Krishnamurti - Modern physics and Eastern mysticism, the self and seeing

BR74S2 - Modern physics and Eastern mysticism, the self and seeing
Brockwood Park, UK - 14 October 1974
Seminar 2

0:01 This is J. Krishnamurti’s 2 nd seminar with scientists at Brockwood Park, 1974.

0:11 FC: Well, I’m a physicist. My field is theoretical high-energy physics, which is also called particle physics because it investigates the subatomic particles. I think my interest in this conference will be obvious from what I’m going to say.

0:33 I want to talk about two kinds of knowledge which come from two different, very different, sources and which seem totally unrelated to most people, but which in fact appear to be related in a very close and significant way. I am talking here about scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and when I say scientific knowledge I am referring mainly to physics because this is my personal experience of science; on the other hand, I am talking about what I call for simplicity mystical knowledge, that is, the knowledge that has been developed by mystics of all ages and traditions. I have spent several years exploring the parallels between the worldview emerging from modern physics and the world view of Eastern mysticism, and I found that these parallels are striking, significant and profound. 1:41 Of course, I shall not have time here to go into the parallels in great detail but I have brought an article which sums up a book I’m just completing about the parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophy, and people who are interested in reading this, I have brought a few copies, and of course I am also very happy to talk about it at any length of time at other occasions.

2:09 What I want to touch here now are mainly two questions. I don’t so much want to discuss the existence and significance of the parallels, which is beyond any doubt for me, but rather the questions, why do they exist and secondly, what does their existence imply? What does it imply for science and for society as a whole? However, before discussing these questions let me very briefly outline the main aspects of the worldview emerging from modern physics. It can be characterized as an organic worldview, a holistic worldview, or if you wish, an ecological rather than mechanistic and fragmented worldview.

3:04 In modern physics, as in mystical philosophies and religions, the universe appears as an inseparable, interconnected whole which cannot be divided into isolated distinct things or events. In this century, the exploration of the atomic and subatomic world has made it increasingly clear that this world cannot be reduced to any basic building blocks, to any elementary particles or other fundamental constituents. It rather appears as a web or network of complicated relations, whose parts are only defined through their connections to the whole. And this universal interwoveness includes not only all objects around us, but also most importantly ourselves. 4:06 In modern physics we cannot talk about the properties of any object as such; they are only meaningful in the context of the object’s interaction with us. Therefore the scientist can no longer play the role of a detached objective observer, but becomes involved in the world he observes and becomes involved to the extent that he influences the properties of the objects he observes by his method of observation. It has been suggested by one physicist that we should take this into account by replacing the word observer by the word participator. I think that’s quite significant in this connection.

4:54 Now, all these… the aspects I have mentioned so far appear in quantum theory, which is the theory of atomic phenomena. When we go deeper down into matter, into the atomic nuclei and the subatomic particles, we have to take into account not only quantum theory but also relativity theory. Now, in relativity theory, as you probably know, space and time are fused into a four dimensional continuum, which physicists call space-time. Therefore the particles of the subatomic and sub nuclear world cannot be pictured as static three-dimensional objects but rather have to be conceived as four-dimensional entities in this space-time. 5:50 They are dynamic patterns which have a space aspect and a time aspect. The space aspect makes them appear as objects with a certain mass. Their time aspect makes them appear as processes with involving rather a certain energy – and you know that the two are equivalent, mass and energy. This fact that mass is nothing but a form of energy means that these entities are associated with activity, with processes, because energy is associated with activity, with processes, and therefore this implies that the nature of subatomic particles is intrinsically dynamic. 6:37 Relativity theory then has shown that the activity of matter cannot be separated from its existence, from its being.

6:47 So to sum it up, we can say that quantum theory has made us aware that particles are not isolated grains of matter but are interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web. Relativity theory, so to speak, has made these interconnections come alive by showing their intrinsically dynamic character. These interconnections involve a ceaseless flow of energy, a dynamic interplay in which particles are created and destroyed continually. There is a continual variation of energy patterns. The whole universe is engaged in endless motion and activity; if you wish, in a continually cosmic dance of energy.

7:40 So this is very briefly the picture emerging from modern physics, and all these features appear in one way or in another in the writings and teachings of mystics. Why then is there this similarity? What do mystics and physicists have in common? Well, I’d like to make just a few very schematic and sketchy remarks to establish a framework for the comparison and to suggest a few points for discussion.

8:16 First of all, as far as my comparison is concerned, the aim of both physicists and mystics is the same; it’s to see into to the essential nature of things; and also their method is the same because it is a thoroughly empirical method. Physicists derive their knowledge from experiments, mystics from direct meditative insights. Both are observations and in both fields these observations are acknowledged as the only source of knowledge. 8:54 However, physics and mysticism, or science and mysticism, are two complimentary activities. They can be seen as complimentary manifestations of the human mind, of its rational and intuitive faculties. I like to see this part of physics as the extreme specialisation of the rational mind, and mysticism as the extreme specialisation of the intuitive mind. Of course, again all this is very sketchy and schematic and simplistic.

9:30 An importation point, I think, is that the mystical knowledge, in contrast to scientific knowledge, cannot be transmitted verbally, therefore cannot be studied from books.

9:43 Now, the observations made in both fields, that’s another point now they have in common. The observations made in both fields take place in a realm which is inaccessible to the ordinary senses. In physics this is the realm of the subatomic world, in mysticism it’s an experience of the world which also, as mystics tell us, transcends sensory perception. And consequently the essential results of the observations cannot be expressed in ordinary language, because ordinary language is derived from our ordinary sensory experience. 10:25 Again mysticism and modern physics show here the same features. Furthermore, mystics often talk about higher plains of consciousness, about multi-dimensional experiences which cannot be expressed in terms of our everyday three-dimensional world. Exactly the same thing happens, or a similar thing happens in physics where we are forced to work at the four-dimensional level of space-time in our relativistic theories.

10:57 Finally, one of the main differences between the two fields is that mystics speak about a macroscopic reality, but physicists speak about a sub microscopic world, and yet their results are so similar. How… what is the reason then why these similarities exist? How, for example, does the mystic experience the unity of two macroscopic objects which appears in modern physics at the subatomic level very clearly but not macroscopically? Could it be that the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic – which is based on measurement and therefore ultimately on the senses – could it be that this distinction is irrelevant in the mystical experience? All these are questions for further discussion if you wish.

11:57 To conclude, I want to turn to the question: what are the implications of the profound harmony between the worldviews of modern physics and of mystical thought? And here we are struck immediately by the very different ways in which this knowledge affects the physicist and the mystic. Mystical knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life, which is the living manifestation of that knowledge. To make a contact to the theme of this conference you could say, to acquire this type of knowledge means to undergo a transformation. You could even say the knowledge, the mystical knowledge is the transformation. 12:41 Whereas scientific knowledge can stay abstract and theoretical. Today, I think most physicists are not aware of the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories. So, the question then is: how is this possible? Something in the structure of science allows physicists to do research and yet escape the conclusions of this research. How then is this possible? Or is this only a temporary state of affairs, and if so, what can we as scientists do to transform the image of science in order to bring it in harmony with its content?

13:25 And lastly, what are the implications for society? Now, here we have to observe that our technological society is still largely dominated by the mechanistic and fragmented worldview. Science of course was originally based on this worldview and developed from it, in the days of Descartes, Newton and Laplace. Now, however, science is overcoming the mechanistic worldview and leads us to the organic, holistic worldview of the mystics. 14:05 And since the survival of our whole civilisation seems to depend on our ability to realise the basic oneness of nature and on our ability to live in harmony with it, it would seem to me a matter of extreme urgency to make the new views of science known, to make them known to the scientists themselves and to the general public.

14:32 Thank you.

14:33 DB: Now, I open up this talk for discussion. Does anybody want to make any comments?

14:47 George Sudarshan (GS): Well, perhaps I could add a couple of things. One is that this presentation of the present status of modern physics is very nice, very elegant, but it is the idealistic philosophy of modern physics; it is not the philosophy accepted by most practising physicists. Most practising physicists would run away from any holistic interpretation of this kind. Most practising theoretical particle physicists always deal with isolated, limited domains of phenomena and would elaborate a philosophy but would certainly say, if you ask, ‘What about this phenomenon? ’ he says, ‘I am not interested in that. 15:37 I’m only interested in nuclear phenomena,’ or, ‘I’m interested only in weak interactions. I am interested only in high energy domain.’ This is probably necessary because most physics seems to be carried out by a large number of (inaudible)… I mean, a large number of people who do small pieces of work rather than look at why they do the problem. They do the problem more as a technical task, rather than as a general philosophic… general inquiry into the system of things.

16:07 The second thing is that most physicists that I know of seem to be unable to comprehend the world in which the notions of space and time could be altered; that they are now so convinced that there is three dimensions of space and one of time, that they would not consider any personal experience that they themselves have about time, space, causality, causation, relation between phenomena as being of any significance, that they have already decided that space-time is four dimensional. Mystical phenomena on the other hand – I mean, what you included amongst mystical… are cases in which you experience creativity yourself, spiritual or extraordinary states of consciousness in which it is quite clear that there is more than one level of phenomena in which time occurs. 17:04 The point that Dr Capra made about modern physics considering as ingredients, not only objects but also organisations and laws and processes, this particular thing which is certainly seen in mystical or spiritual approaches to knowledge is again not accepted by the physicists in practice anywhere beyond the immediate phenomena that he is dealing with. He would be willing to consider processes as being ingredients as long as processes are physical processes, but processes as being relevant in terms of personal phenomena. I believe that the majority of theoretical particle physicists, and probably the most influential and most famous amongst them, seem to be quite unwilling to consider their personal experience even with regard to physics as being relevant. 18:00 So, while I am all in agreement with the desirability of physicists viewing the world the way in which you suggested, I believe that very few people view this. I would like to have your reaction to this, sir.

