VIBRATIONS

 

BARBARA ROSE SHULER interviews RALPH ABRAHAM
on Radio KAZU, Pacific Grove, CA on August 10, 1990

 

BARBARA: We're going to be talking about the question "Is there order in the universe." We'll learn about visual music and something called chaos theory, catastrophe theory, dynamic systems theory -- we'll find out what that's all about, and we'll explore and make some discoveries that neither Dr. Abraham nor I probably know as yet.... I'm very happy to introduce to you Ralph Abraham. Thank you for being here.

 

RALPH: Sure.

 

BARBARA: I'd like to begin, Ralph, by kind of setting the basis and talking a little bit about chaos theory. I'd like to ask you to describe kind of in a nutshell why it's so important to us and why it's been a key area of research for you over the years.

 

RALPH: The word chaos exerts a kind of fascination on people. It's not really a negative concept. We're intrigued by it because it's sort of outside our ken. Most natural processes are chaotic. The fact that they're outside our ken is bad, because we want to understand our environment and the phenomenal world we live in enough so that we can survive and get on with our business. The failure to understand chaos is one of the great puzzles of human existence. If we could have a talk with a whale or a porpoise we might find that they don't have the same limitation - that for them, chaos is not beyond their ken. This is just speculation, of course. Chaos is almost by definition beyond our ken because it means anything we can't understand. If we could learn something about it, the territory that we can walk over with

understanding would be tremenously enlarged.

 

A similar enlargement of our territory may have happened when we found out about oscillation, vibration, and rotation, and when we discovered the wheel. This process took a long time, probably thousands of years. Archeologists have traced the first appearance of the wheel back some five or six thousand years. Before that time, anything cyclical was probably beyond our ken, speaking as a species. The phases of the moon were beyond our ken. When they were no longer beyond our ken, the territory we could walk over with understanding was enlarged enormously practically overnight. We had taken a giant step forward in the history of consciousness.

 

BARBARA: It became orderly, in a sense.

 

RALPH: Yeah, it became orderly if orderly is the word you use when you have the feeling that you understand something well enough. We never understand things too well anyway, of course, but we have the feeling of understanding, of 'everything is OK.' Things like wars are relegated to the chaotic because we don't understand them. We don't know how they happen to other people, we don't know how they happen to us. We have no idea what makes them start or stop. They're beyond our ken, therefore beyond our control. All we know is that we don't like them. But if wars were periodic, like the phases of the moon, we'd know much more about them - maybe we could even do something to change them. The importance of learning about chaos is that it is connected with the majority of natural processes, many of which we have an evolutionary problem with. If our understanding doesn't grow past the boundary of what we now consider chaotic, then our future is very questionable.

 

BARBARA: What are some present practical applications for chaos theory? I'd also like to explore how you got into it. What attracted you? What was the incident, or the series of incidents in your life that plummeted you into this research?

 

RALPH: I don't know. Everything I do seems to be a total accident. I'm a person who goes on faith and if I have an intuition, I just follow it. I was led, or maybe I was prepared from babyhood on, for this particular frontier, which is associated with the arcane arts of computer programming, the impossible secrets of pure mathematics, and so on. Maybe this sounds a bit esoteric, but actually, it's extremely simple; the only difficult thing about it is novelty. In the future, chaos theory may be heavily mathematical. It might depend on arcane computer arts. But right now, it's the simplest thing in the world. It's only because it's foreign and novel that it sounds strange.

 

To answer your question...In my teens I was planning to be a psychiatrist. I don't know why; it seemed extremely abstract. I got interested in radios like the kind you have here -- these tremendous stacks of very hostile-looking steel boxes. I really liked the idea that you could reach out over them to other people. This happened during a two year period when I was confined to bed with tuberculosis. By means of the radio I was able to keep up sort of a normal social life. When I skipped from psychiatry to radio engineering, I thought, "I made a big mistake in my previous studies. They were a total waste of time. I'm going to start from scratch." Later, I switched from radio engineering to physics and thought,"Well, all that other stuff was a complete waste, because now I'm doing double chambers and high energy particle physics." Then when I changed to math I thought, "Well all that was wasted."

