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A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. By “thoughts” I mean specifically chatter in the skull: perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating.

I’m not saying that thinking is bad—like everything else, it’s useful in moderation: a good servant but a bad master. And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive because, through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. That’s to say: we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, and ideas with the real world.

Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth. And a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed, and to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event. This is a disaster.

For as a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs—such as bank balances and contracts—we are destroying nature. We are so tied up in our minds that we’ve lost our senses and don’t realize that the air stinks, water tastes of chlorine, the the human landscape looks like a trash heap, and much of our food tastes like plastic. Time to wake up.

What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea.

It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: [GONG]. You see?

We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done. To get in touch with reality there is an art of meditation—of what is called yoga (or dhyāna) in India, chán in China, and Zen in Japan.

It is the art of temporarily silencing the mind, of stopping the chatter in the skull. Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flat iron.

Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone. So: will you try an experiment with me? Simply close your eyes and allow your ears to hear all sounds around you.

Don’t try to name or identify these sounds. Just hear them as you would listen to music, as when you hear a flute or a guitar, without asking what it means. And as and when I talk, just hear the sound of my voice.

Don’t bother about what it means—your brain will take care of that by itself. Just let your eardrums respond as they will to all vibrations now in the air. Don’t let yourself, or your ears, be offended by improper or unscheduled sounds.

If, for example, the record is scratchy, okay. You wouldn’t object if you were listening to it sitting by a fire of crackling logs. [RING] Let ’em ring.

It’s just a noise. And keep your tongue relaxed, floating easily in the lower jaw. Also, stop frowning: allow the space between your eyes to feel easy and open.

And just let the vibrations in the air play with your ears. You must understand that in meditation we are concerned only with what is: with reality, nothing else. The past is a memory, the future an expectation.

Neither past nor future actually exist. There is simply eternal now. So don’t seek or expect a result from what you’re doing.

That wouldn’t be true meditation. There’s no hurry. Just now, you’re not going anywhere.

Simply be here. Live in the world of sound. Let it play.

That’s all. In the world of pure sound, can you actually hear anyone who is listening? Can you hear any difference between all these sounds on the one hand, and yourself on the other?

Naturally, we use techniques and gimmicks to help the thinking mind to become silent, and one of them is the gong. It is a sound at once pleasing and compelling.It absorbs attention, but watch what happens when it fades out. [GONG] The one sound becomes the many.

The single tone is transformed easily and gently into all other noises. And that’s how the universe comes into being out of the one energy underlying all events. So if you don’t have a gong, you can use your own voice: by chanting what Hindus and Buddhists call a mantra—that is, a syllable or phrase sung for its sound rather than its meaning.

Chief of these is the syllable om—or aum—called the pranava, or the “sound of God,” because it involves the whole range of the voice from the back of the throat to the lips. Take the tone from the gong and hum it with me. Aaauuuuummmmmm.

Now, you can hear all sounds as om. They're all—at some point in the total range of sound, from the back of the throat to the lips—making a spectrum of sound as all colors are originally one white light. But don’t ask what the sound is or what it means.

Just hear it and dig it. Hum with me again. [GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm.

[GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm. [GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm. [GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm.

Let me explain again what we are doing. We are going behind words, names, numbers, beliefs, and ideas: to get back to the naked experience of reality itself. And that this level of awareness we find no difference between the listener the sound, the knower and the known, the subject and the object, or between the past, the present, and future.

All that’s just talk! What is really happening is: [GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm. And you may wonder how I can keep the sound going for so long a time.

It depends on regulation of the breath, which is basic to the art of meditation. And I’m going to show you how to do this and why. To begin with, just as you've been letting vibrations in the air play with your ears, let your lungs breathe as they will.

Don’t, as yet, attempt any breathing exercise. Don’t force anything. Simply allow breathing.

Now, is this breathing a voluntary or involuntary action—or both, or neither? Just feel it without taking sides; without words. And again, hear my voice as if it were wind in the trees of the sound of waves.

[deep breathing] Most of us are short of breath. We never really empty our lungs. But to make a long complete out-breath you mustn’t force it.

