of the world are doing: it is an act; it’s a game just like the tightrope walker. But it’s a risky one and you can get ulcers from it, and all sorts of troubles.

But you must respect it and say, “Congratulations on being so far out.” This seminar about birth, death, and the unborn is going to be a discussion of the Buddhist philosophy of change. And I’m going to start out by going into the very tricky and difficult question of the Buddhist view of birth and death, and the doctrine which is ordinarily understood as reincarnation, or rebirth. It’s a curious thing that many Westerners who become interested in Hinduism or Buddhism do so because of this idea of reincarnation.

They like it. It gives a more satisfactory vision of individual history and development than the two possibilities that would normally be open to Westerners to believe in. On the one hand, you’ve got the choice of the Christian view, which is that you live in this world once, and in this fourscore years and ten your eternal fate is settled.

Or you’ve got the possibility of the materialistic view, which is that you only live once, and when you’re dead you’re dead. That’s that. You’re a flash of consciousness between two eternal darknesses.

Intelligent people in the Western world have never felt very happy about either of these two prospects. And therefore there is a certain attractiveness about the idea—which seems to be the point of Buddhism and Hinduism—that you are a soul on a pilgrimage, and that from some extremely obscure origin you began as some sort of animalcule, and worked your way up step by step through all sorts of forms of life, and finally you have the privilege of appearing in human form. And once you’ve got there, you have an opportunity to develop to the highest spiritual position.

You must remember that, according to both Hindu and Buddhist doctrines, the human form is a very privileged position, for there are—according to both of them, because they share a common cosmology—six domains of beings. And if you will visualize the wheel of life with its six divisions: at the highest top division, there is the realm of the deva. Deva is a word from which we get the word “divine,” and equally the word “devil.” Deva means, though, originally: a God, or more correctly, an angel.

“Angel” is a better Western translation of deva than “God.” Immediately opposite the deva world, at the bottom of the circle, there is the naraka world of beings in torment, of the absolute—this is the dimension of the world which is the screaming meemies, which is experience in the form of horror. The deva world is the experience of being in the form of bliss. And between these two poles there are all kinds of ranges.

There are, for example, the asuras next to the devas, going clockwise around the wheel. And the asuras are a wrathful beings. Asura is the incarnation of divine anger.

Then, next to the asura, going around, are the animals; all animals whatsoever. Then again, we get to the naraka at the bottom, the place of the purgatory, we’ll call it. Then, coming up again, there’s the world of the preta, who are frustrated beings.

And they’re represented iconographically as having very large bellies and very tiny mouths—that is to say, an immense appetite with very little means of satisfying it. They’re a sort of spiritual bottleneck. And then, coming up between the pretas and the devas is the world of the humans.

And this is understood to represent a sort of middle position. You can be liberated from the human state, because the devas are too happy to be liberated, the asuras too furious, the animals to dumb, the narakas too tormented, and the pretas too frustrated. You need not take this as a literal account of various kinds of being in the universe.

You can take them simply as a depiction of various states of the human mind, of the moods you can go through. They’re all really in your own head—as we shall see later on about many other things. But these are the six worlds of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.

And the notion is that one reincarnates again and again through the six worlds. This is the popular idea. In other words, if you live this human life in a bad way and you become angry, if you devote your life to fury, you’ll be reincarnated as an asura.

If you devote your life to merely living for back and belly, you’ll be reincarnated as an animal. If you are horribly cruel to people and so on, you’ll be reincarnated as a naraka. And so on all around.

But, on the other hand, if you do good things in the course of your karma, you will be reincarnated in the deva world, or in better and better situations in the human world. That’s the popular understanding. And Westerners, many of them, think: well, that’s great!

Because this opens up vast vistas of future development. We can go on in future lives working out our destinies, and we can also love to think about who we were before. When you fall in love with somebody, did you meet before in some past life?

Is this the working out of a karma that is between you? And it’s very interesting. But the funny thing is that Hindus and Buddhists who do believe in rebirth do so not because they like it, but because they feel they have to accept it as a hard fact.

And the whole task of the work of a sādhanā (or spiritual practice and discipline) is to get out of it. So it always strikes me as very funny that Westerners take this up because they find it comforting, but Easterners are always trying to get away from being reborn. It was so funny.

