Physic :
Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy
Psychology : The value
of Psychotic Experience by Allan Watts
Psychology : About Depression
Psychology : Gates to Buddhist
practice by Chagdud tulku
Psychology : Buddhism in our
daily life by C.T. Shen Lecture 1
Psychology : Buddhism in our
daily life by C.T. Shen Lecture 2
Psychology : Buddhism in our
daily life by C.T. Shen Lecture 3
Psychology : Buddhism in our
daily life by C.T. Shen Lecture 4
History of Literature : A small biography of D.T.
Suzuki
Theory of arts : Description
Philosophy of Sciences :
What is
Sciences ?
Heisenberg's Physics and PhilosophyWerner Heisenberg (1958)
Physics and Philosophy
Source: Physics and Philosophy, 1958; Chapter 2 (History)
Published: by George Allen and Unwin Edition, 1959.
Chapter 2 (History)
The History of Quantum Theory
THE origin of quantum theory is connected with a well-known phenomenon, which
did not belong to the central parts of atomic physics. Any piece of matter when
it is heated starts to glow, gets red hot and white hot at higher temperatures.
The colour does not depend much on the surface of the material, and for a black
body it depends solely on the temperature. Therefore, the radiation emitted by
such a black body at high temperatures is a suitable object for physical
research; it is a simple phenomenon that should find a simple explanation in
terms of the known laws for radiation and heat. The attempt made at the end of
the nineteenth century by Lord Rayleigh and Jeans failed, however, and revealed
serious difficulties. It would not be possible to describe these difficulties
here in simple terms. It must be sufficient to state that the application of the
known laws did not lead to sensible results. When Planck, in 1895, entered this
line of research he tried to turn the problem from radiation to the radiating
atom. This turning did not remove any of the difficulties inherent in the
problem, but it simplified the interpretation of the empirical facts. It was
just at this time, during the summer of 1900, that Curlbaum and Rubens in Berlin
had made very accurate new measurements of the spectrum of heat radiation. When
Planck heard of these results he tried to represent them by simple mathematical
formulas which looked plausible from his research on the general connection
between heat and radiation. One day Planck and Rubens met for tea in Planck's
home and compared Rubens' latest results with a new formula suggested by Planck.
The comparison showed a complete agreement. This was the discovery of Planck's
law of heat radiation.
It was at the same time the beginning of intense theoretical work for Planck.
What was the correct physical interpretation of the new formula? Since Planck
could, from his earlier work, translate his formula easily into a statement
about the radiating atom (the so-called oscillator), he must soon have found
that his formula looked as if the oscillator could only contain discrete quanta
of energy - a result that was so different from anything known in classical
physics that he certainly must have refused to believe it in the beginning. But
in a period of most intensive work during the summer of 1900 he finally
convinced himself that there was no way of escaping from this conclusion. It was
told by Planck's son that his father spoke to him about his new ideas on a long
walk through the Grunewald, the wood in the suburbs of Berlin. On this walk he
explained that he felt he had possibly made a discovery of the first rank,
comparable perhaps only to the discoveries of Newton. So Planck must have
realised at this time that his formula had touched the foundations of our
description of nature, and that these foundations would one day start to move
from their traditional present location toward a new and as yet unknown position
of stability. Planck, who was conservative in his whole outlook, did not like
this consequence at all, but he published his quantum hypothesis in December of
1900.
The idea that energy could be emitted or absorbed only in discrete energy quanta
was so new that it could not be fitted into the traditional framework of
physics. An attempt by Planck to reconcile his new hypothesis with the older
laws of radiation failed in the essential points. It took five years until the
next step could be made in the new direction.
This time it was the young Albert Einstein, a revolutionary genius among the
physicists, who was not afraid to go further away from the old concepts. There
were two problems in which he could make use of the new ideas. One was the
so-called photoelectric effect, the emission of electrons from metals under the
influence of light. The experiments, especially those of Lenard, had shown that
the energy of the emitted electrons did not depend on the intensity of the
light, but only on its colour or, more precisely, on its frequency. This could
not be understood on the basis of the traditional theory of radiation. Einstein
could explain the observations by interpreting Planck's hypothesis as saying
that light consists of quanta of energy travelling through space. The energy of
one light quantum should, in agreement with Planck's assumptions, be equal to
the frequency of the light multiplied by Planck's constant.
The other problem was the specific heat of solid bodies. The traditional theory
led to values for the specific heat which fitted the observations at higher
temperatures but disagreed with them at low ones. Again Einstein was able to
show that one could understand this behaviour by applying the quantum hypothesis
to the elastic vibrations of the atoms in the solid body. These two results
marked a very important advance, since they revealed the presence of Planck's
quantum of action - as his constant is called among the physicists - in several
phenomena, which had nothing immediately to do with heat radiation. They
revealed at the same time the deeply revolutionary character of the new
hypothesis, since the first of them led to a description of light completely
different from the traditional wave picture. Light could either be interpreted
as consisting of electromagnetic waves, according to Maxwell's theory, or as
consisting of light quanta, energy packets travelling through space with high
velocity. But could it be both? Einstein knew, of course, that the well-known
phenomena of diffraction and interference can be explained only on the basis of
the wave picture. He was not able to dispute the complete contradiction between
this wave picture and the idea of the light quanta; nor did he even attempt to
remove the inconsistency of this interpretation. He simply took the
contradiction as something which would probably be understood only much later.
In the meantime the experiments of Becquerel, Curie and Rutherford had led to
some clarification concerning the structure of the atom. In 1911 Rutherford's
observations on the interaction of a-rays penetrating through matter resulted in
his famous atomic model. The atom is pictured as consisting of a nucleus, which
is positively charged and contains nearly the total mass of the atom, and
electrons, which circle around the nucleus like the planets circle around the
sun. The chemical bond between atoms of different elements is explained as an
interaction between the outer electrons of the neighbouring atoms; it has not
directly to do with the atomic nucleus. The nucleus determines the chemical
behaviour of the atom through its charge which in turn fixes the number of
electrons in the neutral atom. Initially this model of the atom could not
explain the most characteristic feature of the atom, its enormous stability. No
planetary system following the laws of Newton's mechanics would ever go back to
its original configuration after a collision with another such system. But an
atom of the element carbon, for instance, will still remain a carbon atom after
any collision or interaction in chemical binding.
The explanation for this unusual stability was given by Bohr in 1913, through
the application of Planck's quantum hypothesis. If the atom can change its
energy only by discrete energy quanta, this must mean that the atom can exist
only in discrete stationary states, the lowest of which is the normal state of
the atom. Therefore, after any kind of interaction the atom will finally always
fall back into its normal state.
By this application of quantum theory to the atomic model, Bohr could not only
explain the stability of the atom but also. in some simple cases, give a
theoretical interpretation of the line spectra emitted by the atoms after the
excitation through electric discharge or heat. His theory rested upon a
combination of classical mechanics for the motion of the electrons with quantum
conditions, which were imposed upon the classical motions for defining the
discrete stationary states of the system. A consistent mathematical formulation
for those conditions was later given by Sommerfeld. Bohr was well aware of the
fact that the quantum conditions spoil in some way the consistency of Newtonian
mechanics. In the simple case of the hydrogen atom one could calculate from
Bohr's theory the frequencies of the light emitted by the atom, and the
agreement with the observations was perfect. Yet these frequencies were
different from the orbital frequencies and their harmonies of the electrons
circling around the nucleus, and this fact showed at once that the theory was
still full of contradictions. But it contained an essential part of the truth.
It did explain qualitatively the chemical behaviour of the atoms and their line
spectra; the existence of the discrete stationary states was verified by the
experiments of Franck and Hertz, Stern and Gerlach.
Bohr's theory had opened up a new line of research. The great amount of
experimental material collected by spectroscopy through several decades was now
available for information about the strange quantum laws governing the motions
of the electrons in the atom. The many experiments of chemistry could be used
for the same purpose. It was from this time on that the physicists learned to
ask the right questions; and asking the right question is frequently more than
halfway to the solution of the problem.
What were these questions? Practically all of them had to do with the strange
apparent contradictions between the results of different experiments. How could
it be that the same radiation that produces interference patterns, and therefore
must consist of waves, also produces the photoelectric effect, and therefore
must consist of moving particles? How could it be that the frequency of the
orbital motion of the electron in the atom does not show up in the frequency of
the emitted radiation? Does this mean that there is no orbital motion? But if
the idea of orbital motion should be incorrect, what happens to the electrons
inside the atom? One can see the electrons move through a cloud chamber, and
sometimes they are knocked out of an atom- why should they not also move within
the atom? It is true that they might be at rest in the normal state of the atom,
the state of lowest energy. But there are many states of higher energy, where
the electronic shell has an angular momentum. There the electrons cannot
possibly be at rest. One could add a number of similar examples. Again and again
one found that the attempt to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of
physics led to contradictions.
Gradually, during the early twenties, the physicists became accustomed to these
difficulties, they acquired a certain vague knowledge about where trouble would
occur, and they learned to avoid contradictions. They knew which description of
an atomic event would be the correct one for the special experiment under
discussion. This was not sufficient to form a consistent general picture of what
happens in a quantum process, but it changed the minds of the physicists in such
a way that they somehow got into the spirit of quantum theory. Therefore, even
some time before one had a consistent formulation of quantum theory one knew
more or less what would be the result of any experiment.
One frequently discussed what one called ideal experiments. Such experiments
were designed to answer a very critical question irrespective of whether or not
they could actually be carried out. Of course it was important that it should be
possible in principle to carry out the experiment, but the technique might be
extremely complicated. These ideal experiments could be very useful in
clarifying certain problems. If there was no agreement among the physicists
about the result of such an ideal experiment, it was frequently possible to find
a similar but simpler experiment that could be carried out, so that the
experimental answer contributed essentially to the clarification of quantum
theory.
The strangest experience of those years was that the paradoxes of quantum theory
did not disappear during this process of clarification; on the contrary, they
became even more marked and more exciting. There was, for instance, the
experiment of Compton on the scattering of X-rays. From earlier experiments on
the interference of scattered light there could be no doubt that scattering
takes place essentially in the following way: The incident light wave makes an
electron in the beam vibrate in the frequency of the wave; the oscillating
electron then emits a spherical wave with the same frequency and thereby
produces the scattered light. However, Compton found in 1923 that the frequency
of scattered X-rays was different from the frequency of the incident X-ray. This
change of frequency could be formally understood by assuming that scattering is
to be described as collision of a light quantum with an electron. The energy of
the light quantum is changed during the collision; and since the frequency times
Planck's constant should be the energy of the light quantum, the frequency also
should be changed. But what happens in this interpretation of the light wave?
The two experiments - one on the interference of scattered light and the other
on the change of frequency of the scattered light - seemed to contradict each
other without any possibility of compromise.
By this time many physicists were convinced that these apparent contradictions
belonged to the intrinsic structure of atomic physics. Therefore, in I924 de
Broglie in France tried to extend the dualism between wave description and
particle description to the elementary particles of matter, primarily to the
electrons. He showed that a certain matter wave could 'correspond' to a moving
electron, just as a light wave corresponds: to a moving light quantum. It was
not clear at the time what the word 'correspond' meant in this connection. But
de Broglie suggested that the quantum condition in Bohr's theory should be
interpreted as a statement about the matter waves. A wave circling around a
nucleus can for geometrical reasons only be a stationary wave; and the perimeter
of the orbit must be an integer multiple of the wave length. In this way de
Broglie's idea connected the quantum condition. which always had been a foreign
element in the mechanics of the electrons, with the dualism between waves and
particles.