Imagine there’s a large ball of lead inside your neck, and allow it to fall slowly through your body to the floor, pushing and easing the breath out as it drops. Ease the breath out just as you settle and sink down comfortably into a bed. And when the ball reaches the floor, let it drop away as if to the center of the Earth.

[deep breathing] Then let the breath come back in as a reflex, without pulling it. And then imagine another ball of lead in the neck. And again, let it fall out.

Long and easy. [deep breathing] And once again. [deep breathing] Now, do you see what’s happening?

You are generating a great deal of energy without trying or forcing. Two things seem to be happening at once. First, the outflow of breath is simply falling, happening all by itself.

Second, it’s under perfect control. So from this practice you learn to experience, to realize, that what happens to you and what you do are one and the same process. There is no real separation between one thing called “you” and another quite different thing called “the universe.” When you stop talking and naming, they're quite obviously one.

So again: let your breath fall easily out. [deep breathing] All the way. Let it come back on its own, and then out again.

[deep breathing] And now let’s put the sound “ah” on the next outflow. [GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm. And again, so that you have nothing in mind but [GONG] Aaauuuuummmmmm.

Then there is a very effective mantra used by an important sect of Islamic mystics known as Sufis. Like all these different mantra, they will be kept up for quite long periods—say, fifteen to twenty minutes or more. So what I’m giving you are only samples.

You can easily do this one with me. It goes like this. Allah!

Allah! Allah! … Now, today, we are living in an age which is quite peculiar.

Because, in the world of science, there are no longer any secrets because the method of science requires that all scientists be in communication with each other and, therefore, that every scientist—as soon as he has discovered something, or got a good idea—he rushes into print. And it’s important for him to do so because some other scientist somewhere else in the world might be thinking about something on the same lines and would be stimulated in his work by this man’s speculations, even if not by discoveries. And so the whole scientific world tries to remain in communication, and for this reason it was absolutely impossible to keep atomic energy a secret.

In former ages that might have been managed, because there were many secrets once upon a time and people were not admitted to these secrets unless they were in some way tested and found capable of handling them without running amok. We live in such a dangerous age because all the secrets are out in the open and anybody can run amok with them. And that’s just the situation we have to face and that is just the situation we have to handle.

It is too late to stop it because that would be, as they say, locking the door after the horse has bolted. The vice president of an extremely important corporation in the United States—very progressive and very vital—a few months ago said, “There are two major forces operating in the world today, for good or for evil. One is red China, the other is LSD.” And there is a certain reason why such a thing as a certain chemical—which is capable of opening people’s minds in a certain way—should be something extremely disturbing.

Because this particular chemical—in common with a number of others that have been known for centuries (but have been rather played cool through those centuries)—is capable of doing something which simply cannot be tolerated. That is to say: capable of letting properly prepared individuals—or sometimes improperly prepared individuals—in on a secret which is very closely guarded and which is, as a matter of fact, the deepest and most fundamental of all our social taboos. I have just finished writing a book which I have had—with a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude—had the temerity to call The Book, and it is subtitled The Book, you see, On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

Because that is really the thing that cannot be let out. Sex is not really a serious taboo in our culture. If you are initiating a young person into life, and you realize that your son or daughter is going to college and that you ought, therefore, to have a serious talk with them, they’ll laugh at you and say, “All these things you’re telling us about sex we knew years ago, and we know more about it than you do.” So that is not a subject for a serious initiation talk to a young person.

So we have to think again and try and find out—think deeply—what is fundamentally taboo in this culture, and perhaps in other cultures as well? What would—what information, in other words—would really let the cat out of the bag and give away the show? Now, quest around a bit.

Ask yourself this: for what reason would a person be considered hopelessly insane? What sort of claims must a person simply not make? Well, there is one.

And that is if anybody claims that he is God. That simply isn’t done. Certainly not in our culture, although it’s very frequent in India.

But in our culture that is simply not allowed because we… most of us from a Christian background, and if not that, from a Jewish background—and there’s a great deal in common because both Christians and Jews are deeply concerned about somebody called Jesus Christ. Both Christians and Jews are, in a way, followers of Jesus Christ in different ways. He is a problem to both because he was the man who came out and discovered he was God.