Once, Joseph Campbell told me a story that he was sitting with a Vedanta swami; one of these Vedanta Society swamis. And the swami was saying, “Oh, dear me.” He said, you know, “The idea of rebirth is so wonderful.” He said, “I really think this is the most comforting notion.” And Joe said to him, “Swami, don’t be a damn fool! What are you talking about; the idea of rebirth being so comforting?

Don’t you realize that that’s what you’re supposed to get away from?” And the swami suddenly jumped, and said, “Oh, yes! Of course!” It was like I once had a talk with a swami, and he was arguing, you see, that behind all the multiple forms of this world there was only one single divine principle. And he was going on about this, and I said, “Swami, you can’t talk like that.

You know very well that the Brahman”—the ultimate reality—“isn’t one. Because one has an opposite, which is many. And Brahman has no opposite.

You should speak of Brahman as the non-dual.” And again, he said, “You talk just like a Hindu!” They are funny, you see, because these swamis have accepted an enormous amount of Western feeling. And the British were responsible for that; for occupying India so long and perverting its traditions. Now, it is so curious, all this.

Because in Buddhism there still prevails an idea of rebirth very strong among all Buddhist countries. And yet, Buddhism explicitly denies that there is any individual reincarnating soul. You see, in Buddhism there is a doctrine which is called the three signs of being.

And these three signs of being—or I should more correctly say the Sanskrit word is bhava, and that means “becoming” rather than “being.” Bhava is from the basic root (I think) bh, which is connected with “growth.” So bhava—“becoming,” the process of change—has three signs. One is called duḥkha. In Sanskrit it means “frustration”—sometimes translated “suffering,” but I think “frustration” is a more general word, which is perhaps better.

Duḥkha is the opposite of sukha. Sukha means “sweet.” Duḥkha perhaps means “sour.” But in the way it’s used it means frustration as a basic characteristic of living beings. Because for some reason or other, life is always eventually frustrating.

You desire more than you can ever get. You overreach the possibilities. And so to every being death comes as a collapse and as something unfortunate.

The next sign of being is called anitya, which means “impermanence”—the opposite word being nitya: “eternal.” So anitya is: everything is in flux. And finally, anātman, which means that nothing has its own soul. Now, that sounds to a Christian a terrible idea.

Because we use the word “soulless,” or we say to a person, “you have no soul,” which means you have no finer feelings, you’re not a human being. Because Christian theology did distinguish between humans and animals by saying that animals have no soul. Idiots have no soul.

They’ve lost their soul. But you can see at once that there is a complete difference of the meaning. To translate ātman as “soul” is ridiculous.

Anātman means basically that nothing exists—well, there’s another word in Sanskrit you have to know: svabhāva. Sva, that means “one’s self” or “one’s own,” same as the Latin suus, because the “V” becomes the “U.” Sva-bhāva. Bhāva: “becoming again.” “Your own becoming.” Or sometimes it’s called “your own nature” or “self-nature.” And so what it is saying is that nothing has any real svabhāva, because no individual thing of any kind exists except in relation to all the other things.

In other words, you are what you are only because of your relationships to everything else, and therefore the whole universe is a system of interdependence. It’s just as if, for example, you were to stand two sticks on the ground and lean them against each other, and they will stand up and form an inverted V: because they lean on each other. And this is an old thing that they teach children in Japan.

That these sticks leaning against each other form the Chinese character for “man” [人]. And they say, therefore: “Man cannot exist unless we support each other.” This is the basis, therefore, of brotherhood and of good social relationships. But underneath that is the far more profound idea that the universe coheres by everything depending on everything else.

And therefore, nothing exists alone, nothing exists in its own right. And that’s what anātman means: you do not have an indestructible, immortal soul which is just plain you forever and ever and ever, and is independent of there being anything else at all. Also, though, this does go along with the idea that there is not some kind of gaseous spook, some kind of etheric double, astral body, what have you, which outlasts the existence of the physical body and migrates to the next incarnation.

So it has always been a puzzle for Buddhist philosophers to explain how they can at once believe in reincarnation, and at the same time deny the existence of an individual spook which is independent of the physical frame. And the most subtle discussions in all Buddhist literature range around this puzzle. The most important text of early Buddhism is a book called The Questions of King Milinda.