18:13 DB: Yes, just a moment. (Inaudible) …identify as Dr Sudarshan – everybody who speaks after this should give his name so that we can keep track of the discussion. Now will you then go ahead?

18:25 FC: Yes, I think I agree with most of what you say. Of course, I have not had time to go into any detail into the method of science and so on, and I have not talked at all about the concept of approximation which is crucial to any scientific work – that physicists are aware that all their theories are approximations and do not have an absolute value of truth or do not have a permanent value, and that when they isolate phenomena they can do it only in neglecting other phenomena. 19:08 But they know… I mean, if they are good physicists, they know that one of the most important things when you build a theory is to establish its limits, to ask why does it work, in what sense is it an approximation to quantify this approximation, so that at a later stage one can go beyond it and expand it. It is true… I think what you say is perfectly true, that physicists do not want to consider the world as a unity, at large do not have this holistic view, but yet in their fields they are very well aware of the fact that things are interconnected. 19:48 For instance, in particle physics they are very well aware, they are forced to be aware, that they will never understand the properties of any single particle completely before understanding the properties of all the others. Furthermore, they will never understand the properties of the particles before understanding their neutral interactions, that is, the activity. Properties can only be understood in terms of activity of processes. And then what you say about their philosophy – well here you more or less echoed what I was saying, that they do not… they are not willing to draw the conclusions from the theories in philosophical terms. 20:34 I think it’s quite interesting that this very often is a stumbling block in advance in physics.

20:42 I think personally that the Greek type of natural philosophy is a great handicap in modern physics today, especially in particle physics. There is still a very strong trend to look for elementary constituents of matter. The last ones proposed are the quarks, and there are still a lot of physicists who think that they will… maybe they have given up the hope now of finding the quarks, because they haven’t been found so far, but they still think that these quarks in some way or the other exist, and that’s a central problem of particle physics today. 21:16 And here I think the world view, the Democritean, Newtonian world view, is a great stumbling block for the advance of the theories themselves. And if the physicists had been brought up in a mystical environment – well, this is difficult to say, you see I was going to say they would make more progress, but you can’t say that because in order to get to where they are now they had to go through the Newtonian, Cartesian phase. This is why I like to say that the two are complimentary, and what we need is both of them and not any single one.

21:49 DB: Anybody want to comment on that? If not, I’ll just say a few words. Just one point: I think that we can’t ascribe this view to the Greeks, but rather as you said later to Democritus. You see, the Greeks had many philosophical points of view and you had holistic views among the Greeks and you had Heraclitus who first proposed that everything flows.

22:13 FC: Yes, but he was… he was and still is misunderstood by most people.

22:17 DB: Yes, but I only want to say that the Greeks have espoused almost every view possible, but the particular view of the Greeks that has been taken up in modern physics is that of the atomistic view of Democritus, which you have described. Now, the other point that I would like to make is, of course most physicists are exactly as Dr Sudarshan described, but I think we shouldn’t let that weigh too heavily on us because we have to proceed in the way that’s right, not according to the way that most physicists believe. And that’s true not only… the whole purpose of our conference is to look at questions which most people in the world would not be willing at present to look at, because somebody has got to begin.

23:07 Now, does anybody want to comment any further on this paper… this talk?

23:15 David Shainberg (DS): I wanted to say one thing – Dr Shainberg is my name – your point that you had to go through the Newtonian phase in order to get to the other phase is really something that I think maybe we will keep coming back to in the conference, because I think it’s implicit, for instance, in such things as Zen meditation and those sorts of transformative processes where one sits and discovers the limits of one’s own thought and then the transformation occurs – and I think in some way this discovery of the limitations of the Newtonian phase, so that there’s a breakthrough or transformation, is something of the same process at a different level. I’ll come back to that in my paper.

24:02 FC: I would like at some later point to discuss this question, why is there similarity between the mystical world view and the world view of modern physics? It’s a question which I am puzzled by and which I am very interested in; and if anybody wants to discuss it with me at any time I’d be very happy to.

24:23 GS: Could I say one more… – Sudarshan. Do we, in talking about physics – like Dr Capra, I’m also a physicist – and in a certain sense I could talk about it at three possible… discuss things at three possible levels. One is as a practising physicist what I have found. Second, what the profession, what the people talk about, and third, how I could view it if I wanted. Now, these three need not be all distinct, but usually they are distinct. In the same sense, with regard to mysticism also, for mystical knowledge, again one can talk about what is talked about them, how it may be viewed, or in terms of one’s own personal experience with regard... Now, during these deliberations are we going to talk about personal experiences also?

25:11 DB: Well, I think I have to leave that up to each individual, whatever he sees fit as, you know, the most appropriate way.

25:20 GS: Because otherwise we would be talking, I mean, scholarly discussions about things, and it would have very little genuine content about the possibility of transformation; it would be like saying that if you people want to be transformed, this is what you should do. Not a case of saying that… sure I am saying, I have tried it and this works and therefore experimentally this is a… empirically this is a valid means of transformation.

25:47 DB: Well, I would say that there’s some value in both methods, that we should have some general discussion and we should also have particular experience of individual brought in if he feels that he can. Now, does anybody want to make any more comments? (Pause) In that case we’ll end this and we have just a short moment to allow the microphone to be changed. And before… now I’ll have to ask… since we’ve changed the plan, I’ll go just through the paper. Are you ready, Dr Ferris, now?

26:27 Dr Elizabeth Ferris (EF): Yes.

26:28 DB: Now, then… Right, then whenever you are ready. The next one would be Dr Globus – you are ready, but... (Pause) Dr Globus will now… (inaudible)

26:59 Dr Gordon Globus (GG): A few days ago, we got off the boat at Southampton. We were driving our camper which we have been travelling in for a number of months. We got out on the British highways and in about five minutes I was absolutely terrified, and I sought refuge in a gas station. When the gas station attendant came up I went through my habitual song and dance about getting gas which I had learned, and that is I pointed at the tank that I wanted to fill the gas in, and I pointed at my gas tank and I took a couple of pounds out and showed him a couple of pounds and went like this. 27:44 He was very silent, he filled it up, and after a couple of minutes, suddenly I said to him, ‘Oh, you speak English!’ (Laughter) And I explained to him that I had been travelling and I couldn’t speak Arabic and I couldn’t speak Turkish, and this was just my song and dance for getting gasoline. And as I was about to drive away, the attendant came over to me, with a slight smile on his face and he said, ‘Most of us speak English here. I think you will be all right now, sir.’ (Laughter) And it’s with that kind of feeling that I come to this conference, with the feeling that most of us speak the same language here, that we can understand each other, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be all right here. 28:43 However, despite the commonalities of our interest, and I think the real possibility is that we can talk together, I want to indicate a bit of which side of the road I’m used to driving on, in order to avoid head on collisions.

29:03 So I want to mention a few points of view that I have, which I think would be in disagreement with Krishnamurti and with David, to the extent that I understand their points of view, and just indicate a little bit of how I go about thinking about the world, because there are a few differences. Now, Krishnamurti makes the point, which I think is an extremely good point, that we must look at ourselves without condemnation to appreciate ourselves as we are, to understand our own hatred and our own greed. We can’t condemn ourselves as we do this. And in so doing we can avoid the bifurcation between the observer and the observed, which is a root cause of our difficulties. 29:56 Now, I think it is very important to extend this notion to our attitude towards society at large, because I think to the extent that we condemn society as hateful, as greedy, as destructive, rather than simply appreciating as it is, that we bifurcate our group vis-a-vis that other group. And I think this is part of what we were discussing last night; I think it’s the same issue. So, I think we tend to reiterate the problems of a group which sees itself in a special kind of way vis-a-vis all other groups when we adopt an attitude of condemnation towards the world around us.

30:55 Now, I feel tremendously outraged at times, but it’s a feeling that I really struggle to not hold on to, and if I would like to transcend my feeling of outrage at what’s going on in the world. So I try to see myself in society in a very broad perspective and a long evolutionary perspective, realising I have a very narrow time window to look at it through. I find that I’m a good deal more optimistic about the world than, for example, David was expressing last night. I’m not as optimistic as Chardin, I don’t think the omega point is close at hand, but I feel enormous progress has been made. 31:46 And I think that there are many enlightened people in the world. I think there are more enlightened people in the world now than there ever has been. I think the kids today are much better than the kids when I was a kid, and I think that kind of measure leads me to be rather hopeful. This is perhaps a temperamental difference, and I can only say that my image of the world is a more optimistic image than the one that you were presenting last night. Now, I suppose that it’s the business of the branch of knowledge called history to try and decide such questions in an untemperamental way, but I think both my view and your view are images, in Krishnamurti’s sense, applied to the world, and I think we ought to try and step back from those images of the world as making inherent progress or at the cataclysm of destruction and being very bad.

32:59 A second area that I want to mention has to do with the self, with the observer. And I’m of the opinion here that there has been a philosophical era permeating British philosophy since Hume, and I think it’s partially reflected in Krishnamurti’s thought, having to do with the denial of the self as an entity. Hume on examining his consciousness was unable to find his self, and I don’t think that there has been a British philosopher who has found himself since. Krishnamurti finds himself, but he tells us that the self is an observed datum, if I understand him correctly, quite like any other, ultimately based on sensory impressions and based on memories. To the contrary I find myself very real and I find myself important. I have to… this is the way it is for me. And I also find myself very different from my sensory impressions of the world. I want to convey a little bit of how I think of self, because I think of it perhaps in a little different way. I think of self as a qualia of experience or context of experience, rather than a content. Let me explain what I mean by a qualia of experience by using the example of synaesthesias. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of lying with your eyes shut and being kind of quiet, and there will be a loud sound and you’ll see a flash of light at the same time that you hear the sound. For example, I was once sort of half dozing and one of my children dropped a toy on the floor and it made a harsh grating sound and I saw a jagged flash of light at the same moment. This is a synaesthesia. Well, the…

35:11 GS: With eyes closed?