In Bohr's theory the discrepancy between the calculated orbital frequency of the
electrons and the frequency of the emitted radiation had to be interpreted as a
limitation to the concept of the electronic orbit. This concept had been
somewhat doubtful from the beginning. For the higher orbits, however, the
electrons should move at a large distance from the nucleus just as they do when
one sees them moving through a cloud chamber. There one should speak about
electronic orbits. It was therefore very satisfactory that for these higher
orbits the frequencies of the emitted radiation approach the orbital frequency
and its higher harmonics. Also Bohr had already suggested in his early papers
that the intensities of the emitted spectral lines approach the intensities of
the corresponding harmonics. This principle of correspondence had proved very
useful for the approximative calculation of the intensities of spectral lines.
In this way one had the impression that Bohr's theory gave a qualitative but not
a quantitative description of what happens inside the atom; that some new
feature of the behaviour of matter was qualitatively expressed by the quantum
conditions, which in turn were connected with the dualism between waves and
particles.
The precise mathematical formulation of quantum theory finally emerged from two
different developments. The one started from Bohr's principle of correspondence.
One had to give up the concept of the electronic orbit, but still had to
maintain it in the limit of high quantum numbers, i.e., for the large orbits.
In this latter case the emitted radiation, by means of its frequencies and
intensities, gives a picture of the electronic orbit; it represents what the
mathematicians call a Fourier expansion of the orbit. The idea suggested itself
that one should write down the mechanical laws not as equations for the
positions and velocities of the electrons but as equations for the frequencies
and amplitudes of their Fourier expansion. Starting from such equations and
changing them very little one could hope to come to relations for those
quantities which correspond to the frequencies and intensities of the emitted
radiation, even for the small orbits and the ground state of the atom. This plan
could actually be carried out; in the summer of 1925 it led to a mathematical
formalism called matrix mechanics or, more generally, quantum mechanics. The
equations of motion in Newtonian mechanics were replaced by similar equations
between matrices; it was a strange experience to find that many of the old
results of Newtonian mechanics, like conservation of energy, etc., could be
derived also in the new scheme. Later the investigations of Born, Jordan and
Dirac showed that the matrices representing position and momentum of the
electron did not commute. This latter fact demonstrated clearly the essential
difference between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.
The other development followed de Broglie's idea of matter waves. Schrödinger
tried to set up a wave equation for de Broglie's stationary waves around the
nucleus. Early in 1926 he succeeded in deriving the energy values of the
stationary states of the hydrogen atom as 'Eigenvalues' of his wave equation and
could give a more general prescription for transforming a given set of classical
equations of motion into a corresponding wave equation in a space of many
dimensions. Later he was able to prove that his formalism of wave mechanics was
mathematically equivalent to the earlier formalism of quantum mechanics.
Thus one finally had a consistent mathematical formalism, which could be defined
in two equivalent ways starting either from relations between matrices or from
wave equations. This formalism gave the correct energy values for the hydrogen
atom: it took less than one year to show that it was also successful for the
helium atom and the more complicated problems of the heavier atoms. But in what
sense did the new formalism describe the atom? The paradoxes of the dualism
between wave picture and particle picture were not solved; they were hidden
somehow in the mathematical scheme.
A first and very interesting step toward a real understanding Of quantum theory
was taken by Bohr, Kramers and Slater in 1924. These authors tried to solve the
apparent contradiction between the wave picture and the particle picture by the
concept of the probability wave. The electromagnetic waves were interpreted not
as 'real' waves but as probability waves, the intensity of which determines in
every point the probability for the absorption (or induced emission) of a light
quantum by an atom at this point. This idea led to the conclusion that the laws
of conservation of energy and momentum need not be true for the single event,
that they are only statistical laws and are true only in the statistical
average. This conclusion was not correct, however, and the connections between
the wave aspect and the particle aspect of radiation were still more
complicated.
But the paper of Bohr, Kramers and Slater revealed one essential feature of the
correct interpretation of quantum theory. This concept of the probability wave
was something entirely new in theoretical physics since Newton. Probability in
mathematics or in statistical mechanics means a statement about our degree of
knowledge of the actual situation. In throwing dice we do not know the fine
details of the motion of our hands which determine the fall of the dice and
therefore we say that the probability for throwing a special number is just one
in six. The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater, however, meant more than
that; it meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the
old concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something
standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a~~
strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and
reality. r Later when the mathematical framework of quantum theory was fixed,
Born took up this idea of the probability wave and gave a clear definition of
the mathematical quantity in the formalism. which was to be interpreted as the
probability wave. It X as not a three-dimensional wave like elastic or radio
waves, but a wave in the many-dimensional configuration space, and therefore a
rather abstract mathematical quantity.
Even at this time, in the summer of I926, it was not clear in every case how the
mathematical formalism should be used to describe a given experimental
situation. One knew how to describe the stationary states of an atom, but one
did not know how to describe a much simpler event - as for instance an electron
moving through a cloud chamber.
When Schrödinger in that summer had shown that his formalism of wave mechanics
was mathematically equivalent to quantum mechanics he tried for some time to
abandon the idea of quanta and 'quantum jumps' altogether and to replace the
electrons in the atoms simply by his three-dimensional matter waves. He was
inspired to this attempt by his result, that the energy levels of the hydrogen
atom in his theory seemed to be simply the eigenfrequencies of the stationary
matter waves. Therefore, he thought it was a mistake to call them energies: they
were just frequencies. But in the discussions which took place in the autumn of
I926 in Copenhagen between Bohr and Schrödinger and the Copenhagen group of
physicists it soon became apparent that such an interpretation would not even be
sufficient to explain Planck's formula of heat radiation.
During the months following these discussions an intensive study of all
questions concerning the interpretation of quantum theory in Copenhagen finally
led to a complete and, as many physicists believe, satisfactory clarification of
the situation. But it was not a solution which one could easily accept. I
remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at
night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went
alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again
the question: Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these
atomic experiments?
The final solution was approached in two different ways. The one was a turning
around of the question. Instead of asking: How can one in the known mathematical
scheme express a given experimental situation? the other question was put: Is it
true, perhaps, that only such experimental situations can arise in nature as can
be expressed in the mathematical formalism? The assumption that this was
actually true led to limitations in the use of those concepts that had been the
basis of classical physics since Newton. One could speak of the position and of
the velocity of an electron as in Newtonian mechanics and one could observe and
measure these quantities. But one could not fix both quantities simultaneously
with an arbitrarily high accuracy. Actually the product of these two
inaccuracies turned out to be not less than Planck's constant divided by the
mass of the particle. Similar relations could be formulated for other
experimental situations. They are usually called relations of uncertainty or
principle of indeterminacy. One had learned that the old concepts fit nature
only inaccurately.
lie other way of approach was Bohr's concept of complementarity. Schrödinger had
described the atom as a system not of a nucleus and electrons but of a nucleus
and matter waves. This picture of the matter waves certainly also contained an
element of truth. Bohr considered the two pictures - particle picture and wave
picture - as two complementary descriptions of the same reality. Any of these
descriptions can be only partially true, there must be limitations to the use of
the particle concept as well as of wave concept, else one could not avoid
contradictions. If one takes into account those limitations which can be
expressed by the uncertainty relations, the contradictions disappear.
In this way since the spring of I927 one has had a consistent interpretation of
quantum theory, which is frequently called the 'Copenhagen interpretation'. This
interpretation received its crucial test in the autumn of 1927 at the Solvay
conference in Brussels. Those experiments which had always led to the worst
paradoxes were again and again discussed in all details, especially by Einstein.
New ideal experiments were invented to trace any possible inconsistency of the
theory, but the theory was shown to be consistent and seemed to fit the
experiments as far as one could see.
The details of this Copenhagen interpretation will be the subject of the next
chapter. It should be emphasised at this point that it has taken more than a
quarter of a century to get from the first idea of the existence of energy
quanta to a real understanding of the quantum theoretical laws. This indicates
the great change that had to take place in the fundamental concepts concerning
reality before one could understand the new situation.
Further Reading:
Biography | Heisenberg on Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory |
Heisenberg on Philosophical Ideas Since Descartes
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org
The
Value of Psychotic Experience
By Alan Watts
I think most of you know from the announcement of this series of seminars
and workshops during the summer, they're entitled 'The Value of Psychotic
Experience.' And many people who are interested in an entirely new
approach to problems of what have hitherto been called mental health are
participating in these seminars and workshops, and doing something which
is extremely dangerous and in a way revolutionary.
For this reason: We are living in a world where deviant opinions about
religion are no longer dangerous, because no one takes religion seriously,
and therefore you can be like Bishop Pike and question the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity, the reality of the virgin birth, and the physical
ressurection of Jesus, and still remain a bishop in good standing. But
what you can't get away with today, or at least you have great difficulty
in getting away with is psychiatric heresy.
Because psychiatry is taken seriously, and indeed, I would like to draw a
parallel between today and the Middle Ages in the respect of this whole
question.
When we go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, we must remember
that the professor of theology at the University of Seville has the same
kind of social prestige and intellectual standing that today would be
enjoyed by the professor of pathology at Stanford Medical School. And you
must bear in mind that this theologan, like the professor of pathology
today, is a man of good will.
Intensely interested in human welfare. He didn't merely opine; that
professor of theology KNEW that anybody who had heretical religious views
would suffer everlasting agony of the most apalling kind. And some of you
should read the imaginative descriptions of the sufferings of Hell,
written not only in the Middle Ages, but in quite recent times by men of
intense intellectual acumen. And therefore out of real merciful
motivation, the Inquisitors thought that it was the best thing they could
do to torture heresy out of those who held it.
Worse still, heresy was infectious, and would contaminate other people and
put them in this immortal danger. And so with the best motivations
imaginable, the used the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron maiden, the leaded
cat-of-nine-tails, and finally the stake to get these people to come to
their senses, because nothing else seemed to be available.
Today, serious heresy, and rather peculiarly in the United States, is a
deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions as having a
kind of experience which is different from 'regular' experience. And as
Ronald Lang, who is going to participate in this series, has so well
pointed out, we are taught what experiences are permissable in the same
way we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behavior is
permissable and socially acceptable. And therefore, if a person has
so-called 'strange' experiences, and endeavors to communicate these
experiences--because naturally one talks about what one feels--and
endeavors to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked
at in a very odd way and asked 'are you feeling all right?' Because people
feel distinctly uncomfortable when the realize they are in the presence of
someone who is experiencing the world in a rather different way from
themselves.
They call in question as to whether this person is indeed human. They look
like a human being, but because the state of experience is so different,
you wonder whether they really are. And you get the kind of--the same kind
of queasy feeling inside as you would get if, for the sake of example, you
were to encounter a very beautiful girl, very formally dressed, and you
were introduced, and in order to shake hands, she removed her glove, and
you found in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would be spooky,
wouldn't it?