This is the Greek Menander. He is a king in the succession of Alexander the Great, who ruled in Alexander’s eastern empire and had long conversations with a Buddhist sage by the name of Nāgasena. And Nāgasena tries to explain to the king how there can be rebirth without anyone who is being reborn.

And so this is the problem to which we address ourselves: how can there be a continuing process without any thing carried along by it? And you will recognize at once that the problem is very largely semantic. Because it involves our whole idea of continuity.

What, for example, do you mean by a wave? When you throw a stone into the water, and from the plop point where the stone goes in a whole lot of rings emerge. And they are waves, and they go out.

And you can, as it were, look at one of them and follow it. And you say, “I am watching a wave.” But what is a wave? You know very well that the water itself—no specific volume of water is moving outwards from the place where you dropped the pebble.

The water is staying quite still, so far as lateral motion is concerned. But the water is moving up and down. And these up and down movements create the illusion of a thing called “a wave” that goes along—similar to the illusion when you watch a barber’s pole revolving: it seems to be a procession of something that keeps going up from the bottom of the pole to the top, but actually it’s just going around.

Now, that appearance of something moving when there is actually—the only thing that is going outwards is motion. And motion is about as abstract as you can think. This is the whole route of the Indian idea of māyā; of the world as māyā, as a construct, something which, shall we say, exists only in your mind.

Only, we shall have to be very careful what we mean by that—and I’m going to come to that later on in the seminar. So here is here is the point. You are delivered from rebirth—this being the purpose of the spiritual disciplines of Hinduism and Buddhism—as soon as you are relieved of the illusion that something is going on; continuity.

This after this after this after this, all linking up together into a chain. In the famous Zen text called, the Platform Sutra (attributed to Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch) there is a passage which says, “If we allow our thoughts past, present, and future to link up into a series, we put ourselves under restraint. But, on the other hand, if we just see that there is just this thought and then this thought and then this thought, you are liberated.” This is an idea which is taken up by T. S. Eliot in this poem The Four Quartets, where you come to the passage where he says that you are getting on a train, and you’ve settled down in the compartment with your newspaper, and you’re going on a journey.

But the one who arrives at the destination will not be the same person who left the platform in the beginning. Because you, who sit here now, are not the same as the people who came in at the door a little while ago. Just in exactly the same way as the flame of a candle appears to be a constant flame, which we can identify as a thing, but as a matter of fact, it is a stream of hot energy.

Which is whatever particles, whatever gaseous molecules are here, are going zhhh zhhh zhhhh, like this, the whole time, flowing upwards and disappearing. The flame is converting the candle wax into gas. And in exactly the same way as we can see that the flame has an identity—you say it is a flame, we have a noun for it—well actually, it is a process: it is flaming.

And so, in just precisely that way, every human being is a process: just as the flame is the conversion of wax into gas, so you and I are the conversion of air and water and light and beefsteak and milk into shit—and which again converts into something else, you see? We are the flowing vibration through which all this goes. And not for one moment are we the same.

So then, the meaning of the Buddhist doctrine is that you, who live today, are never going to die. Because the one that’s going to die will not be the you that’s here know. And likewise, the one that’s here now was never born.

It goes like this: it is explained by Dōgen (who was a most fabulous Zen philosopher living around 1200 AD), when he said, “The spring does not become the summer, and the summer does not become the autumn. No one would say that spring becomes the summer. There is spring and then there is summer.” And he said, “In the same way, when you burn wood, there are ashes.

But the wood does not become the ashes. There is wood and then there is ashes.” Each is, as it were, sufficient to itself. There are, as it were so, steps.

It’s like vibrations, wave crests, you see? Where the water doesn’t move, you see? Water doesn’t move laterally.

So, in this sense, by analogy, the spring does not become the summer. But by watching it, you (in your mind) impose motion on the up and down of the water. And so you say the spring becomes the summer.

So, likewise, you say the baby becomes the adolescent, becomes the man, becomes the crone, becomes the corpse. And the Buddhists say: no, these states follow in the same way as the apparent motion of a wave. And so the word to the wise is: live the moment you’re in.

There is no other place to be. You will not die, and you were never born—if you realize, if you see through the illusion. Now, this may sound as if one were creating a theory of the universe which is what you might call atomistic, discontinuous.