 

You see, my life is chaos. It has all these switches and transformations apparently without reason, and drift by drift my only rule was, I like to do what I like. I don't have much discipline, therefore I was able to follow my feelings. I guess they were a good guide, because looking back many years later, I can see that everything sort of added up, and none of these activities periods of mine could have been shortened or lengthened without destroying the whole process. The actual encounter with chaos came only quite recently. Before that I was studying vibrations, rotations, oscillations.

 

BARBARA: As a professor, you're considered a mathematician.

RALPH: Right. I'm Professor of Mathematics at the University of California. And since my Ph.D., 27 years ago, I've always been associated with mathematics It's only recently that I'm beginning to see that that is also just a phase on a wave to yet elsewhere. It's been a long stay with pure mathematics for me compared to the one or two years I spent with these other things before.

 

BARBARA: The encounter with chaos. What was that like?

 

RALPH: Well, chaos is so ubiquitous that even the smallest number of pure oscillators that can be coupled together, namely 2, have the tendency to go immediately into what is called chaos, that is to say, not understandable from our point of view. Some people realized as long as 20 years ago the importance and the meaning of chaos, but not me. It began to interest me and other people around 1972, when some scientists pointed out that chaos, as it has been encountered so far, provides a mathematical model for turbulence, fluid dynamical turbulence, for waterfalls, for whitewater and so on. This impressed not only me but a lot of people, because turbulence had been rejected by science -- it was over that boundary. It couldn't be understood. It's the prototypical chaos. And since physicists couldn't understand it, they denied it. They rejected it.

 

BARBARA: Rather typical.

 

RALPH: We all do this. And that's why it's so important to acquire the understanding of the ununderstandable, you see? To find some means of going over the edge. Well, so it impressed me as well as other people. Many physicists began -- it took a couple of years -- to write papers. Ruelle, a mathematical physicist in France, and Takens, a mathematician who, like myself, specializes in dynamics, made this connection in a really convincing way, in a paper called ????

 

It was very sophisticated, satisfactory. and beautiful, both from the physical and the mathematical point of view. Nevertheless, the main journal of mathematical physics rejected it. But eventually it was accepted and I read it. Before that, turbulence was rejected by the whole of science. Unconsciously, I rejected it too. But now it's been accepted by science as a whole, and I can see how the same thing must have happened in other cases. What else are we rejecting because it's inexplicable? Maybe we're not even trying because it's been rejected so long ...

 

BARBARA: They become ingrained assumptions.

 

RALPH: Yeah. During my stay in India I became convinced that there are some kinds of vibrations and undulations of extended fields, and that this is a universal metaphor suitable for understanding consciousness and also other phenomena. There is a kind of resonance in the relationship between phenomena and consciousness. This came to me in a totally intuitive way. I didn't know where it would go, but I built a model to study it. It was a dish of fluid which was vibrated from below by the sound from a loudspeaker that produced the purest tone possible. As you turn up the volume or change the frequency of this tone, you see a projected color image on a screen that shows exactly what's going on in the transparent fluid in the dish while being subjected to this vibration. The sound is made visible -- the resonance phenomenon.

When I came back from India I was obsessed with the idea to build this gadget. I called it a macroscope. Some students helped me. When it was ready, I turned on the light to check whether it all worked, I lined up the telescope mirrors and the optics, and everything worked more or less perfectly. Since then -- it must have been around the summer of '74 -- my understanding has progressed primarily in terms of seeing the relationship between this vision and other things, like the arms race, problems in relationship, ecology and so on.