Or let's suppose that you were looking at a rose. And you looked down in
the middle where the petals are closed, and you suddenly saw them open
like lips, and the rose addressed you and said 'good morning.' You would
feel something uncanny was going on. And in rather the same way, in an
every day kind of circumstance, when you are sitting in a bar drinking,
and you find you have a drunk next to you. And he tells you,
'undistinguishable drunken ranting' and you sort of move your stool a
little ways away from this man, because he's become in some way what we
mean by nonhuman. Now, we understand the drunk; we know what's the matter
with him, and it'll wear off. But when quite unaccountably, a person gives
representation that he's suddenly got the feeling that he's living in
backwards time, or that everybody seems to be separated from him by a huge
sheet of glass. Or that he's suddenly seeing everything in unbelievably
detailed moving colors.
We say, 'well that's not normal. Therefore there must be something wrong
with you.' And the fact that we have such an enormous percentage of the
population of this country in mental institutions is a thing we may have
to look at from a very different point of view, not that there may be a
high incidence of mental sickness, but that there may be a high incidence
of intolerance of variations of consciousness.
Now in Arabic countries, where the Islamic religion prevails, a person
whom we would define as mentally deranged is regarded with a certain
respect. The village idiot is looked upon with reverence because it is
said his soul is not with his body, it is with Allah. And because his soul
is with Allah, you must respect this body and care for it, not as
something that is to be sort of swept away and put out of sight, but as
something of a reminder that a man can still be living on Earth while his
soul is in Heaven. Very diffent point of view. Also in India, there is a
certain difference in attitude to people who would be called nuts, because
there is a poem--an ancient poem of the Hindus-- which says 'sometimes
naked, sometimes mad, now's a scholar, now's a fool, thus they appear on
Earth as free men.'
But you see, we in our attitude to this sort of behavior, which is
essentially in its first inception harmless, these people are talking what
we regard to be nonsense. And to be experienced in nonsense. We feel
threatened by that, because we are not secure in ourselves. A very secure
person can adapt himself with amazing speed to different kinds of
communciation. In foreign countries, for example, where you don't speak
the language of the people you are staying with, if you don't feel ashamed
of this, you can set up an enormous degree of communication with other
people through gesture and even something most surprising, people can
communicate with each other by simply talking. You can get a lot across to
people by talking intelligent nonsense, by, as it were, imitating a
foreign language; speaking like it sounds.
You can communicate feeligns, emotions, like and dislike of this, that and
the other; very simply. But if you are rigid and are not willing to do
this type of playing, then you feel threatened by anybody who communicates
with you in a funny way. And so this rigidity sets up a kind of vicious
circle.
The minute, in other words, someone makes an unusual communciation to you
about an unusual state of consciousness, and you back off, the individual
wonders 'is there something wrong with me? I don't seem to be understood
by anyone.' Or he may wonder 'what's going on? Has everybody else suddenly
gone crazy?' And then if he feels that he gets frightened, and to the
degree that he gets more frightened, he gets more defensive, and
eventually land up with being catatonic, which is a person who simply
doesn't move. And so then what we do is we whiffle him off to an
institution, where he is captured by the inquisitors. This is a very
special priesthood. And they have all the special marks that priesthoods
have always had. They have a special vestment. Like the Catholic priest at
mass wears a *, the mental doctor, like every physician, wears a long
white coat, and may carry something that corresponds, shall we say, so a
stole, which is a stethescope around his neck. He will then, under his
authority, which is often in total defience of every conceivable civil
liberty, will incarcerate this incomprehensible person, and as Lang has
pointed out, he undergoes a ritual of dehumanization. And he's put away.
And because the hospitals are so crowded with people of this kind, he's
going to get very little attention. And it's very difficult to know, when
you get attention, how to work with it.
You get into this Kafka-esque situation which you get, say, in the state
of California, if you are sent to such an institute as Vacaville prison,
which is as you drive on the highway from San Francisco to Sacramento, you
will encounter Vacaville about halfway between.
You will see a great sign which will say 'California State Medical
Facility.' The state of California is famous for circumlocution. When you
go underneath a low bridge, instead of saying 'Low Bridge,' it says
'Impaired Vertical Clearance.' Or when you're going to cross a toll
bridge, instead of saying, plainly, 'Toll Bridge,' it says 'Entering
Vehicular Crossing.' And when it should be saying, plainly, 'Prison,' it
says either 'California State Medical Facility,' or 'California State
Correctional Facility,' as it does as Soledad. Now Vacaville is a place
where people get sent on what they call a one- to ten-year sentence. And
there is a supervising psychiatric medical sort of social service staff
there, who examine the inmates once in a while because they have such a
large number. It's a maximum security prison, much more ringed around with
defences than even San Quentin. I went there to lecture to the inmates
some time ago. They wanted someone to talk to them about meditation and
yoga, and one of the inmates took me aside--a very clean-cut all-American
boy. And he had been put in there probably for smoking pot; I'm not
absolutely sure in my memory what the offense was. He said 'You know, I am
very puzzled about this place. I really want to go straight and get out
and get a job and live like an ordinary person.' He said 'I think they
don't know how to go about it. I've just been refused release; I went up
before the committee; I talked to them. But I don't know what the rules of
the game are. And incidentally, the members of the committee don't
either.'
So we have these situation, you see, of confusion. So that when a person
goes into a mental hospital and feels first of all perhaps that he should
try to sort himself out and talk reasonably with the physician. There is
introduced into the communications system between them a fundamental
element of fear and mistrust. Because I could talk to any individual if I
were malicious and interpret every sane remark you make as something
deeply sinister; that would simply exhibit my own paranoia. And the
psychiatrist can very easily get paranoid, because the system he is asked
to represent, officially is paranoid. I talked with a psychiatrist in
England just a few weeks ago. One of the most charming women I've come
across, an older woman, very intelligent, quite beautiful, very
reasonable. And she was discussing with me the problem of the LSD
psychosis. I asked her what sort of treatments they were using, and all
sorts of questions about that, and she appeared at first to be a little on
the defensive about it. We got onto the subject of the experience of what
is officially called 'depersonalization,' where you feel that you and your
experience--your sensory experience--that is to say all that you do
experience: the people, the things, the animals, the buildings around
you--that it's all one. I said 'do you call this a hallucination? After
all,' I said, 'it fits the facts of science, of biophysics, of ecology, of
biology, and much better than our ordinary normal experience fits it.' She
said 'that's not my problem.' She said 'that may be true, but I am
employed by a society which feels that it ought to maintain a certain
average kind of normal experience, and my job is to restore people to what
society considers normal consciousness. I have no alternative but to leave
it at that.'
So, then. When someone is introduced into this situation, and it's very
difficult to get attention, you feel terrified. The mental hospital, often
in its very architecture, suggests some of the great visions of madness,
of-- You know that feeling of-- The corridors of the mind. If you got lost
in a maze and you couldn't get back. You're not quite sure who you are, or
whether your father and mother are your real father and mother, or whether
in the next ten minutes you're still going to remember how to speak
English. You feel very lost. And the mental hospital in its architecture
and everything represents that situation.
Endless corridors, all the same.
Which one are you in? Where are you? Will you ever get out?
And it goes on monotonously, day after day after day after day after day.
And someone who talks to you occasionally doesn't have a straight look in
his eye. He doesn't see you as quite human. He looks at you as if you're
weird. What are you to do?
The best thing to do is get violent, if you really want to get out. Well
then they say that's proof that you're crazy. And then as you get more
violent, they put you off by yourself, and the only alternative you have,
the only way of expressing yourself is to throw shit at the walls. Then
they say, 'well, that's conclusive. The person isn't human.'
Well, the question has been raised a great deal in the last few days on
the television, as to whether this is a sick society. And I have listened
to a perfectly beautiful pschoanalyst with a thick German accent. Oh,
marvelous things! 'Eet ees quite obvious dat society is quite hopeless,
you zee.'
And I have listened to four red-blooded Americans saying 'most people in
this society are good people, and it's a GOOD society, but we have a very
sick minority.'
Now, what I want to do in--certainly this first part of the seminar--is to
call in question, very fundamentally, all of our basic ideas about what is
sickness, what is health, what is sanity, what is insanity. Because I
think we have to begin from this position of humility; that we really
don't know. It's reported that shortly before he died, Robert Oppenheimer,
looking at the picture of technology, especially nuclear technology, said
'I'm afraid it's perfectly obvious that the world is going to hell.' It's
going to destroy itself, it's on collision course. The only way in which
it might not go to hell is that we do not try to prevent it from doing so.
Think that one over.
Because it can well be argued that the major troublemakers in the world
today are those people with good intentions. Like the professor of
theology, University of Seville, professor of psychiatry at wherever you
will. The idea that we know who is sick, who is wrong.
Now, we are living in a political situation right now where a most
fantastic thing is occuring. Everybody knows what they're against; nobody
knows what they're for. Because nobody is thinking in terms anymore of
what would be a great style of life.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination.
There's no earthly reason; there's no physical, technical reason for there
being any poverty at all anywhere.
But you see, there are a great many people accumulating what they think is
vast wealth, but it's only money. They don't know how to use it, they
don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
I'm announcing not the date, but the intention of conducting a seminar for
extremely rich people entitled 'Are You Rich and Miserable?' because you
very probably are. Some aren't, but most are. Now the thing is that we are
living in this situation where everybody knows what they're against, even
if they say 'I'm against the war in Vietnam. I am against discrimination
against colored people, or against any different race than the discolored
race,' and so on.
Yeah, so what? But it's not enough to feel like that; that's nothing. You
must have some completely concrete vision of what you would like, and
therefore I'm making a serious proposition that everybody who goes into
college should as an entrance examination have the task of writing an
essay on his idea of heaven, in which he is asked to be absolutely
specific. He is not allowed, for example, to say 'I would like to have a
very beautiful girl to live with.' What do you mean by a beautiful girl?
Exactly how, and in what way? Specifically. You know, down to the last
wiggle of the hips, and down to every kind of expression of character and
socialbility and her interests and all. Be specific! And about everything
like that. 'I would like a beautiful house to live in.' Just what exactly
do you mean by a beautiful house?
Well you've suddenly got to study architecture. You see, and finally, this
preliminary essay on 'My Idea of Heaven' turns into his doctoral
dissertation.
So in a situation where we all know what we're against, and we don't know
what we're for, then we know WHO we're against. We're defining all sorts
of people as nonhuman. We say they're totally irrational. They're totally
stupid.
People will say, 'oh, those niggers, they're completely uneducated,
they'll never learn a thing, there's nothing you can do about it, they're
hopeless, get rid of them.' The Birchers are saying the same sort of
thing. Other people, the liberals are saying the same thing about the
Birchers. 'They're stupid, get rid of them.' The only result, then, the
only thing anybody can think of in this sort of situation is 'get your
gun.' And this sets up a vicious circle, because everybody else gets his
gun. And the point from which we have to begin, then, is that we don't
know who is healthy and who is sick.
Who is right and who is wrong.
And furthermore, we have to start, I think, from the assumption that
because we don't know, there isn't anything we can do about it.
There's a Turkish proverb that I like to quote: 'He who sleeps on the
floor cannot fall out of bed.' Therefore, we should make it a beginning--a
basic assumption about life that even supposing you could improve society,
and you could improve yourself, you were never sure that the direction you
moved it in would be an improvement.
A Chinese story, kind of a Taoistic story about a farmer. One day, his
horse ran away, and all the neighbors gathered in the evening and said
'that's too bad.' He said 'maybe.' Next day, the horse came back and
brought with it seven wild horses. 'Wow!' they said, 'Aren't you lucky!'
