And, you see, by that method you create a gorgeous landscape. Then, when he’d sobered up a little, he’d look at this and do a Rorschach blot on it, and he would see a landscape which could be brought out for all to see by just a few extra touches of the brush. And there was a very great Zen painter in China in the Sung dynasty who used to paint as follows: he’d get very drunk and then-he had long hair-and he’d dip his hair in ink, and then he’d wave his head over a piece of paper. Leonardo da Vinci spoke of using his imagination on a dirty old wall in which he could see landscapes and battles and all kinds of things. For example, if you examine the animal paintings in the caves of Lascaux, which are probably the earliest artforms in existence, it is apparent that the painters of those images first looked at the rock, at its contours and at the smudges and various changes of color in it, and saw the animals and creatures that they painted just as you might see something in a Rorschach blot. Now, a foundation of artistic creation is to see things in blots. And so, in that sense, the universe is rather like an enormous Rorschach blot. Trees are, rocks are, clouds are, waters are, the outlines of islands and so on-it’s all wiggly. But we like to do this, and even I once read something that I never believed any human being had ever thought, but during the 18 th century, when Western man had a peculiar passion for symmetrical order, somebody wrote an essay saying that the stars had been very poorly disposed, and that if they had been arranged in geometrical patterns it would have been far more consistent with the divine reason than this haphazardly scattered affair. But sometimes a member of a constellation could very well be in an entirely different galaxy millions of light years away. Actually, those stars happen to be fairly close to each other in space. Seen from another point of view in space they wouldn’t look like a dipper at all. The constellations, of course, aren’t there there are no strings joining those stars which constitute the Big Dipper. We try, for example, not to let the stars seem to be disordered, but to organize them into constellations. And so then we are also always in conflict with wiggliness. And so we’re confronted with tables and chairs and walls and window frames, and we get a sense of non-wiggly reality. We don’t notice this very much if we live in towns and if we live in ordinary houses, because we build our streets and our homes so as to seem to be non-wiggly. And so I want to start, then, by telling you the many, many things that the word māyā actually means.īecause, you see, the physical world is fundamentally wiggly. And the extremely low standard of living makes life intolerable, and so they would just as soon believe that it isn’t real, that it all has a dreamlike quality, and that the highest ideal to which man can aspire is to escape altogether from this sort of physical existence (which they call saṃsāra: the round of birth and death), and to disappear into a state of rather diffuse consciousness wherein the individuality vanishes and one is simply suspended forever, or in a kind of timeless time, in an infinite ocean of faintly luminous, mauve jello. The heat makes the world seem like a mirage, makes it seem rather unreal. Because a general impression has circulated in the West that the Hindus live in a very, very hot country, have very little to eat, and live an absolutely miserable life, and therefore this affects the brain in a certain way. When Hinduism is reported in little textbooks on comparative religion and encyclopedia articles, this is one point on which almost all the scholars are either completely misleading or very incomplete. This is one of the most rich ideas that has ever been thought by the mind of man, because it has such a great multiplicity of meanings. I’m going to start by talking to you about the foundation idea underlying the whole of this seminar, which is the Hindu Buddhist-that is to say, Indian-idea of the world as illusion, which they call māyā.
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