 

In the beginning I had the intuition that it would apply to everything; that not only could turbulence cross the boundary from the unknown to the known, but also to many other turbulent situations in this field or that. I thought of the physical sciences. I thought of the biological sciences. In the course of time I saw how it gave insight to the social sciences, to social situations, to complex systems, and to the evolution, the open-ended change, according to what rule we don't know, whereby order emerges from chaos; whereby form emerges from nothing.

 

In the intervening years, that intuition has been borne out through the working out of many little tiny special cases, some of them in the physical sciences to which a physical scientist could respond, others in biological sciences that the biologist or medical doctor could respond to and so on.

For me, these were all different examples of the same thing that was somehow already complete and obvious in my head in 1974, when I turned on that machine. It's like looking in a swimming pool when the sun is overhead and you see those lacy patterns on the bottom of the pool, and then somebody dives in and the patterns jump around, and you realize that you can see the motion, the beautiful cooperative motion, the undulation of the entire pool, that huge body of water moving like one organism. You just know, without knowing any physics, that the motion of light on the bottom of the pool is caused by the motion of the water. You know what's going on, but it suddenly becomes visible to you.

 

I wanted to share this discovery with other people. I was working on different ways of not only projecting the image, but also in creating some toys -- visual musical instruments, as it were. It was like getting control of chaos -- no, control is not the right word -- it's understanding; getting to feel OK with chaos, knowing that just because it's not periodic, it's not necessarily out of control. What's going on with the world situation, or with the value of the US dollar against the yen or whatever, is behaving in a chaotic or turbulent way, but you don't have to die of fear when it happens. Because there is order. There is beautiful order. It can actually be viewed as a splendid geometric object that has never been seen before, yet seems strangely familiar when seen for the first time. There is a certain computer-based instrument that I call macroscope because it reveals the macroscopic form of chaos, which is like smoke rings -- a pattern familiar to our entire being. Our system is producing these chaotic forms.

 

Nothing alive in this world is perfectly periodic, but with the aid of these forms it can be understood. They are our heritage, which we have not as yet claimed. It's like the discovery of the wheel, when we learned that a round object can rotate around. In the past 25 years the next step has suddenly become open to anyone who wants to take it, giving rise to a kind of increased capability to 'grok' -- to understand the form of chaos. Perception is enhanced, because the mental capacity to cognitively deal with chaos has been extended to a large number of things happening around us.

 

BARBARA: I'd like to read something that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor about Ralph Abraham. I thought it was a lovely quote. This person calls him "a bespectacled, bearded, slightly rumpled but unabashedly idealistic man. He has a clear goal. 'Our goal is to save the world from itself, to do good, and to have a good time,' he says."

 

RALPH: Yeah.

 

BARBARA: That's a lovely statement.

 

RALPH: Well, many people are successful in having a good time, but not in saving the world. And then there are people who sacrifice their all in order to prevent some catastrophe. I think one reason that the world is in such trouble now is that people are not really connected to their children. They're not connected to the next generation. If they could just praise the creator and get through till their own death day without a planetary catastrophe, that would be enough. And then it will be the turn of their children. They will have to face the problem. If people were as interested in the future as they are in the present, if what happens to their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren were as important to them as what happens to us, then the distinction between having a good time and saving the world would disappear.

 

We're obviously too short-sighted. And what makes people short-sighted? It's because being far-sighted is in conflict with their personal goals. These personal goals may simply be inherent in our culture. How can that be changed? Most people do love their children, at least when they are little. No doubt there are exceptions, but as a rule, there is a great deal of love between the parents and the children while they all live together. Parents make sacrifices for their children and put their well-being ahead of their own. But as soon as the children move out of the house and become adults, suddenly there are problems.