He said 'maybe.' He next day, his son grappled with one of these wild
horses and tried to break it in, and he got thrown and broke his leg. And
all the neighbors said 'oh, that's too bad that your son broke his leg.'
He said, 'maybe.' The next day, the conscription officers came around,
gathering young men for the army, and they rejected his son because he had
a broken leg. And the visitors all came around and said 'Isn't that great!
Your son got out.' He said, 'maybe.'
You see, you never really know in which direction progress lies. And this
is today a fantastic problem for geneticists.
They genetecists, you know, because they think they are within some degree
of controlling the DNA and RNA code, believe that it is really possible
perhaps to breed the kind of human beings that we ought to have. And they
say 'hooray!' But they think one moment and they think 'ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,
but what kind of human being?' So they're very worried. And just a little
while ago, a national committee of graduate students and geneticists had a
meeting at the University of California and the asked a group of
psychologists, theologans and philosophers to come and reason with them
about this and give them some insight. And I was included. That means that
they are REALLY desperate. So I said 'I'll tell you what, the only thing
you can do is to be quite sure that you keep a vast variety of different
kinds of human beings, because you never know what's going to happen next.
And therefore we need an enormous, shall I say, varied battery of
different kinds of human intelligence and resources and abilities.
So that there will always be some kind of person available for any
emergency that might turn up. So you see, there's a total fallacy in the
idea of preaching to people. This is why I abandoned the ministries, I've
often said, not because the church didn't practice what it preached, but
because it preached. Because you cannot tell people what sort of pattern
of life they ought to have, because if they followed your advice, you
might have a breed of monsters. Look at it from the point of view that the
human race is a breed of monsters.
I was thinking about it this afternoon, driving down from Monterey to
here, and looking at the freeways, and all these little cars going along
them, and I was wondering if I considered that the planet was a physical
body like my own, whether I might not feel that this was some sort of an
invasion of weird bacteria that were eating me up. Whether it may be that
the birds and the bees and the flowers--animals in general--were a kind of
healthy bacteria. You know, bees and birds sort of wander about, generally
mix in with the forest and the fields and carry on a rather disorganized
but very interesting pattern of life, whereas human beings cut straight
lines across everything. Railways. They cover themselves with junk. A bird
may have a little nest, but it doesn't have to surround itself with
automobiles and books and buildings and phonograph records and
universities and clutter up the whole landscape with a lot of bric-
a-brac. Human beings pride themselves on this. 'You see, this is culture!'
This is a great achievement. Build a building, you know? It's all you can
get money for. You can't get money for professors, but you can get them
for new buildings. So we cover the Earth with clutter. And so the Earth
might feel as if we might feel if suddenly we got a disease which instead
of leaving us soft-skinned, covered us with crystalline scabs, and this
would be proliferating all over the place--a pox!
Are we a pox on the planet?
Don't be too sure that we're not.
Consider simply this: There is a good argument--keep in mind I'm saying
these things to provoke you, to make you a little insane by being in doubt
of all the assumptions which you think are firmly true. It is quite
possible, you see, that the whole enterprise of man to control events on
the Earth by his conscious intelligence, by his language, by his
mathematics, and by his science is a disaster. We say look at his
successes, look how much disease we have cured. Look how much hunger has
been abolished. Look how we have raised the standard of living. Yeah. But
in how long a time?
Well, even if we say this started with the dawn of known history, it's a
tiny little fragment of time, as compared with the time in which the human
species has existed. And if it's the Industrial Revolution, it narrows
down to the teenieest, weeniest little bit of time. How do we know this is
progress? How do we know that this is a success?
It may be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It may be. But the truth
is, we don't know. Of course, it could be possible, that every star in the
heavens was once a planet, and that planet developed intelligent life,
which in due course discovered the secrets of atomic energy, blew itself
up into a chain reaction, and as it exploded throughout various masses
which began in due course to spin around it, became planets, and after a
while developed intelligent life.
After millions of years, as the central star started to cool off, they
blew themselves up in turn, and that's the way the thing goes on. That's
of course the theory of the Hindus. Not literally, but they do have the
theory, you see, that life, every manifestation of the universe, begins in
a glorious way, and then it deteriorates. But then everything does.
Isn't everything always falling apart and getting older and fading out?
Why shouldn't various species, why shouldn't various planets, why
shouldn't various universes be going through the same course?
You see, that's a totally upside-down view in respect to our common sense.
We think everything ought to be growing and improving and getting better
and better and better and better and better and better. Look at it the
other way around, it might be quite different. Then there's another
thought. We know that the truth, the way theing are is an interaction, or
better, transaction between the physical world and our sense organs, and
that therefore, what we know as existence is a relationship. It is the way
certain what we will call for the moment electrical vibrations make
impression upon sense organs of a certain structure. Now that's a limited
way of talking about it, but it will do for the moment.
Therefore, according to the structure of the sense organs, the vibrations
will appear of be manifested in different ways. In other words, I can move
my finger like this, and if it happens to pluck the string of a violin, it
will go 'plunk!' In which case my finger and its motion will be manifested
as 'plunk!' But if it should so happen that I should strike the string of
a bass fiddle, it will go, 'bunggggg' and so the finger will be 'bunggggg'
But if the same motion should strike the skin of a drum, 'thunk,' so the
finger will be 'thunk,' now what is that motion truly? It's whatever it
interacts with. If it goes across somebody elses skin, it'll be something
I can't make a noise about. It'd be a feeling. If it does it in front of
an eye, it will be a motion.
So depending on the structure of shall we say for the moment the receptor
organs, so will the reality be. Now behind the receptor organs--the senses
are not at all simple--behind the senses they are inseperable from an
extraordinarily complex neurological structure. And not only that, but a
system of cultural standards as to what events are to be noticed and what
events are to be ignored. What is important for a certain reason such as
survival, and what is unimportant, and therefore we further modify the
selectivity of the sense organs and of the nervous system as a whole with
a selective system of what is culturally accepted as real or unreal,
important or unimportant.
So we end up you see, with the possibility that so complex a selective
system may have a great many variations, and that people that we call
crazy have a different system of evaluation. They may have a difference of
neural structure, as would obviously be the case if there were lesions
caused by syphillis, or by brain tumors. But what about something not
quite at that level, but at the level of the selectivities they imply
which would correspond to what I call social conditioning. Now we know the
proverb that genius is to madness 'cross the line. And how do we know
whether a certain modification in the structure of the whole sensory
system is a sickness or whether it is a growning edge--some kind of
improvement in the human being. Well we have certain very, very rough
standards which we apply to this, but we can never be quite sure because
what we call sanity is mob rule.
Sanity is simply the vote or organisms that recognize themselves to be
humans and they get together and say 'Well, the way we see it is the way
it is.'
And you will remember in Kipling's story in the 'Jungle Book' called
'Cause Hunting' how the monkeys, the bandiloot are laughed at because
every once in a while they get together in a meeting and shout 'We all say
so, so it must be true!'
But herein you see lie the deepest political problems. How is the majority
to tolerate, to absorb, to evaluate a minority? It's an academic problem.
We have standards as to who are sound scholars, reliable scientists--we
give them a PhD. And they all get together and uphold the standards. But
then they suddenly realize that they're getting a little narrow and that
things aren't going on, and suddenly somebody says one day 'Old so-and-so,
who we always thought was quite mad and very, very unorthodox has suddenly
come up with an idea that we've all got to think about.' So one would say
that every university faculty has to include in its membership at least
five percent screwballs.
Every culture has to tolerate within its domain a lot of weird people. Now
there's no possibility that everybody in the United States is going to be
a hippie. But the fact that a large number of young people are hippies
should be a matter of congratulations, even if you don't want to live that
way yourself. Not to mention the various racial variations that we have
among us: negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and so forth.
All this is exceedingly important, because as I said to the geneticists,
this preserves variety. And a culture which is insecure in itself--I'm
getting back to a sort of starting point--cannot tolerate this.
Now in England as I remember it, they were much more secure. When I was a
boy, 15 years old, in a very orthodox Church of England school, I
announced that I was a Buddhist. Nobody turned a hair. Here, if somebody
announces that he's something strange, they have to go before the
principal, and there's a big problem, and the FBI is brought in, and this,
that, and the other. But they said 'Jolly wot, the man's a buhddist!' And
positively encouraged me in my deviant interest, and gave me the first
prize in the divinity class. Now exactly the same kind of relaxed attitude
is necessary here.
Let's ask a few questions that don't need answers. Is the American family
such a drag that a few kids living in free-love communes are a fundamental
threat to it and will pervert all our nice boys and girls to live that
way? Are American universities so boring that a few students who drop out
and form their own univerisities are a threat to the total system and will
pervert all the other nice children in there? Are a few kids going around
in elegant beards and long hair going to turn all our boys into weirdos?
Say, I had a funny experience. When I was in England I attended services
at Westminster Abbey. I took my wife there because I really wanted to her
to see this thing, because it's the heart and soul of British
establishment. The dean of Westminster is like the Dali Lama almost. They
had this very elegant victorian service--beautiful vestments, choir and
everything--and as they were coming out in procession, the choir came
first, which were little boys with proper haircuts and surplices.?A and
red caps on, there were a number of older boys wearing surplices--the
special kind of surplice that is worn by its color of a British public
school. Y'know, the public schools are not public schools, they're very
private schools, very exclusive schools, and the school of Westminster is
one of the top, like Eaton or Harrow. Suddenly, these boys in surplices
turn up, with these enormous Beatles haircuts whishing all over the place.
I couldn't believe my eyes, because I used to be a King's Scholar, and in
our day, we were very proper and all wore mortarboards over short hair.
And then behind these surpliced boys, there were the commoners of the
school, who were not King's Scholars and therefore didn't wear surplices,
but wore striped black pants, black coats, wing collars and black ties.
And we always used to walk in procession as we came out, like this, but
here were these boys with a similar hairdo coming out. .apparent visual
joke here that I guess you'd have to be there to get, but very funny, it
would seemA My god, what's going on? This is Westminster Abbey! But the
dean of Westminster doesn't turn a hair, he takes it all in stride. He's
perfectly secure. He knows he is who he is. He knows it's ordained by
Jesus Christ and everything else and it's all right, and if you want to
come in and do something different, it's all right. And that is the
attitude we have to have in regard to everything deviant, psychotic, and
weird.
Because we are not sure what's right, who's sane, which end is up. In a
relativistic universe, you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And
you know what swimming is. It's a kind of relaxed attitude to the water,
in which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a
certain giving to it, and it's just the same with relationships to people
all around.
ALAN WATTS: THE VALUE OF PSYCHOTIC EXPERIENCE, PART 2
Zen has attracted attention over the years, since 1927, when Dr. Daisetz
Suzuki first published his essays in Zen Buddhism, and he had a very odd
fascination with Westerners. To begin with, very many intelligent Western
people were becoming--had already become, dissatisfied with the standard
brands of their own religions, and this dissatisfaction had of course
begun to take place quite seriously towards the close of the 19th century,
and at that time, we began to be exposed to Oriental philosophy or
religion, whatever you want to call it, because the great scholars like
Maxmilla, ¨Riese DavidsÙ and so on were translating the texts of Buddhism
and Hinduism. And already in 1848, the Jesuit had translated the Tao Te
Ching, the Taoist texts from China into French, and translations into
English then became available
What happened was rather curious, because we were receiving Oriental
tradition on a far higher level of sophistication than we were receiving
the Christian or the Jewish traditions. The average person was exposed to
an extremely low level of Christianity, and therefore immediately compared
this to the highest level of Hinduism and Buddhism, much to the detriment
of the former, because you could no go into your parish church, even if
you lived in a very good neighborhood, even in a university neighborhood
and find Meister Eckhart for sale on the entrance table. Nor even would
you find some Thomas Aquinas. You found wretched little tracts. And so the
comparison was overwheming. It wasn't really fair for the Christian
tradition, but that's what happened. Then something else happened, which
was that in the year 1875, a strange Russian woman by the name of H.P.
Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, whose doctrines and literature
were a fantastic hodgepodge of the Western occult tradition, a great deal
of Hindu and Buddhist lore, a smattering of Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese
Buddhism, but it all was very romantic, and presuppose that the adepts of
Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and so forth were very high order initiates.
Supermen.
The masters. And they had their secret lodges in the vastness of the
Himalayas, and even such places as the Andes, and they were rather
inaccessable, because they were in possession of the most dangerous
secrets of occult power. But they every now and then felt safe to send an
emissary out into the world to teach the ancient doctrine of liberation to
mankind.
And so the West, through this, got an extremely glamorous impression of
what Oriental wisdom might be. And I remember the media in which I found
myself involved in England when Dr. Suzuki first came around was
essentially theosophical in its oreintation. They expected Dr Suzuki to be
a master in that sense, in that theosophical sense, or if not quite that,
then at least in touch with those who were. And the whole idea of the Zen
master, the way the whole word 'master' got attached to a teacher of Zen
carried with it this theosophical flavor, and also a certain flavor which
the Theosophical Society picked up from India where the great guru is
somebody enormously revered. People would travel for hundreds of miles
just to look at him, to have what is called Tao-Shan¨, or 'view' of
someone like Shri Arabindo¨ or Shri Ramana Maharshi or the current
Maharshi, or it would be Shri Rama Krishna or Amandani, who's a lady guru,
and there's always the feeling that these people have tremendous powers.
And so this is what was expected by many people from Zen masters.
But the interesting thing about Zen masters is they're not like that.
They're very human. And they wouldn't deign to perform a miracle. I got to
know about Zen masters through my first wife, because when whe was an
adolescent about 14 years old, she went to Japan, and they lived close to
the great monastary of Nonzengi where the master in charge was a very
brilliant master by the name of Nonshinkan¨. He was an old man, and he
was-- The man who is appointed to be the roshi or the teacher of Nonzengi
of Kyoto was always considered to be just about tops of the whole bunch.
We've had the present master, Shibayama Roshi visiting the United States
recently. And he used to sit around with her and he'd get a catalog of all
the famous sumo wrestlers, who were enormously fat. They have to eat, eat,
eat, eat, eat, eat rice, because the whole art depends on their weight.
But they're very handsome.
And he used to thumb them through sitting next to this little girl and
pick out husbands for her. And then he would have nose-picking contests
with her. Y'know, they weren't exactly real, but they'd make sort of like
picking their noses and flicking the snots at each other. So you mustn't
expect the Zen master to be like the Pope. They can come on very dignified
when necessary, but there's always something about them which is
fundamentally lacking in seriousness. Even though they may be well-endowed
with sincerety. They're two quite different qualities. They are
extraordinarily interesting people, as are their students, in the context
of Japanese culture.
Japanese culture is terribly uptight, because the Japanese are very
emotional people, underneath. Tremendously passionate. But they have to
hold that in, because they live in a crowded country, and space is the
most valuable thing in Japan, especially living space, because 80% of the
territory is uninhabitable. It's forested mountains, and you can't grow
anything there, you can't make much of a city. So they're all crowded into
20% of the country. And so this feeling of being pressed in by other
people is-- They try to handle it by exquisite politeness, and by orderly
behavior by vary strong convention. But this makes the average Japanese
man and woman kind of nervous. When a Japanese giggles, it's a sign not of
being amused, but of being embarrassed. And you'll find all sorts of funny
attitudes, such as people putting their hands over their mouths when
they're eating, or to conceal a giggle. And they're tremendously hung up
on social indebtedness, whether it's a debt to the emperor, or whether
it's a debt to your fathers and mothers, or whether it's a debt to someone
in the family, or whether it's a debt to friends whom you visited and they
entertained you. Well, you always take gifts with you when you go, but
then that still embarrasses your friends to whom you take the gifts,
because they have to consider the next time they go to visit you, they've
got to take gifts of the same value. And you wouldn't believe what goes
on.
So actually, what Zen is in Japan is a release from Japanese culture. It
is gettign rid of the hang-ups, but doing it in such a way as not to
embarrass the rest of society. So the Zen monks come on as if they're
pretty stiff; when they walk out in the street, they almost look like
soldiers. When they walk, they stride, they don't shuffle, like other
Japanese do. They don't giggle, ever. They have no need to. Because the
process of their discipline has liberated them from the social
conventions. Only they are very tactful and don't rush out like, you know,
a bunch of hippies or something and say 'Look, we're liberated!' They
pretend they're the very pillars of society.
So they follow a tradition which is very ancient, which is that in every
society, there is an inner group who doesn't believe in the fairy stories
they've been told. He sees through. To whom everything becomes completely
transparent. You see what games people are playing. And you don't despise
them for that. You see, they're involved in that because of their whole
conditioning. But you see through all those games.
The game--the me game--that everybody is playing is of course the survival
game.
And we think-- We've got our minds rigged about this in such a way that we
live in constant dread of sickness or of death or of loss of property or
status. Well, so what? Supposing you do.
Everybody's going to die someday. It's a little harder to take when you're
20 than when you're 50, but if you are entirely hung up on the idea that
YOU are this particular expression of the universe and that only, you
haven't been properly educated.
If you were awake, you would understand that you were the whole universe,
pretending, projecting itself at a point called here and now, in the form
of the human organism. And you would understand that very clearly, not
just as an idea, but as an actual vivid sensation, just the same way you
know you're sitting in this room.
And so the object of Zen, as of other ways of liberation--Taoism,
Hinduism; you'll find it even in Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox
Church; Islam--the object of these ways of liberation is to bring you to a
vivid, perfectly clear, I would say even sensuous realization of your true
identity as a temporary coming on and going off, coming on and going off,
or vibration as waves, of what there is, and always is, of the famous E
which equals MC squared. And you are that. You will be that, and always
will be that--accept that.
This whatever it is-- which, then no which, then which--it doesn't operate
in time. Time is a more or less human illusion. We will discover this to
be so in our experiments. You will discover that there is only now, and
there never was anything but now and never will be anything but now, and
now is eternity.
Now Zen is a little bit unlike the rest of Hinduism and Buddhism in that
it's summed up in these four principles: It's a special transmission of
the Buddhist enlightenment outside the scriptures. It does not depend on
words or letters. It points directly to your own mind-heart and attains
therefore Buddhahood directly. Buddhahood means the state of being
awakened to the real nature of things. But you see, what IS the real
nature of things? It obviously cannot be described. Just as if I were to
ask what is the true position of the stars in the big dipper.
Well, it depends from where you're looking. From one point in space, they
would be completely different in position from another. So there is no
true position of those stars. So in the same way, you cannot therefore
describe their true position or their true nature. And yet on the other
hand, when you look at them, and really don't try to figure it out, you
see them as they are, and they are as they are from every point of view,
wherever you look at them.
So there is no way of describing or putting you finger on what the
Buddhists call reality or in Sanscrit, tathata, which means 'suchness' or
'thatness,' or sunyata, which means 'voidness,' in the sense that all
conceptions of the world when absolutised are void. It doesn't mean that
the world is, in our Western sense, nothing. It means that it's no thing.
And a thing--as I think I explained last night--is a unit of thought. A
think.
So reality isn't a think. We cannot say what it is, but we can experience
it. And that is of course the project of Zen.
Now, it does it by direct pointing. And this is what exciting people about
Dr Suzuki's work when he first let people know about Zen in the Western
world. It seemed to consist of an enormous assemblage of weird anecdotes.
That these people instead of explaining had kind of a joke system, or kind
of a riddle system. the basic secret of the Buddha system is simply this,
and it's explained by a great Chinese Zen master, whose name was Hui-neng,
who died in the year 713 AD. And he explained it in his sutra. He said,
'If anybody asks you about secular matters, answer them in terms of
metaphysical matters. But if they ask you about things phusical, answer
them in terms of things worldly.' So if you ask a Zen master what is the
fundamental teaching of the Buddha, he answers immediately, 'Have you had
breakfast?' 'Yes.' 'If so, go and wash your bowl.' Or such a thing as
'Since I came to you master, you have never given me any instruction.'
'How can you say that I've never given you any instruction? When you
brought me tea, didn't I drink it? When you brought me rice, didn't I eat
it? When you saluted me, didn't I return the salutation? How can you say
that I haven't instructed you?' And the student said, 'Master, I don't
understand.' And he said, 'If you want to understand, see into it
directly, but when you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.'
They have also in Zen monastaries a funny thing. It's a chin rest. If you
spend a long time meditating, it's sometimes convenient to have something
to rest your chin on, and it's called a Zen- bon¨. And so once a student
asked the teacher, 'Why did Bodidharma--' who is supposed to have brought
Zen, you know from India to China '--why did Bodidharma come to China?'
And the master said 'Give me that Zen-bon.' And the student passed it to
him and the master hit him with it.
A contrary kind of story. The master and one of his students were working,
I think pruning trees. And suddenly the student said to the master, 'Will
you let me have the knife?' And he handed it to him blade-first. He said
'Please let me have the other end.' And the master said 'What would you do
with the other end?' There was a group walking through the forest, and
suddenly the master picked up a branch and handed it to one of his
disciples and said 'Tell me, what is it?' Y'know, the master was still
holding it. He said 'Tell me, what is it?' The disciple hesitated, and the
master hit him with it. He passed it to another desciple. 'What is it?'
The disciple said 'Let me have it so I can tell you.' So the master threw
the branch at this other disciple, and he caught it and hit the master.
I was once talking with a Zen master, and in an idle sort of way we were
discussing these stories, and he said, 'You know, I've often wondered,
when water goes down a drain, does it go clockwise or anticlockwise?'
'Well, I said, it might do either.'
He said 'NO! It goes this way!' -apparently something visual here,. So
then he said 'Which came first, egg or hen?' So I said, -clucks like hen,.
He said 'Yes, that's right.'
Now all these Zen jokes are much simpler in their meaning than you would
ever imagine. They are so devestatingly simple that you don't see them.
Everybody looks for something complicated. When I was once visited by a
Chinese Zen man, I had my little daughter with me, and he said to her,
'You know, once upon a time, there was a man who kept a very small goose
in a bottle. A gosling. And it began to grow larger and larger until he
couldn't get it out of the bottle.
Now, he didn't want to break the bottle, and he didn't want to hurt the
goose, so what should he do?' And she said immediately, 'Just break the
bottle.' He turned to me and he said 'You see, they always get it when
they're under seven.'