It is saying the universe is nothing but point instants, and it all comes down to that, you see? This as an extension of the Western philosophy of nominalism. Nominalism as opposed to realism.

The nominalists argue against the realists’ point of view, which (as realists say) there is such a thing as mankind. Mankind is a reality, and every individual human is a special instance of a real universal substance called man. The nominalists argue this is abstraction and nonsense, there is no such thing as mankind, there are only individual people.

And, of course, this has become, in the twentieth century, the ascendant point of view. There is not really such a thing as the United States of America. That is a political abstraction.

There are just the people who live here. But if you take nominalism to its logical conclusion, you get to the point where you don’t exist at all. A human being?

There is no such thing as a human being. It’s an abstraction. All there is is the molecules, or the cells, which infest your bones.

And dissolve those further into the nuclear particles, and you can say, “Well, that’s all there is, you see? There are just these things.” But then you suddenly begin to realize there is no end to that way of thinking. Because you can always (given imagination and given instruments of sufficient subtlety) subdivide any unit of existence, of motion, of energy, into further subdivisions, further units of measurement, and say that we get more real as we get smaller, you see?

That’s simply saying that the smaller things are the more real things. Well, that’s a ridiculous argument because you can play it exactly in the opposite direction. You can say: oh no, no, no, no.

Since all small things only exist relatively—that is to say, in relation to each other—the only real thing is the big thing. So all those small particles are relatively unreal. The only thing that is real is the whole universe.

And that’s so big that nobody can conceive it. So do you see: all philosophical argument is a game, playing with people, arguing with each other in words, playing up and down the scale of arguing as to which level of bits, collections of bits, all bits whatsoever—which one is real? I’ve noticed a very funny thing in observing with my experiments with psychedelics: that psychedelic conversations are absolutely perfect examples of what is going on and always has been going on in philosophy.

People start talking with each other, having very animated conversations about nothing at all except the processes of grammar. In other words, let’s imagine a conversation in which nothing specific is mentioned. No proper names are used, no proper nouns, nothing is being referred to whatsoever.

But all the words that indicate more or less dimensions of quality, dimensions of quantity—all the operative words, say words like “to be,” “to grow,” “to diminish,” “to expand,” “to contract”—all these are operant words which can be used with reference to all kinds of specifics. But they get into conversations where all specifics are dropped out, and only operant words are used. And they dance with each other by using these kinds of words.

And philosophers are doing exactly the same thing. Philosophy is an intellectual dance, a game that we play, just like it might be go, or it might be chess, or checkers, or poker, where we take these abstractions, the set of cards, 52 to the deck, and we play numbers and orders against each other, see? Well philosophers do just the same thing and all their arguments.

And you say: well, isn’t that kind of silly? Well, maybe it isn’t. Because life itself, biology, is the same thing.

We have all these species that eat each other and come on in different shapes, in different forms, and so on. And there is a contest going on all the time to prove whether the cats are more powerful than the mice, or the humans than the rats, and this constant thing is going on. But it is the same kind of bubbledee-bubbledee-bubble.

Only, it takes instead of such a simple word as “bubble,” which is a vibration in the air, it comes on as a mouse. And a mouse is a very complicated way of saying “bubble.” So in all this, you see, when you get a game going of this kind, there comes the point of what you might call emotional investment when you feel that the outcome of this particular feature in the game is urgent. See?

This matters. And do see that that’s what we mean by “matter?” The word “matter,” meaning something substantial, something material, also means important. “It matters.” And it’s up to you what you think matters.

We teach our children what matters, what’s important for them to learn. And we teach them basically that it’s important to live: you must go on. That’s terribly important.

When you get a schizophrenic child or a so-called Mongolian idiot, these children don’t realize that it’s important to go on, and they don’t give a damn. And they are very happy—but from our point of view incompetent, unadapted to society, useless. Because they don’t understand why it’s necessary to go on living.

They’re just going to have a ball where they are, and generally (what we would say) goof off. And in a way, every being in this world is torn between going on and goofing off. That’s the basis of our distinction between work and play.

Play is: everybody needs some time to goof off. But they must go back to work, because you’ve got to farm and fish and manufacture and produce, so that you can go on. But when you have this terrifying urgency to go on—and feel you must, this is important, this matters—we screen out of our consciousness the fact that this is our own volition and our own game.