 

Maybe that's what makes people so pathologically short-sighted that they can't see what their actions do to the next generation -- like cutting down the Amazon jungle. Everybody knows that's bad in the long run, but the fact that it's not so bad in the short run makes it OK to go ahead with it in exchange for the temporary gain of a few billion dollars or so. The inability to be far-sighted is caused by our lack of the cognitive aparatus to deal with extended patterns in space and time. Long-range prediction is not a natural function of the human mammalian brain as it has evolved up to now. However, with mathematical models and computer simulation -- even bad models, even poor simulation -- our capacity to think is extended in terms of long-range space-time patterns. And that may actually be all that's necessary to make a lot of people far-sighted. They may disagree about what strategy would be the best to achieve a peaceful society a thousand years from now, but they may start thinking in terms of a thousand year future, simply because mathematical modeling and computer simulation provide a kind of a telescope into the far future.

 

BARBARA: Can you describe your visual music in more concrete terms? It's hard to do that -- we're not working in a visual medium right now, but maybe you can give us kind of a concept of what you're talking about.

 

RALPH: I'm afraid that radio provides a challenge that I simply cannot meet. You have to see it. I'm talking about a space-time pattern. I've written a book that has only pictures with captions, because you cannot put it into words. The function of chaos theory, among other things, is to expand our language into verbal, because space-time patterns -- you've got to at least be able to wave your hands. ??????

 

Let's go back to the swimming pool for a moment. The sun is over your shoulder as you're looking at the lacework patterns of light on the bottom of the pool. Somebody jumps in, and the pool is like a bowl full of jelly that suddenly starts bouncing around. You can see the water, but you can't see how it's moving. The projection of invisible bumps in the water onto the bottom of the pool by this massive projector, a natural macroscope, makes the vibration visible. You see it for the first time in your entire life, but it looks totally familiar. The invisible has suddenly become visible. Brainwaves act like that. Thoughts are like that. Now you tell me how to put that experience into words. There is the lacework, it's moving, the water is moving, the light is moving, and you see the connection between the two motions. I'm talking about a visual experience. You can probably visualize it, but you can't do justice to it in ordinary words except in this very indirect way.

 

Now, about the visual music. Computer-aided visual music will put in the hands of anybody who can get their hands on one toys like a Casio for under $100. These will be obtainable in the very near future. Visual musical instruments which communicate with the universal language of space-time pattern, which is the pattern of a lot of different things. Words go as far as words can go, and mathematical symbolism goes as far as it can go, but instead of trying to wrap things in words, there is a certain category of experience which is imaged very well visually -- not just static images, but moving images; space-time patterns that move as a unit. Maybe they'll have names. Somebody will say, "Hey, that was a niambic. Did you see how he put that niambic right after the snort?" "Woooow! Hey that was a beautiful... "

 

BARBARA: And we'll call it "George."

 

RALPH: We'll call it George, and in this way, these experiences can get into language. Language could then create the image for someone who hadn't learned it visually.

 

BARBARA: There would have to be a reference.

 

RALPH: Yeah, I think so. Not all experience is like this. Some experiences, I suppose, are better represented by words or symbols -- dots, dashes, whatever. But there is an all-important, loving, touching, emotional sea of experience, an ocean of experience: the field of consciousness, and that kind of stuff requires analog communication. Right now, abstract patterns in space and time are our best shot at naming, understanding, sharing, and talking about those experiences. I'm thinking of creating an instrument with which people could dialogue and "sing" together on analog experience.

BARBARA: When do you think this is going to be available? Are you physically working with this right now? Could you tell the listener who's eager to acquire this experience and this technology when it will come out?

 

RALPH: Well, at a certain price it exists already.

 

BARBARA: Is this the $40,000 price?

 

RALPH: Oh, more like $150,000.

 

BARBARA: Can we come over to your house and play?

 

RALPH: If you were satisfied with a broader category of space-time patterns that don't have to be connected with chaos theory and these ultimate units of abstract expression, you could make -- and this is coming very soon -- very interesting visual music out of computers that are available for two to three thousand dollars. I'm predicting that it will come down to a hundred dollars in less than a decade.