So there's that side of Zen, and that side of Zen we would call,
essentially, in technical language, sanzen. That means, really, to study
Zen in the form of an interchange with the teacher. Sanzen in the
monastaries these days is very formal. But these are all stories from Tan
and Sung dynasty China, where the relationship of student and teacher was
more informal than it has now become. The other side of Zen is za-zen, or
the practice of meditation. And that involves-- You can actually practice
za-zen in four ways, corresponding to what the Buddhists call the four
dignitaries of man: walking, standing, sitting, and lying. Only sitting is
the one most used. But you should not imagine that Zen mediation requires
absolutely that it be done sitting. People get rather hung up on that, and
I get annoyed with people who come back from Japan having studied Zen and
brag about how long they sat and how much their legs hurt.
But za-zen is very fundamental to Zen, in one form or another. And it is
the art of letting your mind become still. That doesn't mean that it
becomes blank. That doesn't mean that you have no what we would call
sensory input. It means simply that you learn how to breath properly.
That's very important. And that you stop talking to yourself.
The interminable chatter inside your skull comes to rest. So what happens
is this-- I should add that there are various schools of Zen, with
different methods and different approaches, and my approach to it is again
somewhat different from other peoples, but buddhas have always have this
kind of elasticity.
But what normally happens is this: You have some difficulty in being
accepeted by a teacher, because Buddhism is not on a missionary basis.
They don't send out ads and invitations saying 'Come to our jolly church,'
you know. They wouldn't dream of doing that. Because it's up to you to
seek it out. They're never going to shove it down your throat. So it is
difficult to get into a Zen school. It isn't really a monastary as we have
monastaries, where the monks take life vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience. It's more like a theological seminary, and the monk, or
seminarist, as he might more accurately be called, stays there for a
number of years, until he feels he's got the thing that he went for.
The teacher, the master, is usually unmarried, but that doesn't prevent
him from having girlfriends. They are not uptight about sex in Zen, as
they are in other forms of Buddhism. They're very-- The whole atmosphere
of the monastary is very fascinating. Everybody is sort of alive. They
don't dither around. They're all working. But they're very open. In some
kinds of Buddhism, they have conniptions if you try to photograph
something. 'This is too sacred to be photographed,' sort of attitude. In
Zen, they say 'Help yourself! Photograph! Anything! Go on, take picture!'
So, completely open.
So then, they have these sesshins. You must distinguish between 'session,'
English, and 'sesshin,' Japanese. 'Sesshin' means a long, long period of
meditation practice, over say, a whole week. But especially early in the
morning, and at certain times of day, they all meet and they sit
cross-legged on their mats in meditation. In one set, they meditate on
what is called a koan, and that means a 'case,' in the sense of a case in
law establishing a precedent. And it's one of these stories. When the
great master Joshu¨, who lived in the Tung dynasty, was asked, 'Does a dog
have buddha nature?' he replied 'mu,' which means no. Everybody knows that
dogs have buddha nature. So why did the great master say 'mu'? That's a
koan. Or Hakuin invented a koan as a proverb in Chinese: One hand cannot
make a clap. So the koan is 'What is the sound of one hand?' Of course,
it's differently said in Japanese than it is in English.
But, you see, it sounds like a very, very complicated problem, and so
these students take this problem back for meditation, and they-- First of
all, the average person would start trying to arrive at an intellectual
answer. And if he takes that back to the teacher, the teacher simply
rejects it out of hand, time after time after time.
I had a friend who had this koan, and he was an American. And one day he
was going to the teacher for sanzen, and he saw a bullfrog. They have many
bullfrogs in Japan, about so big, sitting in the garden, and they're very
tame. So he swooped up this bullfrog and dropped it in the sleeve of his
kimono. And when he got to the master, he produced the bullfrog as the
answer to the koan. The master shook his head and said 'Uh-uh, too
intellectual.' So people get desperate about these things, and they go to
all sorts of lengths to try and answer them, because they don't realize
how simple the answer is. That's what's always overlooked. If you were to
answer that koan in English, it gives it to you as it's stated. It says
'WHAT is the sound of one hand?' .Watts finds this very funny, but nobody
else does, It's very difficult for people to become that simple. And you
can become that simple only through meditation where you stop all the
words and you see all the things perfectly directly. And so accomplished
Zen people are very, very direct. Their life is completely simplified,
because they know perfectly well--and if you look, and see youself--that
there is only this present moment. No past. No future.
So what's your problem? You know, you could ask this of anyone. Well, you
could say 'I've got all sorts of problems and responsibilites' and so on.
All right. Don't other people have some share in this? You see, we are
always being spiritually conceited in thinking we have to take care of
everybody else, and that can sometimes do people a peculiar disservice,
because they get into the idea that everybody should take care of them.
And so we go around ingratiating ourselves by making all sorts of promises
about which we feel enthusiastic at the time, but the enthusiasm wears off
and then we don't keep them and then people get annoyed. And we go about
telling people how much we like them when we don't. And all sorts of
things of that kind by not being direct, you see. This is the whole idea
of Zen, is directness. By not being direct, we create a great deal of
trouble.
However, the primary concern of Zen is not so much with interpersonal
relations, as it is with man's relation with nature. In view of life and
death, where are you? They have an incscription that hangs up in Zen
monastaries, which says 'Birth and death is a serious event. Time waits
for no one.' Which is sort of equivalent to the Christian 'Work out your
salvation with diligence.' Or with fear and trembling.
So it begins in a clarification of our relationship with existence. With
being. And therefore it lies in a more, I would say, primary or
kindergarden level than the encounter group, which is concerned with
personal relationships. But I don't think you can set up harmonious
personal relationships until you've got with yourself. Until you've got
with the sky, the trees, and the rocks, and the water, and the fire. Then
you're fundamental. You're really alive. From that position, you can
relate much better to other people, because you don't come on as a kind of
'poor little me, who's in this universe on probation and doesn't really
belong' attitude. And most of us do that, terribly apologetic for our
existence. Just because we're aplogetic, some people are insufferably
proud, because they feel they have to compensate for this inferior status
in the universe by overdoing it with boastfulness and with agression
towards others. But if you know that-- Well, when Dogen came back from
China--he lived around 1200 AD, and studied Zen there and founded a great
monastary--they asked him 'What did you learn in China?' He said, 'I
learned that the eyes are horizontal, and the nose is perpendicular.' Now
in all these things, don't search for a deep symbolism. Some decrepit
modern Chinese Zen will look for--will give you a symbolic understanding
of all these sayings. But they're NOT symbolic; they're absolutely direct.
So when somebody says, you see, that the fundamental principle of Buddhism
is a cyprus tree in the garden, you are not to understand this this is
some pantheistic doctrine in which the cyprus tree is a manifestation of
the godhead. Let me illustrate the point further, because I can't
illustrate it intellectually. It's a little bit of a complicated story,
but I think you can follow it.
There is a sect of Buddhism in Japan called Jodo-shinshu .Sukhavati?,,
which means the true teaching about the pure land. And they have a method
of meditation in which they call upon the name of a transcendental buddha
called Amida. So they say this formula, 'Namu Amida Butsu.' Namu means
like 'hail,' only it means, in other cultures and other languages than
ours, instead of saying 'hail,' they say 'name,' 'nama.' So 'Namu Amida
Bustu' means 'Hail Amitabha buddha,' or 'Amida' is the Japanese. That
formula is called 'Nambutsu,' or 'Having the buddha in mind.' There was a
priest of this sect that went to study with a Zen master, and had made
good progress, and the master told him to write a poem expressing his
understanding.
So he wrote the following poem: When nambutsu is said, There is neither
oneself nor Buddha; Na-mu- a-mi-da-bu-tsu-- Only the sound is heard. And
the Zen master scratched his head awhile, because he wasn't quite
satisfied with it, so the student submitted another poem which did satisfy
the master, and it went like this: When the nambutsu is said, There is
neither oneself nor Buddha; Na-ma-a-mi-da-bu-tsu, Na-ma-a-mi-da-bu-tsu.
The master was satisfied, but in my opinion it had one line too many.
So you see that the Zen practice involves using words to get beyond words,
where we might use words simply for their sound. Let's suppose you say the
word 'yes.' Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You come to think after a
while 'Isn't that a funny kind of noise to make?' And we are delivered
from the hypnotic effect of words by this particular use of words. We
learn they're only words after all, but we hypnotize people by using
words.
And children, for instance, have no antibodies against words, so they get
absolutely frantic, you know. 'Jeannie called me a sissy!' So what? But
children get absolutely desperate about it because we put this power of
words upon them, these incantations. These are spells, you see. All
magicians embroil people in spells and incantations, because they use
words to beguil. And so then, we are from infancy told who we are, what is
our identity, what our expectations should be, what we ought to get out of
life, what class we belong to. And we believe the whole thing. And having
believed it, we come to sense it, as we sense the hard wood of the corner
of the table, and we think it's real, and it's a bunch of hogwash.
It's an amusing game, if you know that that's all it is, and can be played
with eloquence. But the more you know it's ONLY an illusion, the better
you can play it.
So then. In this practice, it is very important, as I said last night, to
bear it in mind that Zen study or Zen meditation--and this includes yoga
and other forms of meditation--is not like any other form of exercise, in
that it is NOT done for a purpose. You may ask me 'How can I possibly do
something that is not being done for a purpose?' because you have a fixed
idea, which is part of the hypnosis, that everything you do is done for a
purpose.
For what purpose do you have belly rumbles? I remember Soki Antsuzaki¨,
who was a great Zen master, sitting in his gorgeous golden robes, with
incense burning in front of him, and his scriptures open on the stand, and
holding a sort of sceptor that Zen masters occasionally hold, and reading
a passage from the sutra, then by commment saying, 'Fundamental principle
of Buddhism is purposelessness. Most important to attain state of no
purpose. When you drop fart, you don't say 'At 9:00, I drop fart.' It just
happen.' And all this kind crypto-Christain audience, very embarrassed,
stuffing handherchiefs into their mouths.
In Chinese, their word for nature is 'tzu-jan,' in Japanese, 'shi-jen¨,'
at that means, 'what is so of itself. We would say 'spontaneity.' A tree
has no intention to grow. Water has no intention to flow. The clouds have
no intention to blow. And as the poem says, When the wild geese fly over
the lake, The water does not intend to reflect them, And the geese have no
mind to cast their image.
Now, that worries us. First of all, we think that spontaneity is mere
capricious action. There's nothing very capricious about the way a tree
grows. It's a highly intelligent design. So is the bird. So are you. But a
lot of people who don't quite understand Zen think that spontaneity is
just doing anything, and the more it looks like anything, the more
spontaneous it is. In other words, they have a preconception of
spontaneity, that a person behaving spontaneously. Or would probably be
vulgar, impolite, rude. It doesn't follow; that's merely a preconception
of the nature of spontaneity. Spontaneity is the way you grow your hair,
it's not the way you think you ought to grow your hair. It's the way it
happens. So that's a really high order of intelligence.
What is happening, then, in the discipline of Zen is that we are trying to
move into the place where we use that intelligence in everyday life--but
you see, you can't get it on purpose. The purpose, the motivation always
spoils it. So you would ask then, 'How do I get rid of purpose?' On
purpose? That you ask that question simply shows how tied up you are in
the thinking process. You cannot force that process to stop. You have to
see it as nonsense.
Babble. Interminable babble in your head.