35:12 GG: With eyes closed, yes. Now, the information, the input to the brain is a single input, but we have crosstalk into a visual modality from the auditory input. The information in both situations is the same, but the auditory qual is irrevocably different from the visual qual. There’s something about seeing which simply is different from hearing, which is different from touching, which… we cannot describe these differences in words but yet we all can distinguish seeing from hearing, and I could easily distinguish the sound, the harsh grating sound from the flash of light. So there is a visual qual and an auditory qual, a qual of taste, of smell; the classic sensory quals. I like to think of self as a qual too.

36:10 Participant: Excuse me, what is a qual? A quality or…

36:14 GG: Yes, like a… it’s… yes, in the sense of quality. I’m using the terms qual as singular and qualia as plural; the qualia of experience referring to the various quals that I’m talking about. So in this sense, the self is a basic modality of experience, very much like seeing is a basic modality of experience. And just as I believe that the visual qual has to do with the particular organisation of the visual system, that the way that that particular system is built to process input impinging upon it, which differs from the particular way the auditory system is built, I believe that this qual of self has to do with the particular organisation of a very high order system within the brain, some kind of monitoring system which processes data from other systems, which controls other systems. 37:19 What I want to say is that the neural basis for self as a qualia, as a qual of experience has to do with very high order neural systems. Since I find myself and since I believe there’s a neural basis for this, I think we really have to accept this self as a given. And I also find that the self is concerned with its own interests. Here I find myself not agreeing with Krishnamurti and very much agreeing with Freud, believing that there are very deep biological roots to self-interest.

38:10 Freud would discuss this generally under the topic of narcissism. So I think that narcissism is inherent to the human condition, that it cannot entirely be accounted for by conditioning, although clearly conditioning can make people more self-interested, more narcissistic. But I think there’s a biological core here, it’s the way the brain is built to work; and I think any approach to transforming man and society which does not fully acknowledge the biological roots of self-interest, the biological roots of narcissism, is being a bit visionary. I think this is a given which we have to deal with. I think this is something interesting to discuss. I present this as kind of a bias that I have. I think that the self-interest of a group has biological roots too. If one travels around the world, the nationalism is so striking; every country that one goes people seem to feel that they’re really better than other people. It’s such a universal phenomenon that again – and again following Freud – that I tend to look for biological roots here.

39:38 And I think in terms of, oh, the anxiety at strangeness, the anxiety at things which are different, which are based upon biological things like the orienting response. The brain is built to orient to things which are new. It doesn’t really feel good to be orienting all the time. To be with a different culture, with a different group is anxiety-producing, and as I go from country to country I feel more anxious than I do at home. 40:11 I’ll never feel as comfortable in a Arab marketplace as in a California supermarket. At least it would take me a long time to habituate. This is partially my rigidity in facing new situations, but I don’t think it’s entirely my rigidity. I think my brain is built to orient and respond in this way when unfamiliar stimuli impinge upon me. I think we just have to acknowledge this.

40:45 Now, despite these kinds of disagreements that I mentioned, I think I’m in very basic agreement with Krishnamurti and with David, with the staff at Brockwood, in their focus on people, the transformation of people as being the ultimate way that a society is going to be transformed. That is to say, I don’t think the problem is with knowledge; I think knowledge is really good. I don’t think the problem is with science. It’s the problem with scientists, it’s the problem with academicians, as we were just discussing. 41:28 And the question is, how can we get physicists to see things in the broader holistic way, as we were just discussing a moment ago? I have to say that in my field of psychiatry I am as pessimistic as you are about the physicists. As I think of the full professors in my department, I think it’s very unlikely that they are going to be enlightened. And I’m not about to expend any more of my energy in that direction. However, with students I think we can really be much more hopeful, and I think to the extent that we can pass on the particular ways of thinking that we have to students, as is done at Brockwood Park, I think that’s really the way to go. 42:20 And also I think that conferences like this are really very important to help us get centred in our mind what we are doing and teaching, because I often forget about the broader implications of my role as a teacher, and I am just very forcibly reminded being here about my responsibilities which I greatly neglect. I often teach psychiatry and don’t teach about… don’t pass on to the students my broader views of the world. So this is very useful to me and I very much support the kind of educational programme that you have at Brockwood and the notion of having a conference like this. 43:06 I’m very much in agreement there.

43:08 DB: I’ve opened up the discussion but perhaps since the remarks were addressed to Krishnamurti, he would like to say… Does anybody want to say something first? (Inaudible) And can you give your name, please.

43:23 Montague Ullman (MU): Ullman. The psychiatrists are in a minority here and I don’t want to split the ranks but I do have to take some exception to some of the points you made. When we see very sick patients one of the difficulties in affecting change with them is that the nature of the psychopathological process is such that it carries its own… carries with it its own anaesthetic equipment, so to speak, so that the difficulty we’re up against is that the patient is unaware, profoundly unaware of the unintended consequences of his behaviour, it’s impact on other people. 44:08 And when that’s written large at a social level, we have a situation where ever larger groups of people as a consequence of many, perhaps unfortunate historical accidents in development, have come to a point where large groups of people, societies in fact, are profoundly unaware of the destructive fallout of their own policies and attitudes to other nations and so on.

44:45 GG: Stupefied, in other words.

44:47 MU: Exactly. Well, the point here is that the only – the only hope of coming to terms with a situation like that is to nurture whatever sense of outrage is still left. I think what we tended to do, it seems to me, is sort of delegate the formal aspects of outrage to the younger generation and we more sane individuals simply live comfortably within the framework of the anaesthetic cocoon, that we really exist. I think if we let ourselves be sensitive to the enormous suffering of the world it would be hard to live with ourselves.

45:35 Now, the second point had to do with your concept of narcissism which, I could perhaps agree with you, I think it is a bias; I think we simply come into the world with a profound plasticity to be part of the world, the world about us, and unfortunately it’s moulded into a narcissistic framework simply because our emphasis has been on fragmentation, on accentuating the limits of the self rather than the aspirations and potential of the self to transcend itself. So I too have experienced a sense of culture shock and removed myself to a foreign country recently – and it was a culture shock, not as profound as yours because in Sweden most people speak English, fortunately, but it is somewhat – and I don’t really think that there’s a built in xenophobic mechanism of a proportion that can in any way really be significantly related to the problems that create nationalism and ultimately wars. 46:51 I think that’s somewhat reductionist.

46:54 DS: Shainberg is my name. I wanted to make a couple of points because it seems there is a correlation to what you were saying, Dr Capra, in Dr Globus’ point about narcissism. First of all, I think just to take Freud’s theory, I think Freud’s theory of narcissism had more to do with a belief that this self-involvement was a… he didn’t distinguish qualitatively between self-interest and a kind of compulsive self-involvement. In other words, narcissism for Freud was that self-love which was really a form of self-inflation that was secondary to a sense of basic anxiety. 47:45 And he didn’t really… I think it was basically in psychoanalytical theory, it was Horney that interjected and introduced the notion that there was such a thing as a self-interest that was genuine and spontaneous and was not a secondary form of clinging, so to speak; so that Freud talked about narcissism where people clung to themselves to protect themselves from this feeling of basic anxiety about being in the world.

48:14 MU: I mean primary narcissism.

48:16 DS: Well, I don’t want to get into that too much because I think when we talk about primary narcissism we open up a whole other bag. But just taking this distinction between a kind of compulsive self-holding and a, so to speak, letting oneself open up to one’s own self processes, where there is a spontaneous evolution of growth, that’s something a little bit different that I was suggesting. But the thing that occurs to me is if you take that distinction and then you start… you take your notion of the higher order self which is integrating these qualia; in other words, there is qualia coming in and you are experiencing qualia which are then organised into some sort of self. 49:07 Now, if that organisation process is something that’s protective and closing then it will be a limited form of organisation of these qualia, which I think follows into what Dr Capra was calling a Newtonian view. Whereas on the contrary, if you had an open organisation of self that could allow the qualia to take many different forms – in other words, I have the synaesthesia and I might even recombine into another kind of form, or I might have… I might let… break open the synaesthesia and have the auditory and the visual separate. 49:40 In other words, if I was able to have that kind of breaking open, rather than I had the synaesthesia and that was the only experience of self I could have. Then I think you could conceive of an organising process that would allow yourself to fall into a Newtonian view or fall into a more open view of the universe, and you could move more freely. But the problem has been, as Monty said, that we fall into a fragmentation view which seems absolutely necessary. So I think it depends on how you look at narcissism and depends on if the self is something that’s absolutely necessary to hold onto, then of course you have to have this rigid form of yourself and you can’t experience what David has called the implicate order. 50:26 Thank you.

50:28 P: I would like to criticise this view about biological conditioning. It’s a natativistic view that… because of the way the human race has evolved, its ancestry, we have various inbuilt qualities like self which are inherent in us. Well, I think this is a dangerous sort of view to take because it makes us unwilling to look at other possibilities. And in fact if you do look anthropologically at other races, other states of mankind, one finds there is a tremendous variation in the ways in which individuals have expressed themselves and do. And even within our own cultures there are very big variations. And so I think that it’s a little bit dangerous to argue in this biological kind of way for certain characteristics being natural to us.

51:33 P: Do you mean that there are no natural characteristics of climate or biological… (inaudible)

51:41 P: Well, I don’t know, and one has to find out. I don’t think it’s possible to…

51:44 P: What about the ability to speak as you are speaking now?

51:48 P: Well, I speak differently from a Chinese person.

51:50 P: Fine, but the ability to speak is still biological. I think you’ve got the message.

51:54 P: Yes, certainly. Yes, oh yes.

51:56 P: In another words, there are certain basic biological givens, but the form in which they come through, whether it’s Chinese or English and so on seems to be very highly dependent on conditioning, if you want to call it, or learning or whatever, but don’t deny the natavistic business, that something is different about us.

52:20 P: Yes.