And that simply is impermissible. The Jews handled it in one way. The Christians handled it, quite as effectively, in another way.

The Christians handled Jesus perfectly—even more tactfully than the Jews—by putting him on a pedestal and saying this was the only man who ever was God, and nobody else was really so before, and certainly nobody can be so afterwards. Stop right there! Put him on the altar, bow down to him, worship him, so that everything he had to say will be null and void.

And it worked beautifully. But, you see, the trouble about deep secrets is: they can’t be repressed indefinitely. Now here’s the problem, you see: that there are certain processes—some of which are what you might call spiritual exercises, others are simply chemicals, others are just horse sense—whereby one comes to see very clearly indeed that black goes with white and self goes with other.

And as this becomes clear to you it’s rather shaking because, look: if what you define as “you” is inseparable from everything which you define as “not you”—just as “front” is inseparable from “back”—then you realize that deep down, between self and other, there is some sort of conspiracy. If these things always occur in combination—and look very different from each other, and feel quite different—nevertheless, the feeling of difference between them allows each one to exist. And so underneath the opposition—or the polarity—between self and other (or between any other pair of opposites you can think of) there is something in common as there is, for example, between figure and background.

You can’t see a figure without a background. You can’t have an organism without an environment. Equally, you can’t have a background without a figure or an environment without organisms in it—or without things in it.

You can’t have space which is unoccupied by any solid. You cannot have solids not occupying some space. This is absolutely elementary, and yet we don’t realize it because, for example, the average person thinks that space is nothing.

It’s just a sort of not-there-ness in which there are things. And we are slightly afraid that not-there-ness—that nothingness, that darkness, that the negative poles of all these oppositions—will win; that they will eventually swallow up every kind of being and every kind of there-ness. But when you catch on to the game you realize that that won’t happen because what is called “not existing” is quite incapable of being there without the contrast of something called “existing.” It’s like the crest and the trough of a wave: you can’t have a wave that is all trough and no crest just as you can’t have wave which is all crest and no trough.

Such a thing has never been manifested in the physical universe. They go together. And that is the secret!

There really is no other secret than that. But it is thoroughly repressed. And therefore we are all educated to feel that we’ve got to fight for the white because the black might win.

We’ve got to survive. You must survive: that’s the great thing we’re all working under, and pounding it out day after day in anxiety. Because this is a description of anxiety.

Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other forever. And if—by any chance, by any means—you find out that that is not so, you have an entirely new attitude to what human beings are doing. Which may be very creative, but which also may be very dangerous.

You see through the game, the game called “white must win.” Because, you know, that neither black nor white are going to win because they belong to each other. So one of the problems of the various chemicals which can change the human mind in certain ways—so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together—is that they do rather give the show away, and people who take these chemicals and see through the human game cannot be trusted. They may decide to be good sports and go back into the game and play it as if it were for real, or they may not.

And if they don’t, what’s going to happen? Now, you see, what is—let me speak specifically for a moment—I said the subject of this is LSD. LSD is one such chemical that does produce this curious effect of making you aware of the polarity of things.

It does lots of other things. It does lots of rather unessential and trivial things. And these, of course—in all the publicity in the various national magazines about LSD—get thoroughly emphasized.

In other words, when somebody says something’s real psychedelic they mean bizarre. And when the national magazines try to illustrate the effect of these chemicals with various photographs they come on with blurred photographs of all sorts of things, higgledy-piggledy mess together, naked girls seen through prisms. Well that’s [got] absolutely nothing to do with it.

If you wanted some sort of appropriate illustration for a Life Magazine article on the effects of LSD you would have one very simple solution: you would publish the most gorgeous color reproductions of Persian miniatures, and of Moorish arabesques, and of the illuminations of Celtic manuscripts. That would give you the story so far as changes in human sensation are concerned. But there would be one thing very difficult to put across in pictures because the people who looked at them—if they didn’t get the point of view—wouldn’t see it, and that is what I will call the sensation as well as the intellectual understanding of polarity.