So one learns to listen to one's thoughts and let the mind think anything
it wants to think, but don't take it seriously. And the idea of you doing
this is also a babble in the head. And eventually--but without bothering
about any eventually, because in this state, there is no future; you're
not concerned about the future. Purpose is always concerned with the
future.
Now what bugs Western people about this is they would say 'Are you trying
to tell us that life has no meaning, no purpose?' Yes. What's so bad about
that?
What sort of meaning would you like it to have? Propose me a meaning for
life. Anything you want. Well, when people try to think of what the
meaning of life is, they say 'Well, I think that we're all part of a plan,
and that working as if we were characters in a novel or a play, and we are
all working towards a great fulfillment.
One day, perhaps after we're dead, perhaps in the future life, there'll be
a great gazoozie. There'll be a galuptious, glorious goodie at the end of
the line, see? And that's what we're all for, see? To get in with that.
And it will all be very, very important, because it won't be something
trivial. It will be something extremely holy.' Well I say 'What's your
idea of something very holy?' Well, nobody really knows. You know, they
think about church, and medieval artists who used to represent heaven in
the form of everybody sitting in choir stalls. And I must say hell looked
much more fun. It was a kind of sado-masochistic orgy.
But heaven looked insufferably dull. And when those little children sang
hymns about those eternal sabbaths, it was a a very, depressing future, I
can assure you.
But you see, when you follow through these ideas, what do you want? What
is the goodie? What is progress all about? You realize that you just don't
know. So the question is immediately posed for the meditator, but aren't
you there already?
I mean, isn't THIS what it's about?
Go to Deoxy.Org For more Alan Watts
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Planetary Changes: Last Update February 10, 2002
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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Depression
A Brief History of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
CFS has only recently been recognized as a distinct condition by the
medical community. A recent report by the Royal College of physicians
officially proclaimed it "real" in the sense that they recognize a cluster
of symptoms which is distinguishable from any other disease. They stated
that this symptom cluster appeared to have no one cause, with both
physical and psychological problems playing a part in the condition. CFS
has officially replaced the term M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), because
there is no consistent evidence for the swelling of nervous tissue that
this name implies. It has also replaced the term Post Viral Fatigue
Syndrome, as the symptoms are not always associated with an initial viral
infection.
This marks the most recent stage in a long debate within the medical
community and society at large concerning the nature of what is now called
(in Britain anyway) CFS. Neither the condition or the debate are new.
At the end of the last century, doctors were holding a similar debate over
a condition called Neurasthenia. This was characterized by fatigue and
muscle weakness, leaving sufferers able to do very little. There was no
medical consensus around cause or cure. Some doctors advocated rest,
others exercise. Some said it particularly affected successful, active
buisnessmen, professionals, even doctors. Others said it was mainly an
illness of females, and was largely "all in the mind".
Anyone familiar with the recent debate around CFS will recognize this
situation. The puzzled and divided medics; the distressed sufferer being
given conflicting advice; the cartoon stereotypes of an unsympathetic
media.
Later into the this century, the medical community coined the term "work
shyness". This more obviously judgmental label was mainly stuck on the
working classes. Again this class difference in diagnoses is persistent
today. Community studies have shown that people with the symptoms of CFS
occur equally across all classes, however those who actually get a
diagnoses of ME or CFS and referral for any kind of treatment, are more
likely to be middle class. Many sufferers are aware of having had to fight
for their condition to be taken seriously. It would appear that the middle
class are better equipped to access and articulate the information
necessary for such a fight.
There appears to have been a relative period of quiet over this disorder
mid century. It comes to media prominence again in the eighties, under two
names - ME and Yuppie Flu. The latter was the name coined by a habitually
unsympathetic media which had decided that sufferers were high flyers who
could no longer keep up the fast, eighties, Thatcherite pace, who had
burned out under pressure.
Again the medical community were split. There were those who believed it
was a physical condition, those who believed it was psychological. This is
such a traditional divide - the mind from the body - that, until recently,
few have questioned it. As we shall see later, this division is not
necessarily true or useful.
In the physical camp there have been a variety of theories. Some have
believed it to be an immunological deficiency (in parts of America it is
labeled CFIDS, Chronic Fatigue and Immune Deficiency Disorder); a muscle
tissue disorder; a central and\or peripheral nervous system disorder and,
most commonly, a persistent virus.
In the psychological camp the main theory was that CFS was an
unacknowledged depression. This had the unfortunate affect of reinforcing
that other media fiction - the "all in the mind" illness. This carries the
connotation that the condition is less real or even pretend, together with
the implication of the very British "pull yourself together" school of
treatment
Not surprisingly most sufferers sided themselves with the physical camp.
Throughout the eighties and into the nineties the debate became more and
more polarized and less useful. As no one could agree what was going on in
CFS, there was no consistent approach to treatment, and an increasing
sense of hopelessness around the possibility of change or cure.
However recently things have changed somewhat. The medical community has
begun to see that so called physical and psychological factors cannot be
readily separated in any condition - be it cancer or depression - and
there has been an increased focus on the management of CFS. This has
produced research showing that adopting a consistent approach to managing
the condition can produce a substantial improvement in the majority of
sufferers. The focus has shifted from looking for a single cause and a
"magic bullet" cure, to looking at how a variety of factors can cause,
maintain and change the condition. Most importantly, there is now a
climate of hope around CFS, which was unthinkable just a few years ago.
The next section will describe the variety of factors that appear to be at
play in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
A Holistic Approach To CFS.
Before attempting to present a model of CFS, let us look at some of the
factors that a variety of research has shown can play a part in this
condition. We will look at this in three sections. Factors that tend to
keep CFS going, factors that start it off and factors that make you more
likely to get it in the first place.
First though, a word of caution. All, some or none of the information
below may apply to you. It doesn't actually matter. If it helps you too
make some sense of your condition, fair enough. If it doesn't, ignore it.
The most important part of this web site is the self help. We know this
works in the majority of cases. If the below means nothing to you, then
proceed to the self help section and try it anyway.
Who gets fatigue?
If we look at fatigue in general, rather than CFS in particular, two
things are immediately apparent. Firstly it is very common, over 30% of
the population experience fatigue at any one time. Secondly there are a
variety of causes for it.
Listed below are just a few.
Doing things to our bodies - To begin with the obvious, not sleeping can
make us tired. We get fatigued after exercise. Being ill often results in
tiredness. Most "recreational drugs", both legal and illegal will make us
tired, though maybe not till the next day. Having an intense emotional or
physical experience - arguments, sex, shock, violence - these will fatigue
or exhaust us. Not drinking enough fluids can make us tired.
This is all predictable, short term "normal fatigue". Fatigue here is
telling us to stop what we are doing and to let our body recuperate for a
while.
However some fatigue is more long term, less obviously useful. Here the
links between what we do and how we feel are less obvious.
The pressures of life.
Both from research and anecdotal evidence, it is now clear that anyone
under stress is more likely to become fatigued and/or ill. Some of the
reasons for this are only just becoming clear and are the subject of a new
field of medicine -psychoneuroimmunology. As the name suggests, this
studies the links between life events, the way we perceive and cope with
those events, the functioning of our brain and nervous system and the
functioning of our immune system. At last there is a scientific basis for
what has been obvious to most of humanity for most of the time - stress
make us ill.
A brief word on the mechanism of this. Consider short term stress. The
principle purpose of the stress response is to allow us to cope with
situations requiring rapid response. A fire alarm goes off, a child has an
accident, a chip pan goes on fire - what happens to our bodies?
First of all our sympathetic nervous system switches on. Our pulse and
blood pressure go up, our breathing rate increases. This mobilizes energy.
Our pupils dilate to let in more light. other parts of the body - our
digestive system, our hands and feet, - get resources diverted away from
them (thus cold feet and butterflies).
All this allows us to make a quick response. If the stress is present for
longer, another physical mechanism kicks in. This is the hypothalamus -
pituitary -adrenal system. This acts by regulating chemicals such as
cortisol which have wide ranging effects on the brain, and our nervous,
immune and hormonal systems.
The results of the activation of this system are again, in the short term,
beneficial. Cortisol increases our ability to distinguish between
sensations - thus the "heightened awareness" people often report in
extreme situations (good or bad). it also mobilizes adrenaline allowing us
to access an intense burst of energy.
However the effects of a prolonged or repeated stress response are less
good. Animal and human studies have shown that prolonged stress leads to a
profound alteration in our immune functioning. We are more likely to catch
cold under stress, latent viruses such as herpes are more likely to
express themselves. The immune system is complex and still only partial
understood, but the overall effect of prolonged stress is to decrease the
functioning of the immune system. Continuing stress will also lead to long
term alterations in our levels of neurotransmitters, our hormone levels,
all of which in turn will effect our mood and energy levels (for the
worse). It also now clear that depressed mood leads to a depressed immune
system and vice versa. The pieces of this puzzle are still being put
together, but the fact that stress leads to profound, if subtle, changes
in our functioning - at all levels - is now beyond doubt.
Lifestyles and life events.
We know that certain life events and lifestyles make more people prone to
fatigue and illness. People who develop fatigue problems are more likely
to have had major life events happen to them in the year previous to
developing the problem. Life events can be either positive or negative -
marriage, bereavement, changing job, moving house, the break -up of a
relationship. All of these will exert there toll on the individual. For
instance a study done of divorced couples showed that they had
significantly more depressed immune functioning than average, and that
there was significant correlation between the level of immune depression
and the level of ongoing emotional attachment to the relationship.
Certain lifestyles are more subtly fatiguing. Having little rest, working
under pressure, being a single parent, looking after an ill relative,
being unemployed. In a way these are obvious sources of fatigue. Less
obviously the kind of lifestyle the sports enthusiast or athlete has puts
the same kind of pressure on their body, even though it is perceived as
positive. It is now clear that the immune functioning of training athletes
is lower than normal, their tendency to fatigue and illness is greater.
Personality Factors
It is now clear that a tendency towards hostility and aggression is
positively correlated with a tendency towards heart disease. Recent
evidence has shown that a tendency to suppress strong emotion and to avoid
conflict is positively correlated with the development of certain types of
cancer. Is there any type of personality that is more likely to develop
Fatigue?
There is some evidence that there is. People who are more inclined to set
high standards for themselves and their performance, who have a tendency
towards perfectionism seem more likely to get fatigued. In a way this
makes sense. If you decide that you have to perform 100% all of the time,
you are going to be expending a lot more energy than someone whose
expectations are less high. Also if you decide that you always should be
able to perform at peak level, you will be less tolerant of tiredness and
more likely to push yourself when you should rest.
So, these are some of the things that can make people prone to fatigue.
However what is likely to precipitate a Chronic Fatigue Problem.?
What starts fatigue.
Viruses -
Physical Illness does appear to be present at the beginning of the
majority of cases of Chronic Fatigue. Having a viral infection certainly
makes us fatigued, in some cases for up to three months after we first
contracted it. So a virus can certainly seem to trigger a CF problem.
Research from our group and others has suggested that some infections are
more likely to trigger the illness than others - viral meningitis,
glandular fever and Q fever for example, but so far there is no evidence
that the virus is still there after the initial infection is over. Traces
of the virus can, of course, often be found, but there is no evidence the
virus continues to exert a long term influence. This is not HIV in which
viral persistence continues in a harmful fashion.