52:21 P: I think I’m thinking of it in a much more primordial level. I quite agree with what you are saying but I still think there is a primordial level, something like this: the seat of pleasurable sensations is experienced within the body. That’s the way the brain is built. You know, we experience pleasure in our genitals, not out there; you know, it’s in our genitals. Now, that has enormous consequences: people are very interested in their genitals, they protect them. I think it’s that…

52:57 P: When you extend this to society and to the people necessarily taking a self-interest and even basing their lives on pleasure, then I think you are getting into danger because you are preventing possible changes in one’s whole outlook.

53:17 Karl Pybram: I think that – Pybram is my name, by the way – I think that this setting up of dichotomies is not good. I think the language example is the best one. I mean, you do have certain inherent capabilities, but the way in which they are expressed is so pleomorphic in man because he has this general purpose instrument in his head that can allow it to go one way or another, that… I mean, I agree with both of you in essence. I think it’s dangerous to overdo the nativistic element and say, ‘Gee, we’ve got to have a society which is just this way because we are born this way.’ Quite the contrary, we are born in such a way that we have these tremendous potentialities, and that’s really the message I got from Gordon and…

54:07 P: Yes.

54:08 DB: Dr Melzak.

54:09 Julian Melzak (JM): Melzak is my name. Yes, I’d just like to make a comment on the dichotomy that you made, as it were, placing yourself, or juxtaposing yourself against people like David Bohm, etc. And it had do with your remark on Hume. I mean, you felt that Hume was a precursor of the sorts of views that some people in their room hold and you put forward your own view as that which was somehow opposed to that view. And I think that that’s actually a mistaken way of looking at Hume. I mean, it’s true that in the section of the particular text that I think you are referring to, he said that when I look inward I find nothing but a bundle of perceptions or impressions and ideas. 54:52 But then in a very important appendix which sometimes is overlooked, he feels that… I mean, he claimed, he states explicitly that he must posit, he calls it, this fiction, in order to underlie and support the discrete impressions and ideas, i. e. his perceptions. And I think that when you say the self is necessary to hold on to, I think this is exactly what Hume meant in the appendix when he said, ‘It’s a fiction that I must posit.’ And indeed, really Hume was doing I think very respectable scientific method; he was doing the sorts of things that physicists do when they have to posit entities in order to explain what they observe. 55:27 So Hume wasn’t denying the self, in your sense. I think, Hume was actually… Hume would have, if he was sitting here, agreed with you and said…

55:34 GG: I didn’t know that.

55:36 JM: Except that he would have not… well, he would have said, ‘Oh, it’s interesting; maybe it’s not a fiction.’ In other words, he would have quantified over things that we can’t observe directly. So he might have struck the word fiction, but still I think his view is identical to your view vis-a-vis the ontology of the self, and therefore I think there really isn’t that much of a difference between your view and the view, say, that Bohm holds.

55:57 DB: Yes. Does someone else want to comment?

55:59 Krishnamurti: I would like to ask, sir, not having read Freud, not having read any philosophy or psychology and so on, I like to ask what is the self, actually? Not theoretically, not as an idea, but in daily life, what is the self? Why should we cling to the self? If self-interest is so colossally important – apparently it is now – it is like building a fence around oneself, and not allowing anything to enter. So I would like to ask, if I may, what we mean by this word. Not Freud or some… – you in your daily life, in your daily activity, in your appreciation of things and observation, what is this centre which we call the self? You understand my position?

57:25 GG: Yes, and I tried to convey some of what I thought it was when I referred to it as one of the qualia of experience.

57:35 K: A quality?

57:36 P: Like a quality, yes.

57:37 K: Ah. Qualia.

57:39 P: May I try to help answer your question?

57:43 GG: Yes, please.

57:46 P: Not necessarily agreeing with you, but somewhat… the thoughts that have come to me in answering the question. The philosophers have made a distinction in people, at least, Brentano[? ] especially, that people for some reason or other are able to tell the difference between what they perceive and that they are perceiving; or at least simultaneously appreciate the fact that the perceiver and the perceived are not identical. And in infants this happens sometime during the first two years of life, around usually 12 months, 14 months when they begin to distinguish the mother from themselves. And this has given rise to the idea that perhaps there is a self which is doing the perceiving.

58:46 K: No, but, sir, my question, if I may interrupt, is in our daily life, apart from all the theories and speculations, what is the self, what is ‘me’?

58:57 P: It is this ability to distinguish between that which is perceived and the fact that the perception is taking place; it is a distinction, in another words. And the monitoring aspect of it may be one part of the brain. I’m not so sure it’s all that high – that’s the only reservation I would have – but the idea that one can monitor the difference between perceiving and…

59:28 K: …the perceived.

59:30 P: …and the perceived. And it’s therefore a distinction that is made. Now whether that’s learnt…

59:36 K: Is that the ‘me’, sir? Is that the ego, the ‘me’, the self? I’m asking, if I may, what do we mean by that word around which we function all the time? Me, I want to be the professor, I want to be the great man, I’m suffering, I’m having pleasure, I’m afraid, I’m anxious, I’m a bully and so on and so on – what is that area which we call the self and to which we cling to? Why?

1:00:10 P: Well, I’m not so sure people all cling to it. It has to do with the problem of projection. All of our perceptions take place at our body surfaces, one way or another. When I see an object I really don’t see it out there; I see it on my retina in a sense, and yet I project it out there. There are certain neural mechanisms that allow me to project certain images out into the world and then I say that exists out there. So that’s artificial right there. Now, when I can’t do that then I attribute these things to another entity which I call myself.

1:00:52 K: Are you saying, sir, I project the various images and those images are different from me; having projecting them, I separate myself from them and say I am different, and therefore I, the observer and the thing is observed?

1:01:12 P: It’s quite artificial, but it happens.

1:01:14 K: I know it happens. Is that the movement of the self?

1:01:18 P: I think… (pause in recording) …construct as the self. I mean, I’m just talking neurologically and biologically, I’m not putting any… And therefore it can be broken down. I mean, if we begin to realise that when we sit on a tack that we feel that up here, really (laughs) and not down here, all of this begins to break down. But our Western ways of talking about this distinction have been to say, ‘Ah, here is a self and here is the outside world.’

1:01:51 K: Yes, quite.

1:01:52 P: And it doesn’t have to be that way, but this is the way most of us have learned to talk about it and think about it.

1:01:58 DS: Well, but you said it didn’t have to be that way, but if the child learns it and discovers at 12 that there’s a difference, you are suggesting it has to be that way.

1:02:07 P: Well, let me go back to Freud, for instance. One way of talking about it is to talk about the images of objects, that really we are perceiving it, and in all of the psychiatric things we’re dealing with interpersonal relationships and transactions, one of the difficulties is saying the relationship is now in this state, and most people say, ‘Oh well, it’s your fault.’ And some people say, ‘It’s my fault.’ When actually it’s the relationship which is always what is in jeopardy or what has happened is… (inaudible) Well, this is true of the physical world also. 1:02:42 We say, ‘Gee, you know, there is a microphone out there.’ That isn’t a microphone out there. There is an image on my retina produced by my lens, which my brain perceives, of something which I have learnt to say is out there, and I sort of transcend the idea because, you know, I can feel it too with other senses, and so I finally say, ‘Oh hell with it, it’s out there; let’s just skip all this “image of” and so on, and just talk about it as if it really were out there.’ We have learned to do it this way – shortcuts – and they get you into trouble.

1:03:16 GG: Well, I don’t know how much people want to go on with the discussion of self; we could do it for a long time.

1:03:27 DB: Perhaps we’ll return to this discussion. I mean, it’s good that it has been introduced because I think it’s going to be a key point as we go along. (Laughs)

1:03:34 DS: There’s just one short thing I wanted to say to Monty, because I don’t think we’re really in disagreement. I think it’s possible to be activist without being outraged. I don’t think the sense of outrage is necessary for activism. And as matter of fact, I think when outrage accompanies activism then we create the very… we reiterate the very situation that we are trying to deal with. That is, a group which has a special position, which is outraged about things around them, which reiterates the problem that we see over and over again with special interest groups everywhere. 1:04:23 And I think the way, the model for dealing with that is to be activist without any outrage, very much in the way that I like so much that Krishnamurti talks about looking at ourselves without outrage. I think we should look at society without outrage. It’s the way it is and let’s see what we can do about it.

1:04:42 K: Sir, but wouldn’t you say, when you go to India or one of those Eastern African countries where there is so much poverty, starvation, real poverty and starvation, people are not sufficiently outraged? They say, ‘Yes’ – in India they say, ‘It’s our…’ I was walking once down a hill and there was a mother and her daughter. The daughter was asking, ‘Mummy, mother, may I have some more food?’ And the mother says, ‘No, you can’t, I gave you your last meal just now. That’s the meal for the day.’ She said, ‘But I want more.’ And the mother days, ‘It’s our karma.’ You understand, sir? ‘It’s our…’ They put up with it, they don’t say, ‘For God’s sake, let’s change this!’

1:05:33 DB: Yes. Yes, I would like to say much the same thing, that I think that it’s possible to have some sense of, I mean, of been deeply moved by the situation and see how destructive it is. As a matter of fact, this is not a condemnation, but if you see somebody taking a sledge hammer and smashing the room up, you must say he’s destructive. I mean, it’s a plain fact, and you must say, ‘I feel impelled to stop this destruction.’ Now, I am not condemning him. I say, ‘Perhaps if I understood him more deeply, I would understand why he’s so destructive,’ but the fact is that destruction is going on universally. This is what I tried to convey last night.

1:06:10 K: Yes, and also politically in the world of… political world in America, nobody is concerned morally. You follow, sir? It’s an outrageous thing!

1:06:20 P: Oh, but they are. I think that what Gordon was saying, that I approve of, is we don’t have to be pessimistic at the same time that we are outraged. In other words…

1:06:29 K: Is that….

1:06:30 P: I think we have to be outraged secretly.