That is to say, that the inside and the outside, the subjective and the objective, the self and the other go together. In other words, there is a harmony; an unbreakable harmony. When I’m using the word “harmony” I don’t necessarily mean something sweet.

I mean absolute concordant relationship between what goes on inside your skin and what goes on outside your skin. It isn’t that what goes on outside is so powerful that it pushes around and controls what goes on inside. Equally so, it isn’t that what goes on inside is so strong that it often succeeds in pushing around what goes on outside.

It is, very simply, that the two processes—the two behaviors—are one. What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do. Not “you” in the sense of your superficial ego—which is a very small, little, tiny area of your conscious sensitivity—but “you” in the sense of your total psychophysical organism, conscious as well as unconscious.

This is not something that arrived in the world from somewhere else altogether, that confronts an alien reality. What you are is the universe—in fact, the works; what there is, and always has been, and always will be for ever and ever—performing an act called John Doe. And this is such a subversion of common sense, but is, matter of fact, something—if you stop to think about it—it is completely obvious.

Only: everything conspires to prevent you from seeing that obvious thing. Because when you were babies—practically—all your parents, and your teachers, and your aunts and uncles, and your older brothers and sisters got together and they told you who you were. They defined you as Johnny… who’s just Johnny, and don’t you come on too strong, Johnny, because krrrrxkrrrk—you know—you’ve got elders and betters around you.

But you’re responsible! You’re a free agent. You’d better be!

And so when you are told, from childhood, that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily, you remain permanently mixed up. That, if anything, is permanent brain damage. But that’s the idea, you see?

Because that’s the game we’re playing: you started it! I didn’t. See?

That’s the game we’re playing, and we can make all kinds of complexities out of that and, really—in a way—have enormous fun. But once anybody sees through that… well, we’re frightened. Once you get this sense of polarity—of your inside being the same process as your outside, and your ego being one and the same process as the whole universe going on—then we’re afraid that people may say, well, good equals bad and we can do anything we like, and we needn’t in any way be further subject to the ordinary rules of human conduct, and we can wear what clothes we like—or no clothes at all.

We can have what sexual life we like. We can do anything. And we are going to—generally, because the world is being rather oppressive towards us—challenge the whole thing and run amok.

And a lot of people are doing just exactly that. So I want to introduce into this whole problem some ancient wisdom. I’ve really two things to talk about: how cultures—which always did know in some way, or among whom a large number of people always did know this secret—handled it, and then I want to make some observations about how we’re trying to handle it and how it’s not going to work.

Among the Hindus and among the Buddhists this view of the real identity of a human being has always been known, at least by a very influential minority. The central doctrine of the Hindu way of life—I call it that rather than a religion—is, in Sanskrit, tat tvam asi: “you’re it,” to put it in a kind of colloquial way. You’re it!

And “it” is the which than which there is no whicher, which they call the Brahman or the Ātman—with a capital A—meaning “the self.” You are only just kidding that you’re just poor little me. See, the function of a guru—that is to say, a spiritual teacher in India—is to give you a funny look in the eye because you come to him and say, “Mr. Guru, I have problems.

I suffer, and it’s a mess, and I can’t control my mind, and I’m miserable and depressed,” and so on. And he gives you a funny look. You feel a bit nervous about the way he looks at you because, you know, he’s reading your thoughts.

This man is a great magician. He can read everything that’s in you. He knows right down into your unconscious, and you know all the dreadful things you’ve thought and all the awful desires you have, and you are rather embarrassed that this man looks right through you and sees them all.

That’s not what he’s looking at! He’s giving you a funny look for quite another reason altogether, because he sees in you the Brahman—the Godhead—just claiming it’s poor little me. And he’s going to eventually (by all sorts of subtle techniques that are called in Sanskrit upāya—that, in politics, means “chicanery” and in spiritual education means “skillful pedagogy”) he’s going to try and kid you back into realizing who you really are.

That’s why he gives you a funny look and why he seems to see right through you, as if to say, “Śiva, old boy, don’t kid me: I know who you are. But you’re coming on beautifully in this act that you’re somebody else altogether. And I congratulate you, you’re doing a wonderful job!” Playing this part which you call the person; my person.