 

BARBARA: This is a radical statement! I'd like you to explore a statement you made to me at dinner before the show a little more. You said, "Literacy is an unnatural skill." Can you explain what you mean by that?

 

RALPH: Well, I supported that statement with an observation that I wear glasses, and if I didn't have my glasses on I couldn't read. I think that writing is a great invention. It has been crucial to our history; we never could have got here without it. It's fun and wonderful, and books are among my favorite things. Nevertheless, it does have serious limitations. It's not altogether unnatural that many people watch television eight hours a day, but read zero hours a day. This seems to be quite natural, because watching the visual presence on the screen is really a lot like watching ordinary life itself. It's maybe not as interesting, at least to me, but that's what I mean by natural. It's natural in the same way as walking, running, throwing, picking up rocks, using sticks, making fire, etc. All that has come to us naturally in our million years of evolution on this planet.

 

On the other hand, we've just been staring at these mysterious uniform marks and dots for a really short time. It requires a great deal of visual skills. Children are not born reading. At 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 years of age, reading becomes spontaneous if you grew up in an environment surrounded by reading materials. Literacy is very important, but it is quite unnatural compared to feeling things directly, or watching them on the movie or TV screen. Speaking is also unnatural in terms of representation. The degree of separation between the thing itself and the words or the sounds we're making, whether written or spoken, is huge. There is a vast difference between the sound of 'ball' and the actual ball.

 

BARBARA: It wasn't always that way, was it?

 

RALPH: Well, it's estimated that we've only been speaking for 60,000 years.

 

BARBARA: Didn't we use to speak in tones that were more closely associated with the vibrations of what we were speaking about? I heard a rumor ...

RALPH: Like bird songs. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. It's a big mystery. It's such a big mystery that even hard-core archeologists sometimes speculate about the possibility that a spacecraft landed on earth on a certain day in the past, teaching us to turn a wheel, to speak, or to read and write.

 

BARBARA: Why don't we take a look at the area that you have described as your experience in India, the less materialistic, mechanistic kind of approach? What was it that happened to you in India, and why did it have such a dramatic impact? I'd like to mention that you studied with Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass's guru. The people who listen to this show may remember that Ram Dass was on this program last week. I'd like to kind of fit that in context and maybe move into it a little bit. Perhaps you can relate it to this scientific area of chaos theory.

 

RALPH: Well, India is very special to me. It's very special and important to everyone on this planet, because we have a certain lack in our culture. India has a culture which is really different. You can read books and listen to me talk about it, but you'll never understand what I'm talking about without going there, because the teaching of India consists of being there. The things that you might read about comprise much of what we're lacking, and are a huge complement to what we've got.

 

BARBARA: You're talking about the Western experience, the scientific...

 

RALPH: Yeah. Think of the Western experience as being a bowl full of marbles, and the Indian experience as being a bowl full of water. It's like waves and particles. We've had waves and particles throughout history, from pagan times until very recently. But in this part of the world the particle view not only dominated, but totally vanquished the wave way of looking at things. In India, they maintained both the particle and the wave view. This is just a metaphor. If you went there you'd instantly know what I'm talking about. But I don't think you can really do it justice in words. Anyway, their view is complementary to ours. About 400 years ago they took a left turn when we took a right. And so their music, their dance, the way the rural vegetables are displayed in the bazaar, the way the food is cooked, all of these things are connected.

 

Everything that happens there is a miracle to us, while everything that happens here, or a lot of things that happen here are miracles to them. They want the miracles we've got: radios and television and washing mashines... We, on the other hand, do not want what they have. That's why many people who visit India are not able to accept it. Their system rejects what is there so that they have to flee before the end of two weeks. That didn't happen to me. From the first minute I got off the plane in Bombay, it was all wonderful to me. I was like a sponge that had been thirsting for what they had, and all I had to do was to just be there. It was happening, and the longer I stayed, the more happened. There were miracles; they were wonderous, and they changed my life forever. For some reason my system did not have the mechanism that many Westerners have, which must reject waves. What I mean by waves are things like: we are all connected. Everything is all connected. What we say and do now will matter in thousands of years on the other side of the planet. Maybe even on another planet. The sea of consciousness is like an ocean, particularly when it comes to people and consciousness.