1:06:32 P: Yes… (inaudible)

1:06:33 P: But don’t think you have…

1:06:34 P: I believe we should be outraged actually and that…

1:06:37 P: What do we need the outrage for? If we’re going to take action, why do we have to be outraged with…

1:06:43 P: What do we act with? We act with our feelings. Our feelings are the cement that holds us together. Feelings are not fragmenting; pseudo feelings, neurotic feelings, phony feelings, counterfeit feelings are separating; real feelings are the same quality as love. Whether it’s anger or outrage, it’s a connecting link trying to keep the harmony that should exist in the world about us.

1:07:07 P: I think acting out of love is quite different from acting out of outrage.

1:07:12 K: Ah sir, that’s…

1:07:14 P: It’s been… it’s the indignant attitude which bifurcates us…

1:07:18 P: You are adding something now. You can add arrogance and you transform it into something else. We’re talking just about a sense of outrage as a real feeling. I’m not putting it in the context of cynicism or a looking down or destroying anything, I’m talking about acting to preserve a harmony, not the fragment.

1:07:44 K: I think, sir, Dr Globus probably means – if I may talk for you – that outrage does not produce the same action as love. Love is not an outrage. It acts, it feels, it has the sense of immediate communication and action. Outrage, you organise – you follow? – all that’s involved in it, but I think where there is this sense of fair play, sense of love and all that, that’s quite a different thing from being outrageously active and trying to change people. I think that’s what… at least, that’s what I think… (inaudible)

1:08:33 DB: Let’s make this the last comment.

1:08:37 P: But there are sort of… I appreciate what Monty is saying because I also… I think I understand what you are saying, but there are… let me give you an example just to try throw light on why some of us think that outrage is perhaps not necessary but will spurn us to action more than just concern. I mean, we might read a newspaper about some atrocity that we read about. Now, if we are at all human, we’ll be concerned about it. But then we might just sit there and say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ We are concerned about it, it’s terrible. Now, I can’t be more than just intuitive about the way I feel. 1:09:12 If one feels something more, something as it were, snaps, if one becomes outraged, then the probability at least will be more that we’ll actually do something about whatever we have just read about. I think that’s what you had in mind. In other words, concern is too cool or too… there’s too much of an absence of whatever spurns us to action. So that outrage, although there’s tints of negativism about that feeling, it’s perhaps necessary to spurn us to doing something positive.

1:09:37 P: Maybe, or maybe just growing a better wheat will do the job – I think is what… (inaudible)

1:09:43 P: Sort of, in other words, a cool approach of some action that will actually do something, let’s say, starvation in India…

1:09:55 K: Could I use the word responsibility, sir?

1:09:58 P: It would be better.

1:10:01 K: I mean, if we feel responsible…

1:10:02 P: The ability to respond, meaning…

1:10:04 K: Response.

1:10:05 P: Response ability.

1:10:06 K: Adequately, and all the rest of it. If I feel responsible, I act. I create the environment, I talk about it, I feel about it, it is burning in me.

1:10:18 P: And it’s the understanding of how we fail in being responsible which I think is really important to get at, rather than using outrage as a spur to get us to do something.

1:10:32 K: Right.

1:10:33 P: I think you are confusing rage and outrage. (Laughter)

1:10:37 DB: Well, perhaps we can… I think we more or less agree now. I mean, the point is fairly clear. Do you want to ask something? Maurice Wilkins (MW): Can I just ask one question?

1:10:47 DB: Your name?

1:10:48 MW: Sorry. Maurice Wilkins.

1:10:50 DB: Yes.

1:10:51 MW: Did one of the speakers suggest that it was artificial for the child to recognise some distinction between itself and its mother?

1:11:03 P: I said that this is learned, and that has certain implications which I didn’t mean. I didn’t mean that it’s artificial at all. It’s a developmental thing that happens in humans because of the way the organism is constructed, that he begins to differentiate the outside world from the inside world, as it were. It’s a developmental thing. However, it probably wouldn’t take place if there weren’t social stimulation and so on. 1:11:36 Or at least we don’t know whether it would. It’s like sensory deprivation experiments have shown that our normal biological equipment just doesn’t develop properly without these inputs. So learning wasn’t quite the right word. It’s a combination of learning and development. We don’t have a very good word for it. The two are so intermeshed. Does that answer your question?

1:12:06 MW: The use of the word artificial, I think we’re lost on. However, maybe we’ll come back to this.

1:12:15 DB: Do you feel that you wouldn’t want to use the word artificial?

1:12:17 P: I don’t think it’s artificial, I think it’s biological.

1:12:20 DB: No, he says he doesn’t think it’s artificial.

1:12:22 P: And I think you got the impression of it being artificial because I used the word learning, which means it’s conditioned only, and I didn’t mean to imply that.

1:12:32 DB: Well, thank you very much. And we’ll go on to the next speaker. Now, I’m not quite sure it will be as… Are you ready, Dr Goodwin?

1:12:43 Bryan Goodwin (BG): Yes.

1:12:44 DB: Very well. Then just leave a moment to give you a microphone. (Pause)

1:13:10 BG: Well, my professional field is developmental biology, that is, the study of the transmission of form in embryos and regenerating systems, and so the study of transformation is very much a part of my everyday work. And I think that I was lead to this type of professional activity through the intuition that transformation is a necessary part of the biological process at all levels of its manifestation. Now, the study of morphogenesis, pattern formation in developing systems taught me something about hierarchy and heterarchy, that is to say about the relationship between levels of behaviour and their meanings, and that is about parts and wholes; the relationships between parts and wholes. 1:14:14 And I find that the meaning or the significance of an activity is provided by its context which of course is just the set of constraints which define the next level of order. And I can use examples from the biological system in order to illustrate this at a very elementary level. In molecular biology which is concerned with the causal interactions of individual molecules, we have well-defined processes which are concerned with the synthesis of types of molecules like proteins, and this of course can be understood at the level of the interactions of the molecules, but we cannot understand the significance of the synthesis of protein at a particular point in time and in space within the cell unless we consider some aspect of the cell organisation. 1:15:12 In other words, we have to go to the next level of order in order to understand why that particular process is occurring. We can understand how it’s occurring, of course, without inquiring into the higher order level. A particular example for those of you who are molecular biologists, which I think are probably very few – probably Robin is the only one who was, no longer is, and Professor Wilkins – the synthesis of a molecule of… a permease molecule, for example, in a bacterium can be understood causally at one level but its function is only to be understood in relation to the cell as a whole.

1:15:53 Well, I now take the view that organisms are in fact cognitive systems, in the sense they function on the basis of knowledge of themselves and of their environments. And this can be made into a perfectly self-consistent definition of knowledge, defined as a useful representation of some aspect of the world or of the self. In other words, organisms work in terms of useful representations, and that I regard as knowledge. Now, the hierarchical nature of the system is a very central feature. If we come on to cognition itself, that is, the domain of cognitive processes in human beings, then I tend to see by analogy the same hierarchical principles at work. That is, the problem of meaning is always that of finding the context of an action or of discovering the appropriate relationship between a context and activity as the fitting mode of behaviour, or as David Bohm put it last night, the artful or the skilful mode of behaviour within the context. We tend in general to operate cognitively in the West on one major level which is dominated by sense experience. It’s the physical mode of perception, and philosophers such as Michael Whiteman – well, he’s not so much a philosopher actually, as a mathematician, a physicist and a mystic – calls this the mode of simple fixation, but other philosophers have designated this mode in rather similar ways.

1:17:54 Now, in order to discover a meaning for the physical world, I feel compelled to posit the existence of a context within which the physical world becomes manifest – in other words, some context which transcends the immediate physical domain. And this is the notion, of course, of hierarchy in context, in complete analogy with what happens in the biological system. So, what I believe at the moment in the state of development that I am in, is that there is a domain of order which has well-defined laws which can be perceived when the appropriate mode of cognition is actually developed, and which defines the constraints that govern the physical domain. 1:18:51 The relationship between the higher order field – I use the term field again in analogy with the biological situation in which we have a field that organises the system globally and then within this field there are particular processes going on spatially and temporally, ordered by that field – the relationships between the higher order field and the lower order manifestation are those governing what we call creative activity. This is the way I would look at it. 1:19:23 And if we are not aware of the global field then our activity will be of an extremely local nature. It will be inharmonious in relation to the whole. In the same way, the cancerous growth is out of harmony with the whole, and a cancer is something which is not… the cells within the tumorous tissue are not communicating with the whole, they have broken contact with it. They have their own local laws of organisation, but of course they don’t contribute to the harmony of the whole entity, the organism. 1:19:58 We can become aware of the field, the higher order context by developing higher modes of cognition, and this I understand to be the process of initiation as it is described in esoteric traditions.

1:20:09 P: What was that word?

1:20:12 BG: Initiation? Initiation – in the same way that Castaneda was initiated, or Don Juan tried to initiate Castaneda. When we have been initiated then of course we can see, we can perceive a larger element than we were able to perceive before. We can perceive the context which gives meaning to local action. And the problem of transformation for me is that of actually developing such perception, and I am certainly very pleased to have had the opportunity to come here to find out how other people think about this process and what forms of perception are felt to be necessary. 1:21:07 But I think that with such higher order perceptions we can begin to function creatively in such a way that that our creations have a global meaning. That is, they fit into the field which can order our behaviour cooperatively rather than destructively. But again, and this is perhaps a personal… probably, certainly a personal limitation, I feel a need for models for this to draw our imagination or to draw my imagination in the right direction. These models of course come from many sources, they come from poetry, from music, from science, from mathematics. 1:21:45 But in science I think we need models for the process of manifestation of creative vision. We actually, I believe, create the physical world in some way, we bring it into manifestation. Only if we constrain our creativity to be consistent with the higher order, order, higher level order will it result in some kind of harmony. So, we have to learn to see and we must be initiated. And this is not a single step; I believe that there are many steps. That is, there is a first initiation and a second and a third. 1:22:26 There is again the hierarchy of perception that is necessary if we’re to get higher and higher levels of activity, which result in greater degrees of cooperation.