You know, a person is a fake. The word means a mask. So if you read books on how to be a real person, you’re reading books on how to be a genuine fake.

The word persona—as you know—means a mask worn in Greco-Roman drama. So if you come on to the guru and say, well… he asks you who you are—Sri Ramana Maharshi, when anybody came to him and they said to him (as people do), “Who was I in my last incarnation?” or “Will I be reincarnated again?” he always replied, “Who’s asking the question?” And everybody was irritated because he wouldn’t give them answers about what they were in their former lives. He just said, “Who are you?” And he looked at you—have you looked at photographs of this man?

I keep a photograph of him close by because of the humor in his eyes. They’re looking at you with a dancing twinkle, saying “Come off it!” Now then, in these Asiatic traditions it is well recognized that people who get the knowledge that you’re it may very well run amok, and therefore they always couple any method of gaining this—whether it is yoga, whether it is smoking something or drinking something, or whatever is the method—they always couple it with a discipline. Now, I know the word “discipline” isn’t very popular these days and I would like to have a new word for it, because most people who teach disciplines don’t teach them very well.

They teach it with a kind of… violence, as if a discipline were something that is going to be extremely unpleasant and that you’re going to have to put up with. But that’s not the real secret of discipline. I would prefer to use the word “skill.” Discipline is a way of expression.

Say, you want to express your feelings in stone. Now, stone doesn’t give way very easily; it’s tough stuff. And so you have to learn the skill—or the discipline—of the sculptor in order to express yourself in stone.

So in every other way, whatever you do, you require a skill. And it’s enormously important, especially for American people, to understand that there is absolutely no possibility of having any pleasure in life at all without skill. Money.

Doesn’t. Buy. Pleasure.

Ever. Look: if you want to get stone-drunk, and go out and get a bottle of bourbon and down it, you can’t do that except for people who have practiced the distiller’s art. You can’t even make love without art.

Where I live, in Sausalito, we have a harbor full of ever so many pleasure craft. Motor cruisers, sailing boats, all kinds of things—and they never leave the dock. All that happens with them is their owners have cocktail parties there on Saturdays and Sundays, because they discovered—having bought these things—that the discipline of sailing is difficult to learn and takes a lot of time.

And they didn’t have time for it, so they just bought the thing as a status symbol. So, in other words, you can’t have pleasure in life without skill, but it isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill. If the teacher—in the first place—gets you fascinated with it, there is immense pleasure in learning how to do anything skillfully.

To make carpentry things, to cook, to write, to calculate—anything you want can be immensely pleasurable to learn the discipline. And it is completely indispensable. Because, look: you may be a very inspired musician.

I am not a musical technologist, you see—and I regret it—but I’m a word technologist. But I can hear in my head all kinds of symphonies and all kinds of marvelous compositions, but I don’t have the technique to write them down on paper and share them with somebody else. Too bad.

Maybe next time around. But you see, so far as words are concerned, I can express ideas because I have studied language and I have worked very hard—not that I didn’t like it; I intensely enjoy the work of writing a book, although it is difficult. But it’s fascinating to say what can never possibly be said.

So you see what’s happening? What you have to do: you have inspiration, but then you have to have technique to incarnate—to express—your inspiration, that is to say, to bring heaven down to Earth and to express heaven in terms of Earth. Of course they are really one behind the scenes, but there’s no way of pointing it out unless you do something skillful.

You see, we’re all at the moment absolutely in the midst of the beatific vision. We’re all one with the divine. Although… I don’t like that sort of wishy-washy language, but… we’re all there.

But we’re so much there that we’re like fish in water: they don’t know they’re in water. Like the birds don’t know they’re in the air because it’s all around them. And in the same way we don’t know what the color of our eyes is.

I don’t mean whether you’ve got blue or brown eyes, but the color of the lens of your eye. You call that transparent; no color, see, because you can’t see it. But it’s basic to being able to see anything.

So in order to find out where you are there has to be some way of drawing attention to it, and that involves skill. Upāya, in Sanskrit: “skillful means.” So it’s all very well. Anybody can have ecstasy.