In India, I am not even me, I'm just part of 'we,' 'it.' I could call the whole of it 'I'. It was so obvious, because other people also believe it there. It's real for them, and everything they say and do is reinforcing it in the subtlest ways. If you're close to it, it's like a sprinkling of water in a dry desert. Our souls have been starved for that water. It's only in certain situations, like being in love, or scuba diving, or having a relationship with a pet when you're a child -- only in certain things are we allowed to wave, and by the time you get out of high school, the waves are over. They become particles. It's 'me' and 'them' and the value of the dollar and the yen, and the whole oneness of it is ficticiously separated into individual marbles, each of which must compete with all the other marbles in order to just survive. If you're open to it, it is a pleasure to have your desert watered. It also appears to be something that could be very useful in saving us, in guaranteeing us a future, because this wave that I'm talking about could also be called Love ... it is ... I don't know what else to call it, you know?

 

BARBARA: Were you aware of getting into something like that when you went to India, or did you just follow your intuition without understanding the possible outcome?

 

RALPH: By the time I went to India, I had been reading everything I could find for 4 or 5 years, had apprenticed myself to a Western master, had gone to meetings of Sufi groups and learned different meditation styles. It seems I wanted to go in that direction, I wanted to experience it. It's like saying, I believe in spaceships. I've never seen one, but I'm open to a contact. Reveal yourself. Let me see you. Give me a chance. That was my approach to the Eastern way of thought. It didn't actually get me anywhere, but I thought I was getting it. I went to India to get more of it, maybe to actually experience it, but I had no hopes. My main idea was probably to continue what I'd been doing, which was to have more sex and drugs with maybe a different flavor. However, the minute I got off the plane, all that dropped away because I found 'it'. It was just in the air. It had nothing to do with teachers, masters, gurus, meditation, being locked in a cave or any of that.

 

BARBARA: What was there about this remarkable man, Neem Karoli Baba? Was there something in your encounter with him that contributed to this, or was he just part of the overall experience that you felt the moment you stepped off the plane?

 

RALPH: I guess I just ended up there. Ram Dass had given me instructions how to find him, and I followed them. Within days of my arrival on that strange continent, I found myself halfway up the Himalayas in a really remote spot. There was an extremely weird scene at Neem Karoli's ashram. I rejected it and decided to leave right away, but I couldn't, because miracles began to happen and I stayed around for so long because they kept happening. It's good to get out of the city, because there is a lot of dirt, dust, smog, and particularly noise in the city. Away from it, people are less affected by each other and more in tune with their tradition. The higher you go in the Himalayas, the further you go back in time in terms of the integrity of the original Sanskrit tradition. I just kept going, and it was more and better than I expected.

 

I did have an interaction with Neem Karoli which, although I was fighting it all the way, is partly responsible for my doing the things that I'm doing right now. He set me firmly on the track of the old books at a time when I was saying "I'm done with books. I left them behind in the West. I came for the feeling of it." He tried as hard as he could to lock me up in a room with a bunch of old Sanskrit books and their English translations, and that was wonderful because, although I didn't know what was happening, what came out of these books was that I was able to make a connection between the very strange, foreign experience of the oneness of things and everything I had ever done before -- the radio engineering, the elementary particle research, the pure mathematics of differential geometry and psychoanalysis -- everything connected up. The books provided the bridge between the foreign experience, which we need to complement our own, and with all the rest of it. Reading them in that place made it all come together. Here they would mean nothing. That's what happened to me with Neem Karoli Baba.

 

BARBARA: And how do you find this wave nature in the West, besides within yourself?