1:22:42 Now, just to end, I’d like to read you some extracts from a particular model which I have come across quite recently. It comes from the Pythagorean tradition which relates music and mathematics; and the metaphor for the description of the hierarchy or the unfolding of the manifestations from one level to another is primarily in terms of sound and number. And of course this kind of writing should be understood in a divinatory manner, listening for the meaning. As David Bohm suggested, we should all listen to each other. I’ll just read out some extracts from this material to give you a flavour of the sort of model that I find necessary and which I would like to have articulated more if at all possible during the course of this conference.

1:23:49 ‘In the first beginnings, sound governs number and number governs all creation. Sound being the creator of number is in its unfolding limited by its own creation. The laws of mathematics which proceed from sound lead towards the understanding of music. Any single sound has the power of synchronisation with all other sounds and also the power of creating all other sounds. Any point in space or moment in time has the capacity to vibrate to or to express all space and all experience of time, although each sound, point or moment has a definite individuality. 1:24:31 The one is whole in the many and selfness is of the essence of all things. From the complication of vibrations or sounds, forms and their progeny comes density, which is complication. Knowledge comes through the resolution of complication into greater and greater simplicity. The art of resolution is the art of life. In this knowledge the arts and the sciences are not separated. Since this separation occurred science has lost its creativeness and art has lost its power. The two must now re-become one. Knowledge cannot be obtained without union. 1:25:07 Every vibration has a being or consciousness. The cosmos and everything in it are structures of vibrations. Man is so constructed that he may reach every one of these separate structures by becoming one with them and by using the knowledge of the coordination of vibrations. All practice must follow intuition until the centre of knowledge begins to energise within. The way of true science is the way of experience. Unless knowledge is accompanied by the growth and expansion of the power of the individual, it is nothing.’

1:25:38 Well, that as I say, is a metaphor or a model from a particular tradition, the Pythagorean tradition, and I think it has many connections with the view of the cosmos as expressed in the physical worldview, and certainly I have found that it vibrates very strongly with the type of view that I have been led to by the study of embryological process. The hierarchy is perhaps not explicitly unfolded there, but it is certainly a part of this tradition, and it’s that kind of model that I feel is required in order to guide our imagination and the structure of scientific activity in order to develop these hierarchical levels of perception.

1:26:27 DB: So, do you want to start? But remember to give your name again.

1:26:37 FC: Yes. Fritjof Capra. I was struck by the similarity to modern physics when you say that biological structures can only be understood, or have to be understood in terms of context, because this is exactly what we experience in physics. It’s very different from the traditional approach in physics which goes back to Democritus and which said, if you want to understand a thing you have take it apart and study the components. So, traditionally we have always explained objects in terms of their components and have reduced the objects in the world to the chemical elements first, then the atoms of these elements to the nuclei and electrons, and then the nuclei to the protons and neutrons. 1:27:24 But at the level of subatomic particles we are faced with the situation where we can understand a particle only, as you say, in its context, that is, as an interconnection or a correlation between other particles, so that here also it is not the constituent that determines the whole, but rather the whole which determines the constituent. This has been emphasised very strongly by David Bohm in one of his recent papers, and it has been expressed by Henry Statt[?], another physicist, more or less in the words that a particle is not an elementary unanalysable entity but in essence a set of relations that reach out towards other things. 1:28:12 So this is exactly the same situation. I could also go on for another hour to talk about the vibrations – I have a special chapter in my book on this and especially about the fact that each vibration contains all other vibrations, which we call the bootstrap philosophy in physics, but I don’t want to go into it, it’s too long.

1:28:33 DB: Robin.

1:28:34 Robin Monro (RM): I think that there may be some difference between this biological concept of context and that of physics, in that you can take, say, a protein molecule, an enzyme out of a cell and have it in a test tube, it exists, you know, as such, independently of the physical context of the cell, but to understand its functioning you must understand its relations to the other parts of the cell. Whereas it seems that with subatomic particles you actually can’t take them as individual particles out of a nucleus, say; they can be transformed… they have to… to understand their very nature as a particle you must think of them in the context to a whole nucleus. So I think there is possibly a difference here, at least at a superficial level.

1:29:22 FC: Of course, there’s a difference in the level; the dimensions are different and therefore the extent of approximation you can make is probably different.

1:29:31 RW: But you can think of enzymes or proteins as little mechanisms.

1:29:36 DB: Well, perhaps I could say something to this. You see that if you go back into the history of physics, you could say the atom could be thought of at a certain level as quite independent and analysed chemically, but then when we go into the deeper constitution of the atom we find that particles that make it up cannot be thought of that way. Now, it may well turn out that the biologist is rather at the phase where the physicists was a few centuries ago or a century ago, that he’s dealing with something like the atom which has a relative existence, but if he gets into something deeper, into the deeper nature of life he may also come to things more like Bryan Goodwin is talking about, where something is happening which cannot be analysed in that way.

1:30:18 RW: Yes, well, all I’m saying is that at this level at which Bryan was talking, one hasn’t got to that stage yet, one is still at a level where one can think of an enzyme perfectly well in mechanical terms, but maybe that at some stage one will have to go to a deeper level where that is not an adequate way of thinking about it.

1:30:36 DB: Yes, could I ask Brian Goodwin, whether you think that in your work that you are beginning to point at such a deeper stage?

1:30:44 BG: Well, there are two ways to go. One is to study the context within which the molecules are acting, and that is the main thrust of our work at the moment. The other way to go is to look at the behaviour of the enzyme itself, and I think when one goes within the structure of the macromolecule it will very quickly become necessary to analyse things in terms of fields rather than terms of mechanisms, and therefore once again it will be necessary to develop a more holistic attitude. 1:31:23 Now, it will still probably be possible to develop a perfectly adequate explanation of enzyme action when the enzymes are studied in the test tube as purified entities outside of the organism, so that one is creating… you see, one is then creating a separate system within which there will be levels of organisation.

1:31:43 DB: Yes.

1:31:44 P: Could you explain what you mean by a mechanism, as you used it there, as opposed to field? I think I know what David Bohm has written in physics, but in biology how would you distinguish between mechanism and the operation of fields?

1:32:03 BG: Yes, I tend to use it in a somewhat idiosyncratic sense, I think. Mechanism I see as something with entirely local action; you can see what acts on what. In the sense that the Cartesian theory of the gravitational field would be that there is something which exists with hooks or eyes or something which pulls between two bodies. That I would see as a mechanism, where you can actually identify the components within the system. 1:32:33 A field is something which operates over a space and in a biological system the field is usually interpreted to be some distribution of molecular species, greater distribution in space, and therefore it has a direct physical interpretation. But it’s accompanied by the passage of electrical fields and so on. In other words, there are electrical elements in the field.

1:33:08 P: They still have their effect by local…

1:33:12 BG: The field itself influences the local mechanism, if you like, or the local activity. Perhaps I shouldn’t use the language of field and mechanism in that way, I should simply refer to local processes and global processes. That would perhaps be a much more consistent way of talking about this. Because I don’t want to make any sharp qualitative distinction between the activities that go on within these different domains.

1:33:39 DB: Does somebody want to comment, somebody else?

1:33:44 Joe Zorskie: Yes. Zorskie. You talked, Bryan, about model building, and I think it’s something that we have to be aware of, that we do have a tendency – in fact, maybe that’s the way we work – in building models or images of what it is that we are trying to explain or understand. And the confusion can arise, I’m sure you are aware of it, between taking the model too seriously, and so then you don’t quite know what you are looking at. Are you looking at the model or are you looking the thing in itself, for lack of a better word? So we have to… I think that we’ll have to look at model building process in order to come to a greater understanding of ourselves in this process.

1:34:38 P: I think this connects with the individual as a creative agent, in the sense our models, we tend to regard them as somewhat abstract, but in fact they are real, they are real forces; they shape our being. When we make a model we actually, as you say, our being is affected by it and so is the environment. It’s not something that just exists within our heads. And therefore the model is a very active thing and I think you’re absolutely right that we must be well aware of what models we are constructing. And we must try to find that model, that creative activity which is appropriate to any given situation.

1:35:15 GS: Sudarshan. I don’t know whether this is the appropriate time to make this comment, but I’ll make it anyway. It seems to me that even asking questions about constituents, mechanisms, processes, etc., is itself both the creative, as well as an artificial activity. All causes are inventions. All processes are inventions. What we… if you think of saying, ‘Why does this happen? ’ this too is dependent upon a particular model. And if one talks about one’s own awareness – you mentioned about seeing – part of the initiation into seeing, part of being a Rishi, a seer, is in fact breaking of the urgency to look for causes and mechanisms, of comprehending things without analysing it and viewing it as a dynamical process. 1:36:17 In this process of course one arrives at new entities and these new entities then become objects in terms of which one builds new models, so that the hierarchy of seeing, of being initiated into higher and higher steps, is in fact a sense of freedom from crystallised… from constraints that you break out of a particular mode and you function in a certain fashion, you see new things, you comprehend new entities. But then these entities become building blocks for a next stage of operation and again you have to move. 1:36:59 So, even the question of asking for causes, even in a global sense, or even asking for levels, itself seems to me a limitation. It may be a necessary limitation. If I were to say that you must not have levels, that too is a limitation. Then it seems to me like a person who wears different items of clothing at different times, or lives in different countries or different places at different times, it seems to be necessary to move freely between one version and the other version. 1:37:31 That while it seems to be possible to see without seeing into parts; at other times you have to see… the same person has to see into individual components.