Crises-
As mentioned above, major life events are common in the lead up to CFS
Nothing -
Sometimes there is no obvious reason why someone, either gradually or
suddenly, gets more and more tired, then exhausted, then pained and
disabled. Whatever the reason, the overall effect is a sudden or gradual
inability to keep up the kind of life they previously did.
What can keep fatigue going?
How we cope makes a difference - Take the example of heart disease.
Rehabilitation from a heart problem can take a variety of courses. In one
scenario the individual becomes fearful of any exertion, believing that
this increases the likelihood of another heart problem. They feel helpless
and under threat of death. If they are a smoker or drinker or over-eater
it is possible that they resort to more of these behaviors because of the
stress. The become anxious and demoralized. The combination of inactivity,
fear, helplessness and use of food and drugs does indeed make them more
likely to another cardiac incident.
In an alternative scenario, the same individual adopts an approach of
gradual re-introduction of exercise, reduction of stress and stressors and
develops a feeling of being in control of their recovery. Prognosis thus
improves.
More subtly, in recovery from cancer, the individuals beliefs about
outcome have been shown to be important. On receiving diagnoses,
individuals who adopt either the fighting it attitude, or who go into
denial, have a better chance of survival than those who feel hopeless and
helpless. Prognosis in recovery can be improved by helping people change
the way they manage their illness.
What this demonstrates is that there are several factors at play in
illness and recovery. First there is the bare physical fact of the
illness. Secondly there is how that makes us feel emotionally and how we
believe we should handle it. Thirdly there is how we actually do handle
it. The second two factors are as important as the first. It is no
different in Chronic Fatigue. Some ways of managing are more helpful than
others.
However due to the controversy surrounding CFS, sufferers have often been
given conflicting advice or advice that is not, in the long term,
necessarily helpful. Equally suffers may be merely following the dictates
of their bodies - if something causes pain or fatigue then one naturally
avoids that something.
Let us look in more detail about what we know to be useful and less useful
ways of managing CF problems.
Rest -
The natural response to an illness is to rest. There are few illness
where, in the short term, one would not be advised to rest. However in
CFS, one is often advised to rest, rest and more rest, over a prolonged
period of time. We are now beginning to realize that this is not a good
thing. Prolonged rest has been shown to be detrimental on a number of
levels
Physically it leads to deconditioning of the body, affecting the immune
system, the muscular system and the nervous system adversely. Even a
healthy individual if forced into prolonged rest, will fairly quickly
become much less healthy. They will lose about 3% of there muscle mass a
day, become progressively weaker and more prone to illness.
Mentally, over resting leads to sluggishness, lack of motivation and
concentration and low mood. Particularly if one feels one has no
alternative but to rest, one becomes s frustrated and demoralized.
However this is not to say don't rest. Rest is essential, be we fit or
ill. Indeed another factor that appears to be common in the onset period
of Chronic Fatigue Problems is too little rest. People often struggle on
through illness, attempting to maintain a lifestyle that is beyond them,
resulting in them becoming more ill and fatigued. Eventually they crash.
Sl eep
- Again in Chronic Fatigue Problems, people often develop disturbed
sleeping patterns. Often this will take the form of having poor quality or
unrefreshing sleep at night, often for more hours than prior to illness,
followed by day time sleep to compensate for feeling so tired during the
day. Several things are going on here.
Firstly we know that, as with resting, it is possible to oversleep, that
sleeping more makes us more tired and sluggish during the day. Secondly
there is a vicious circle at work. If we sleep during the day this reduces
the quality of sleep at night which in turn makes us more tired during the
day, which makes us more likely to sleep during the day, which reduces
sleep quality at night... and so on. More subtly, if we spend a lot of the
day resting and unstimulated, there is less need for deep prolonged sleep
at night, even though we may feel more exhausted than when we were active.
This lack of good quality sleep can lead to further frustration and
exhaustion, more resting and more daytime sleep which in turn...
In short, once our sleep rhythm is disturbed, it can have profound effects
on how we feel. Managing this differently can make fatigue problems better
or worse.
Activity
- If activity leads to pain and exhaustion, it is only natural to avoid
it and to rest until we feel up to it. This often happens in CFS.
Individuals will save energy in prolonged rest, be active for a while
then, perhaps a day later, feel the physical effects of that activity -
exhaustion, muscle pain - and then rest again for long period. This boom
and bust cycle tends to be typical of CFS. Again there are certain
elements of a vicious circle in this pattern. If activity produces pain
and exhaustion we avoid it. The more we avoid it, the less able we become
to do it. When, for whatever reason, we are forced to do it again, it
produces even more pain and exhaustion, this leads to more rest and
avoidance.
Eventually, as with any other Chronic Illness, particularly one where
there appears to be no hope and the sufferer feels that they have little
control over their condition, demoralization and depression often occur.
These feelings make an already bad situation worse.
Towards a model of CFS.
So, these are some of the factors that appear to be at work in the onset
and maintenance of CFS. Let us now attempt to synthesize these into a
model of the condition. This will in turn lead to a management strategy
for improving condition. That fact that this management strategy has been
shown to work lends indirect support to the model it is based on. Let us
look at that first.
Before proceeding though, again, a word of caution. You may recognise
yourself in some of this. You may not. If it means nothing to you, go on
to the self help section and try what is suggested there anyway.
Let us first attempt to construct a typical CFS history and see how the
factors above can help make sense of it. [see also Chronic Fatigue
Histories based on true life stories].
Every individual will have a level of activity beyond which they cannot
function for long. We all exceed this occasionally - running for a bus,
going through the stress of studying for exams etc. Functioning beyond
that limit for long will produce increasing fatigue, pain and propensity
to illness.
Let us look at how this might work in practice. At the beginning, the
individual is busy, but not too busy. The general flavour of that business
could contain numerous factors - busy work, social life, exercise and
sport, childcare commitments, being generally driven. As time goes on
however, the individual is beginning to reach their limit. This can be for
two reasons - either their activity level goes up, or their limit comes
down. In fact the two will often go together. An increase in activity
levels without time for rest will weaken the individual and lower the
limit of coping. The longer one tries to function over or near one's
limit, the more the limit will reduce. Sometime external circumstance -
viral illness, life crises, will lead to an abrupt reduction of the
persons limit.
An individual may carry on like this for some time, perhaps feeling
increasingly tired or perhaps thriving on the pace. At some point comes
the straw that breaks the camels back. Most clients that we see report
some critical incident, usually a viral infection, sometimes an operation
or other life event at which point they clearly feel themselves to be
fatigued and ceasing to cope.
They may struggle on for some time. Between point A and B, they are trying
to maintain their activity level whilst their ability to cope, their limit
is reducing all the time. The further they get above that limit, the more
they feel fatigued, ill and unable to cope, the lower that limit becomes.
Two things can happen at point B. Either the individual will abruptly stop
trying to cope and abruptly drop their activity levels (this is
illustrated in Graph 1). Or they will gradually drop more and more from
their life (see Graph 2).
At point B the individual decides to stop work, drop responsibilities and
rests. Again several things can happen at this point. The individual may
not rest enough and attempt to resume their former activities too soon
(point C), whilst they are still not recovered. This puts them in the red
zone, leading to an abrupt return of fatigue and pain (point D). They may
struggle on for a period, during which time their limit decreases further.
At some point (E) they will return to rest again.
Most individual will eventually enter a period where they rest a lot, or
do much less than they used to for a prolonged period. As pointed out
above, prolonged rest is actually detrimental to the system, reducing the
limit even further (between B and C; between E and F). This means that a
lower and lower level activity will produce distressing symptoms. The
person will naturally reduce their activity levels in response to this. In
so doing, with the increase in rest and sleep that this usually entails,
they will reduce their limit even further.
Eventually, at point F, most people reach a "stable state." They will
have, through hard won experience, a knowledge of their current limit. On
days when they are more symptom free than others they will push over it.
This will then lead to symptom increase from which they will recover by
resting for, perhaps, a day or two. Once the symptoms are less, they will
push the limit again. These symptom lead patterns of activity and rest,
the boom and bust cycle, characterize Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You may
recognize this end stage of having to live within a very narrow limit.
Let us look in a bit more detail at the physiology of boom and bust. When
you do too much - that is when you exceed your current physical limits,
given your current health and fitness, you cause the individual muscle
fibres to behave abnormally. These are called eccentric contractions.
Instead of a smooth co-ordinated contraction, the individual fibres pull
against each other, causing microscopic areas of damage. Over the next
24-48 hours this damage repairs, but causes delayed pain. Hence the "boom"
is not a good idea. Furthermore, because the excess activity leaves you
exhausted, and in need of rest, during the following period exactly the
opposite happens. The muscles get weaker, and even more vulnerable to the
next period of activity.
Some people will reach that stable state without such dramatic ups and
downs before hand.
As I said you may not recognize yourself in any of these patterns or
cycles, or you may recognize bits of it. The important point to grasp is
that whatever started it off, the pattern of Chronic Fatigue often becomes
self perpetuating, a vicious circle that one gradually enters and that it
can be hard to break.
DEPRESSION: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
A depressive illness is a "whole body-mind" illness, involving your body,
mood, thoughts and behavior. It affects the way you eat and sleep, the way
you feel about yourself, and the way you think about others and the
outside world. A depressive illness is not a passing blue mood. A rule of
thumb is that depression affects your functioning and lasts for two weeks
or longer. People with depressive illness cannot merely "pull themselves
together" and get better. If nothing else sticks in your mind from reading
this article, this is one of the most important points that people who
have not experienced depression should remember, to do otherwise; to say,
"Just pull yourself out of it" will make the depressed person's self worth
plunge even deeper. Without treatment, symptoms can last for weeks, months
or years. Over 80% of people who suffer from depression can be helped with
appropriate treatment.
Types of Depression
Depressive illnesses come in different appearances and depth. There are
many types of depression, I will cover only three and there are many
varieties of these, so get professional help if you show the depressive
signs which we will cover next and ask you doctor which one you have.
Major Depression presents a combination of symptoms which interfere with
the ability to work, sleep, eat and enjoy the usual pleasures of life. A
major depression can be disabling and can occur once, twice or several
times in a lifetime.
A less severe type of depression, dysthymia, involves long-term, chronic
symptoms that do not interfere with functioning or do not disable, but
keep the depressed person from feeling good and running at "full steam."
There is a condition commonly caused "double depression" in which a person
suffers from dysthymia and also has one or more major depressive episodes.
Another type of depressive illness is manic-depressive illness, often
called bipolar depression when accompanied with manic episodes or unipolar
when primarily just characterized with recurring depressive episodes. This
form of mental illness demonstrates mood changes that are dramatic and can
be rapid, but more often have a gradual onset. We will next review some of
the symptoms of both mania and depression. Mania often affects judgment
and social behavior which cause embarrassment to the person and his
family. Many times the manic episode is accompanied by unwise spending and
decisions and brings on financial problems.
SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION AND MANIA
Not everyone has every symptom and some people have a very few. There are
variances in the severity and number of symptoms experienced by each
individual.
Depression:
Persistent sad, anxious or "empty" mood feelings of hopelessness,
pessimism, feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness loss of interest
or pleasure in things previously enjoyed including sex, insomnia, early
morning awakening or oversleeping, appetite changes and/or weight loss or
weight gain decreased energy, fatigue, "slowed down" thoughts of death or
suicide, suicide attempts, restlessness, irritability, difficulty
concentrating, remembering, making simple decisions, persistent physical
sympto