 

RALPH: Well, it's just a way of looking at things. The world itself is the same here and in India. It's full of waves. Once you learn to look in that way, you see them everywhere. Many people see it. There are cracks in our particle system where the wave shines through. Intuition, which is particularly associated with certain kinds of women, bad women who are too emotional, who don't accept their socially given role and are sometimes identified as soothsayers -- intuition is one of the waves.

 

And then there is our relationship with the animals, though not too many people in the West have a real relationship with animals because they eat them. It's very difficult to kill and butcher something you love while trying to relate to it at the same time. People don't usually eat their pets, they eat other people's pets. You see what I mean? Some people, however, are in a special relationship with animals, and because this relationship has nothing to do with spoken language, this is analog communication. It's gesture, it's voice, it's body language, and it provides the full experience of communication. These are some of the little cracks where the wave is coming through. But when you concentrate on that, you don't have to give up waves, you don't have to give up particles, and you don't have to give up your separateness as a person in order to feel one with someone else.

 

Going to India is very difficult, as I said. Coming back is even more difficult. Many of the people who went and succeeded in staying there, maybe even becoming high-level functionaries in a jungle ashram and being totally absorbed with the language, the philosophy, the psychology, and becoming 'it', were not able to come back. They either stayed, or came back and were destroyed.

 

Coming back is extremely difficult, because although you can see things as both particle and wave, you're the only one who does. You are no longer supported by other people. If you share your view, people think you're crazy. Then you begin to get a lot of negative feedback from people that you like and who like you, but after they get to know you better they drop you. They cannot handle the difference and you are extremely isolated. Fortunately there are so many people nowadays who have been somewhere and gained this complementary view that they begin to support each other and it becomes less painful.

 

BARBARA: What is your advice for people who are experiencing this? I think there are some who haven't gone to India but have had some sort of experience of this kind of culture shock.

 

RALPH: Well, I don't know. For one thing, nobody should do what I did, because it's a really painful way. The usual thing that people do is to seek out others who share their awareness and try to live with them, or at least in the same neighborhood or the same town. There is a mutual support system within this group, so you don't feel so alone. I personally rejected that way, I don't know why. After my return from India I settled with one friend, my friend Ray. Our relationship started in India. Other than that I've been totally isolated in my work. My teaching at the university and my personal research has been very solitary, and because of that it's been difficult to maintain. My best friend is probably the practice of meditation. Meditation is such an awesome technique, it's such a fantastic thing to do because it is another state of being, like waking and sleeping, and it definitely has an effect. Yet few people even try it. It's thought to be nothing in our society, and doing it is not supported by anything that you know. It's even less respected than vegetarianism. There are quite a few vegetarians around lately. The vegetarian can eat meatless food without being thought strange. But there are very few meditators. There's little support for it, and consequently people find it difficult to do.

(RALPH: IS THIS STILL TRUE IN 1990?)

 

In a place like Burma, for example, about 15% of the population are meditators. That is a huge number. But even that number shows a decline of 50% from just a generation or two ago. So even in a place like Burma where meditation is traditionally supported, it's still on the decline. Since it actually does something which is very amazing, you would think it would be forever on the increase. In the past it must have been. How else could Burma have gone through all its centuries of existence without losing it? From Buddha's time until now, there was a continuous throng of meditators, a nation full of meditators, and suddenly the light is going out. Not enough people use these techniques, but they are very supportive of the wave perspective, because they have the direct experience of it. The waves I described on the bottom of the swimming pool, and those cracks, the intuition in relationships or in communication with animals, these become anybody's immediate experience after a short period of regular practice of meditation. They give as much water in the desert as a trip to India. We are basically herd animals, I think. We are unable to accept anything from within. We like to have a bunch of people telling us, 'This is OK.' That's when we see it ... 'course that's the way it is.

BARBARA: Yes. Agreement helps, I guess.