1:37:43 In talking about society – I mean, I hope to make these remarks again and again, if I’m permitted – in talking about society, I mean, we did talk about whether we should have outrage or whether we should have concern so on. We talk about poverty and we talk about misery and violence. There are always cases in which you have… I mean, that is one mode of perception. There is another mode of perception in which you see even you are acting within the thing as part of society that you have. 1:38:11 So it seems to me that even the choice of specifying that this is in terms of constituents and local effects and something else in terms of global phenomena and in terms of teleonomy rather than in terms of immediate chemical reactions, seems to me two different modes of looking at the same thing, and one sees the correct perspective only when you see both of them at exactly the same time. Earlier, in Dr Globus’ discussion he had talked about the fact that wherever you go people seem to be quite convinced that they are amongst the best in the world. 1:38:55 In a certain sense in everyday phenomenon of seeing, you see this effect in perspective. I mean, everything that you see immediately near you appears to be brighter and more detailed, larger than things which are at a distance. And we view them both in the manner in which you see them and in the manner in which they ought to be seen if you went there, and then from this one you get the notion of perspective and distance. So in the same sense it seems to me that these two levels of analysis of the same sequence of phenomena are necessary to be able to see things in perspective, in depth, that it is both the sequence of local phenomena as well as the global description that alone seems to have any comprehension.

1:39:39 DB: Do you want to reply to that one?

1:39:42 BG: No, I agree with him.

1:39:44 P: This is almost the same problem that Professor Wilkins brought up earlier with regard to the artificiality of whatever it is that we are doing, and perhaps the better word for all of this is construction, that we have to construct things one way or another, and as you suggest, that we move flexibly between constructions. But constructions aren’t artificial, they are biologically given. That’s the way the apparatus works – we have to construct in order to do anything. But the various constructions, none of them I would consider artificial and yet they all are partial and therefore if you want to call them artificial they have that tone to them, but I don’t know if artificial is quite the right word for it.

1:40:37 DB: The literal meaning of the word artificial is artefacts, you see, that there may… in a way they are mental artefacts.

1:40:40 P: They are artefacts, that’s fine, but artificial in the sense…

1:40:42 DB: It has a wrong connotation. It has this condemnatory connotation.

1:40:46 P: That’s what I objecting to. In other words, I agreed that they were artificial and yet I couldn’t go along with the idea that they were not true or not real art, because they are fitting.

1:40:57 P: Yes.

1:40:58 P: You see, they’re factual.

1:40:59 Julian Melzack: I just, taking up this point – Melzack here – they are artefacts in the sense that we have to actually… the process of discovering what they are is the construction.

1:41:12 P: Right. But that doesn’t mean that they are artificial it the other sense. In that… I mean, if per impossible we were made in a different way and we could zip open our heads and see it, then we wouldn’t have to construct in the sense of making an artefact. We can’t do that so we have got to… we’ve got to, as it were, arrive at the…

1:41:27 JM: Even if we zipped open our heads, and we are doing that with electrical recordings in a sense, we still have to interpret what we… somebody has to look at it.

1:41:37 P: No, but let’s say if we zipped open our heads and what we found was a piece of paper with a circuit diagram, like the back of a radio…

1:41:43 JM: That’s a construction, too.

1:41:45 P: Yes, but… I know. We arrive at what’s on the paper using inductive inference, but if God gave us that paper of everyone, then we wouldn’t have to construct, we’d have it.

1:42:01 P: God is a construction, too. (Laughter)

1:42:04 P: You’re just replacing one construction by the other.

1:42:05 P: Yes, but I thought that what Pybram was meaning is that the process that we have to undergo in arriving at models involves constructing in this way, and that’s perfectly true. But it’s not logically necessary that we arrive at them in that way. I mean, they could come to us in a flash, or God could give them to us. In which case we wouldn’t have to construct them in your way. Is that… I mean, do you agree or… is that you meaning?

1:42:30 P: It’s hard for me... The implicate mode, using David Bohm’s terminology, doesn’t have any constructions in it, as it were, until something happens in the explicate mode. And, you know, here I’m not talking science or fact, I’m just sort of speculating or guessing – I have a feeling that we’d be terribly confused if there were nothing but the implicate mode. But the moment you get into the explicate, you are already dealing with some kind of construction, and that’s all we can talk about, communicate and so on, that the implicate mode is so confusing and, yes, I mean, it’s just... you’re just there. 1:43:25 And the moment you talk about a circuit diagram or anything like that, you’re already talking about one particular explication of that implicate mode.

1:43:39 GS: Stepping back into my role as the Indian traditionalist, when we are taught literature we are taught something which vaguely translated might be called a pun, but it is something much more serious than that. It’s a figure of speech. And a good poem very often has a pun in it. And the pun, the purpose of the pun is that, first stage of course, to hide meaning from somebody, like sort of a spy message. I mean, instead of writing it in secret ink, I mean, you write it in such a fashion that it means something else. 1:44:14 Second, sort of a technical virtuosity, in which you convey two meanings by the same set of words, and at the higher reaches of the thing you convey the same meanings, not by a pun of the sound of the word, but rather even if you replace the words by equivalent words from the dictionary you would still have it. It is in the constellation of ideas that you have the pun.

1:44:37 One of these examples is a mnemonic for grammar which is used in my language, which says that there are seven cases and there are seven declensions, case endings corresponding to this one, and these are such, such, such and such. And it says that then the beginning of each of these declensions are such and such. Then it says that the… but of these seven the very first is the one without any declension at all. And it’s a very useful thing because if you have to remember seven cases and seven declensions, I mean, you really have to have either a piece of paper on which you write it or some mnemonic device by this one. 1:45:16 But it is only several years later that I realised that this same statement could be interpreted as a philosophic document, that it basically says that there are in fact many levels in which the nominative case, nominated singular functions, namely, in relation to something, and there are a number of these relations. And each of these is a declension, it’s just this is a modification. But on the other hand, the only unmodified one is in fact the very important, the primary, the most important one, which is in relation to no defined relation and therefore no deformation in the system. 1:45:53 I mention this not for the philosophical content, but the idea that these two ideas could be conveyed by the same set of sounds seems to me to be very remarkable. And when you look deeper into the thing it is not an accident that these things have come, that in fact language itself developed to express the relation of a person with regard to other things. If at this stage of when you see these two things together you see in fact something totally new which was neither philosophical nor grammatical, but something which connects on to the origins of language and its relationship with other things, you see a perspective, you see something in depth.

1:46:34 The same thing happens with regard to seeing through two eyes. I mean, with each eye you see approximately the same thing, but things are flat. But with two eyes you see the two visions combined together, you begin to see depth, which is something that was not there in the earlier stage. Similarly, by seeing both the global and in the small description, the stage by stage and the global description, one begins to see something else which is not describable in terms of one or the other one. So I would neither want to put one above the other one, nor to talk of one as natural and the other one as artificial, but in fact any experience requires both immediate comprehension as well as analysis, because in this process of analysis and identifying it with the immediately perceived thing, you have an entirely new creative perception of what you had before. So, I hope that neither biology nor physics would ever come to the point where, in a sense, you have only a holistic description without having the possibility of seeing step by step things.

1:47:40 DB: You want to say something, Harsh?

1:47:43 Harsh Tanka: Yes, I want to… Harsh Tanka. I want to return to the question of transformation. I think, Dr Goodwin, you were saying that the process of transformation was hierarchical, that it involved higher and higher orders of cognition, and so it seems like there is an endless series of initiations that we must undergo. I think in the Eastern, the Hindu tradition, there is a similar idea of birth and rebirth. 1:48:21 And yet all mystical experiences and all that one hears talk about some kind of final point at which this hierarchy disappears and you are free of continual initiations into further transformations. And I was wondering whether this is the kind of transformation that we are talking about just now, or we are talking… or is it this hierarchy that we are talking about?

1:48:50 BG: Yes, well, without any evidence except that from ancient writing or the occult sources I would certainly tend to the view that there is a finite number. There may be six initiations in total, I don’t know, but that ultimately you get back to the null point, you get to the point where Dr Sudarshan was talking about now, where there is no declension, there is just pure being, or whatever word you want to use. And when you have reached that state of total freedom then I have no idea what happens next. I doubt that you are incarnate anymore.

1:49:24 K: I would like to also say the same thing that both Dr Sudarshan and Harsha said. Is perception gradual, hierarchical and each perception a stepping initiation, higher up, higher up, higher up? And who is to teach the higher levels, and therefore who becomes the authority? You follow, sir? Or is there only perception, direct perception, and from that perception, the cause, all the rest follow? Not the other way round. I’m just…

1:50:13 DB: Yes, that’s perhaps for discussion.

1:50:19 K: I think we should discuss that.

1:50:20 DB: (Inaudible) …perhaps just think about it… (inaudible)

1:50:21 GS: I would like to say something with some trepidation, to talk with you about this matter in public. (Laughter) You have expressed at various times over the years the point of view that searching for an initiator, searching for a higher mode functioning entity, a power mains into which you can plug yourself in, is somewhat of a fruitless activity. It is a traditional activity but it’s a fruitless one. I submit that one could view this as a… I’m a theorist in science but in terms of other activities I would like to function as an experiment.

1:51:03 One could submit it to an experimental situation, that if you find that in a certain condition in the company of a certain person, in relation to a certain person you become magnified, you become more efficient, you become more artful, as Dr Capra mentioned, then it seems to me that particular person’s company, presence, influence, is something that you cultivate. Not as a surrogate but only as a device that, instead of sitting quietly in your room you say that, ‘Now, let me go and spend the time with Krishnaji. 1:51:42 If he would let me be in his presence then I’m likely to think about certain things and I would function in a certain fashion. If I am in this surrounding, I’m not likely to think about the competitive dog-eat world of modern science.’ Then I should cultivate this one. But if I can think deep thoughts only in the surroundings then I’m restricting myself.

1:52:06 The question of perception or seeing – I prefer the word seeing because perception seems to be too scientific – the question of seeing is always one which, in my estimate, seems to be a double activity. One, you see, and when you see you don’t say, ‘I’m seeing; I’m now going to see, I open my eyes and I’m going to focus it in this direction’ – I see. But then I say, ‘I have seen,’ and at that particular moment I analyse: how was it that I was able to perceive that there was a sequoia tree out there? 1:52:39 In this case, I didn’t; somebody told me. And when I ask this question I might say, ‘Well, the reason I thought about this particular thing or I saw this thing was because of the fact that there was nothing else to do here, or that there was the appropriate ambience for this one.’ Or I might say, ‘This was because of the fact that this is the place where Krishnaji is living at the present time.’ In the same sense that, it seems to me, initiation into seeing is a process description of the seeing itself. 1:53:10 The seeing is the immediate, absolute, primary, more elemental reality than why I see, how I saw, what was the circumstances. And in the moment of seeing there is no question of who made me see. In fact there is no question of ‘made me see’. There is only see.

