Exploring Consciousness and Existence

It's perfectly obvious that the universe is a system which is

aware of itself.

In other words,

we as living organisms

are forms of the energy of the universe just as much as the stars

and the galaxies,

and through our sense organs,

this system of energy becomes aware of itself.

But there's a puzzle in this,

which again relates back to our basic

contrast between on and off and something and nothing, which is

this,

that the aspect of the universe

which is aware of itself,

that is to say the aspect which, to put it in a very clumsy

phrase, does the awaring,

does not see itself.

In other words,

you can't look at your eyes with your eyes.

You can't kiss your own lips. You can't bite your own teeth.

You can't observe yourself in the act of observing.

All scientists,

neurologists, physicists have wanted to do that,

but they can't do it,

just as you can't touch the tip of this finger with the tip of

this finger, no matter how hard you try.

And that therefore creates on the backside of

all observation a blank spot. Just for example,

as behind your eyes,

from the point of view of your eyes, however you look around,

there is, is blankness behind them.

That's the unknown.

That's the part of the universe, in other words, which does not

see itself because it is seeing.

And so we always get this division of experience

into one half known,

one half unknown. We would like, of course, it would be fascinating

if we could know the always unknown.

But if we, say, examine the brain and the structure of the nerves behind

the eyes, we're always looking at somebody else's

brain

out there.

We're never looking at our own brain

at the same time as we're investigating somebody else's brain.

So there always remains this blank side of experience.

Now, what I'm suggesting to you is this,

that the blank side of experience

has the same relationship to the conscious side

as the off principle of vibration

has to the on principle.

Do you see that? There's a fundamental division.

The Chinese call them the positive side the yang and

the negative side the yin.

That corresponds to the idea of one

in our,

uh, language and zero.

All numbers can be made of one and zero.

That's the-- called binary arithmetic, which is used for computers.

And so it's all made up of off and on, and therefore

equally of conscious and unconscious.

But

the unconscious

is, so to say, the part of experience which is

doing consciousness, just as the

trough manifests the wave, the space

manifests the solid,

the background manifests the figure.

And so all that side of life which you call unconscious,

unknown, impenetrable, is unconscious and is

unknown and is impenetrable because it's really

you.

In other words,

the deepest you

is the nothing side,

is the side which you don't know.

So in this sense, don't be afraid of nothing.

I could make a joke and say there's nothing in nothing to be

afraid of.

But people in our culture are terrified of nothing.

They're terrified of death.

They are uneasy about sleep because they think it's a waste of time, and they

have a lurking fear in the back of their minds that all this

universe is eventually going to run down

and end in nothing, and it will all be forgotten, buried,

and dead.

But this is a completely unreasonable fear

because it is just precisely this nothing which is always the

source of something. Think of it once again in the image

of clarity.

We say crystal clear.

Nothing

is what brings something into focus,

and this nothingness symbolized by the crystal

is your own eyeball,

your own consciousness,

and the clear space

in which all the stars have freedom to be seen.