1:53:26 K: You see.

1:53:27 GS: There is only see. It is very often done, however, that with a certain amount of humility and a certain amount of practical wisdom, that you identify that there was, when you ask, ‘Why did I see? ’ that you point to a particular cause, and very often it happens that that particular agent seems to be more than temperature or visuals around him – a particular person, his presence, his memory, his influence, his touch, his sound, his form, his appearance, even his photograph or mention of that name. 1:54:02 And such a person is not a static person because the person grows. I may see a friend of mine today and I might simply treat him as a friend, but five years later I might remember something that he said today and then say, ‘Oh, what he said was in fact deep wisdom which was given in great love to me,’ because he knew. He may not have known anything about it, but to me then he is a teacher, an initiate. So, I would take the more practical point of view and then say that if I find that company of a certain person, association… a declension in relation to a certain person is a more efficient, more artful method of doing the thing. 1:54:43 I would have no hesitation to identify that person as the seer who has initiated me into seeing. And then I retain the right, at every time, to say that, ‘Well, what I saw was not what it was; it was an illusion, that in fact that person happened to be an initiator at that time, but it was something that I attributed to him.’ But that seems to be true even in more mundane affairs with regard to a doctoral guide, a person who initiates into your research. It seems to me that when I was initiated into fundamental search I gave much credit to my teacher. 1:55:21 I still feel very respectful towards him but it seems to me this was a very stylised form of appreciation to a function rather than a phenomenon that happened at one time, rather than to the person.

1:55:34 P: Could I ask you – it’s interesting what you just said, I find it fascinating – but could I ask, must this initiator be a person? I mean, could it not logically be a pill or, you know, a ray of particles floating down slowly, hitting your person, etc.?

1:55:53 DB: Or else some perception of nature.

1:55:55 P: Yes.

1:55:56 GS: I could give you two answers. One is the traditional answer of India which says that, ‘Yes, that person has to be real, alive, and functioning as a human being as long as you are functioning.’ In practice, even in tradition there are examples – I mean, the great seer, the patron saint or the patron seer of all scientists, I mean, Vishvamitra, who was a king, who found that at a certain point all his arms might was incapable of overcoming a poor old rishi who was living in a forest. And he decided that this was no longer efficient. He abandoned it and then went about acquiring his powers, and many, many times he was in trouble, but eventually he found the things by himself. 1:56:41 So there are cases of people who have seen things by themselves. But the traditional answer seems to be – and many, many people – Krishnaji I’m sure counts himself out of this traditional statement – many, many people whom I respect for obvious reasons seem to say that, ‘Yes, it must be a person who is in human form, as long as you are able to function only in human form.’ I don’t know why it is, but it seems to work every now and then.

1:57:13 P: Yes, it seems to work but then someone else might say, as David said, ‘Nature has done it for me,’ or some more perverted character might say, ‘This pill has done it for me.’ Now, just because a certain set of persons that you happen to respect very much says it must be a person, I mean, one tends to want to ask, why must it be a person?

1:57:32 GS: No, it seems to me that if that… if at a particular time you find that the pill is doing… – pill or, say, grass, is able to do it better than the person, and you really have qualitatively new experiences, totally new experiences which to your own mind appears authentic, it seems to me I would then change my mind and then say that it is so. So what I’m saying is that this is a matter of not to be settled by argument but by direct empirical observation.

1:57:59 K: Would you say that seeing is… you depend on somebody, either a pill, tranquilliser, nature or a person?

1:58:14 GS: No, it is simply that you see more sometimes with the aid of something.

1:58:20 K: I’d just like to find out if you do see with the aid of somebody, or it must be something totally new, the perception independent of everything – independent of persons, tranquillisers, nature, pill or drug.

1:58:41 GS: When you see you do not have any other person assisting you; in fact, when you see you do not even have a ‘when’, you see. Now, you ask the question. I want to put it into the matrix of the space-time causal matrix, and then I ask, why is it that I saw but I do not see now? And then I have to answer like the blind beggar who met Jesus, he was asked, how did you… how did this man, Jesus, make you see? And after many explanations, finally in exasperation he says, ‘I do not know. All I know is that I was born blind. I was blind from my birth, and this man said, “Put this mud on your eyes and go and wash in the lake of Siloam,” and once I washed, and I now see.’ 1:59:32 In the same sense, one can say, ‘If I look for a cause, I can say in this particular case these series of seeings were directly initiated by this particular person.’ Now, I may change my mind later on and then say, ‘No, no, no, he had really nothing to do with it. What happened was that I got rest, I ate vegetarian food, I had no newspaper or telephone or television, and therefore in this particular context with the smell of incense, that was the thing which was initiating me.’

2:00:00 FC: And I think maybe one could use another metaphor also which is used in the East, that it’s like cleansing a mirror. And it is your own mirror but the person just helps you to cleanse it. And once it is clean then you see just naturally and nothing interferes with it, it’s just your own seeing.

2:00:21 GS: That is true in a certain sense, but at this point it seems to me almost borders on the semantic, because the devotee of the great master who says that, ‘I am nothing, but all I see is because of my master,’ and the person who says that, ‘Look, I had a mirror,’ or ‘I had a scope,’ and it was sort of dirty and somebody cleaned it up, it seems to me doesn’t make any difference because you say that you are not seeing with your things. So it seems to me a very slight shade of difference.

2:00:52 DB: There is a Zen saying, there was a monk who said, ‘There is no mirror and no dust,’ you see, who revolutionised the whole thing. You see, there have been difference points of view, so that we don’t know… You see, can we actually give any explanation of why we see? And I think the point raised by Krishnamurti should be reconsidered that, is there anything more fundamental than seeing, that is at all possible?

2:01:23 K: Sir, would you say that what you see now can be seen better next year?

2:01:37 GS: No. Sometimes it is quite the other way round. There are times when you are very clear about what it’s all about.

2:01:44 K: No, no, if you see something which is true, can you see something which you saw as being true as being false next year?

2:01:55 DS: Yes.

2:01:56 K: Then it’s not seeing.

2:01:58 DS: When you see, you see. When you ask what did I see before, when you analyse the thing then… There is no possibility of seeing what I see now, later on. Because when there is a later on, then obviously it is not one seeing but seeing together with a certain condition.

2:02:17 K: That’s all my point. That’s my point.

2:02:19 GS: But in terms of – here I am at a slight disadvantage because I’m not trained in psychological… physiological psychology – it seems to me that either under spiritual – I use the word spiritual, I don’t really know what… – I mean, non-drug induced altered states of consciousness, and mild drug-induced states of consciousness – both seem to have some common features, in the sense that they both have a faint sense of causality of time. But it’s an altered time sequence and in that altered time sequence, the time before and the time now are really not two different times but really continuous.

2:03:00 K: Quite, quite.

2:03:01 GS: Though you are aware in a certain sense by looking at your diary, for example, that there were seven months in between these two – you know that, but still the other time that goes on is in a sense the same vision in which you see more and more clearly. Just like when you look at a person and you distinguish features and then you suddenly see your friend, and there is a sequence in that thing, but yet there is no sequence because there was a time when you did not see, then a time when you see.

2:03:29 K: No, but when you see something as being true or as being false, can that be changed in a few years or a few days later?

2:03:41 GS: The recollection can be changed but what you see later on is not even conditioned by what you have seen before.

2:03:51 P: I don’t know. I don’t agree. I think that…

2:03:55 DB: Let’s say that the chronological time has reached five minutes to one and if we could just finish in about a minute or two.

2:04:00 P: I mean, it seems to me that whatever one sees is always taking place within a context, and that even if it’s true that given a certain context what we see must be true – and I would probably want to question that – but even if it’s true given one certain context, surely it’s possible to see the same kind of insight using... in the sense that we are talking about it, in a different context which would render the first insight in its context false. So that I think even insights in its very profound way, I think you gave away too much. I mean, I think one could say justifiably that an insight could be rendered false at time T plus 1. Why not?

2:04:45 GS: You know, all I was simply saying was that, you don’t… at the moment of seeing, you don’t now ask the question, ‘Now, how does… now that I see these things, is it really true what I saw before?’

2:04:55 K: No sir. I don’t mean quite that. May I just finish?

2:04:58 DB: In just one minute.

2:04:59 K: May I have one…

2:05:00 DB: Otherwise the kitchen will be… (inaudible)

2:05:01 K: I saw something true, that religious organisations were not beneficial. I was the head of something religious – you know all about that. I resolved, I said… dissolved it. I don’t go back and say, ‘Oh, how terrible; I wish I hadn’t dissolved it.’ That is the fact. That is the truth. That is… there is no other argument against it, for me. So I said, that’s finished. I never regretted it, I never went back to it, I never joined other groups or anything. That is so. So, is seeing variable? Is seeing dependent on environment, drugs, gurus – you follow? – all that? Or is it something totally new that you see and that’s the end of it?

2:06:14 GS: The latter one. You see and that is the end of it.

2:06:17 K: That’s all.

2:06:18 GS: I don’t even ask the question: is this going to remain…

2:06:20 K: No, no, no. Of course, of course.

2:06:26 DB: Well, perhaps… We start again at half past three. Is that right?

2:06:32 K: Half past three.

2:06:33 DB: Yes.

2:06:36 DB: We’re going in alphabetic order. We’re going around. Whoever…

2:06:39 P: Who’s next?

2:06:40 DB: Basil, are you going to talk? Then you’ll be next, if you like.

2:06:42 P: Yes.

2:06:43 P: (Inaudible)

2:06:44 DB: Are you going to talk, Robin?

🢁