TOM: I must be very stupid.
DICK: Not unlikely, but what evidence have you?
TOM: I understand nothing!
DICK: That is a sign of intelligence, not of stupidity.
TOM: Glad to hear it.
DICK: Only the stupid can suppose that they understand.
TOM: Yet we all want to.
HARRY: Not at all: I haven't the slightest desire.
TOM: Why does he think like that?
DICK: People who accept without question that appearances are real or, as we should put it, who mistake phenomena for reality, see no problem.
HARRY: None of the kind you argue about anyhow.
TOM: Don't they ever suspect anything, ever smell a rat?
DICK: Of course they do. Why do you think they spend their lives running away from themselves as fast as their legs and their wheels and their bars-and-cafes can carry them?
HARRY: Tcheuh! We enjoy life: you don't!
DICK: Superficially that is true enough: we seek something beyond enjoyment, for we know that is only one part of a whole, and that the counterpart cannot be avoided.
TOM: When they do face up to the question they see that life is inexplicable and that nothing makes sense. But they get no further.
DICK: An increasing number do get further, but they get stuck in the mud because there are no qualified teachers in the West. An understanding that the visible world is phenomenal and that noumenon, or reality, is an invisible cause, is not sufficient. Conditioning is too strong.
TOM: They are unable to believe what the Masters tell them?
DICK: Intellectually they may believe, but habit is hard to overcome. They continue to think and act as though they and everything around them were real and all the reality there is.
HARRY: Nearly everything you say is just crazy nonsense to us. It is as though you took every normal and evident fact and substituted a long-winded absurdity for it. We can hardly believe our ears, or imagine how any apparently sane persons can seriously talk such rubbish.
TOM: Crude, but perhaps good for us to hear?
DICK: Harmless and inoffensive; moreover Harry has a shrewd suspicion that it is not so, haven't you, Harry?
HARRY: Well, the rot you talk rings a bell now and again, though it rarely makes sense.
DICK: What in particular is it you don't understand, Tom. Who knows, I might have a clue.
TOM: This subject-object business. When the object speaks with the maximum
of false identification and absurdity, as, for instance, every time Harry opens his mouth, who is in fact speaking?
DICK: The subject, of course. Who else is there to speak?
TOM: Even when the object speaks one hundred per cent as object.
DICK: Even then.
TOM: But how is that? How can it be?
DICK: Subject can use an object to speak as subject - as when Maharshi spoke, or, under identification, subject can speak as object under that absurd limitation - as when Harry speaks, or you and I when someone treads on our toe.
TOM: So that the withdrawal of subjectivity from the object means...
DICK: Just that. Exactly what it says.
TOM: And reintegration in the subject...
DICK: That is the same adjustment. Subject uses an object as before as a mechanism of dualistic expression, but via, not as, the object employed.
TOM: Yet subject and object are one?
DICK: Subject and all objects are one in reality, but in dualistic manifestation they are apparently separate - like the obverse and reverse of a coin, each of which has a different appearance, representing to you the reality of the coin itself which you cannot see.
TOM: But what puzzles me is that subject might speak via Harry instead of via you or me, at any moment, since we are all objects.
DICK: Subject not only might but does.
HARRY: With this difference, that when the blighter speaks via me he talks sense for a change. Why is that now?
DICK: When he talks sense subject is 'speaking' as an object; when he talks metaphysics, real nonsensical metaphysics to you, he may be 'speaking' as subject.
HARRY: How do you know?
DICK: Only chaps like you are in the happy position of knowing things. We, poor lunatics, are inclined to believe that when knowledge comes in the form of intuition, that is, in a flash, it is probably direct from the subject; otherwise it comes, also from the subject but via the intellectual mechanism which objects provide.
HARRY: And in the latter case what makes the difference between the high-falutin twaddle he lets off through you, and the simple common-sense that issues from me?
DICK: If we are identified with ourselves as objects the only difference lies in the composition, make-and-shape of our intellectual apparatus; if we are not so identified, then our thought is not distorted by the I-notion as yours is.
HARRY: A regular polyglot, that subject fellow, isn't he?
TOM: What do you mean?
HARRY: He comes through in English, French, German, Chinese, Hindustani, any old lingo that happens to be required.
DICK: 'He' comes through, as you put it so well, but not in any lingo.
HARRY: What do you mean?
DICK: 'He' does not speak.
HARRY: Does not speak? But his speaking is the subject of this crazy conversation! I give it up, or rather I withdraw, and reintegrate my own skin!
DICK: The subject is not a 'person', and it does not speak. It is the object, the psycho-somatic apparatus, that speaks. The subject informs that which is expressed, if you will.
HARRY: What is it then? A ghost?
DICK: Not even that. Much less material.
HARRY: What can be less material than a ghost?
DICK: Something that is formless, impersonal, imperceptible, and outside time.
HARRY: Sounds like a description of nothing.
DICK: Exactly. It is, as you say, no thing.
TOM: Just a concept?
DICK: Just.
TOM: And therefore unreal?
DICK: Quite.
TOM: And inexistent?
DICK: Surely
HARRY: Goodbye, goodbye, I'm off - in case they take me to the loony-bin also...
TOM: Too much for Harry! He will never understand anything.
DICK: There have been greater miracles.
TOM: You said just now that the two sides of a coin represent its reality which we cannot see. How do they do that?
DICK: You can only see the obverse and the reverse, and never at once, the appearance called 'coin', because they are unreal projects: you cannot see the reality, the suchness, though you have a concept for it called 'gold'.
TOM: If we did not see the appearance, heads and tails, see the one and imagine the other, there would be no object?
DICK: None.
TOM: But when we see the appearance there is 'behind' it a suchness which we cannot see?
DICK: The relative reality is what you call 'gold' but that is only a concept: its suchness is not a shape, or a weight, or anything sensorially perceptible.
TOM: Not even a vibration, or rate of vibration?
DICK: I do not think so. A vibration is merely a vaguer and more subtle concept. The suchness you seek to imagine, but never can, is of another order altogether, of an order that is of no order.
TOM: Something that has existence in a further dimension?
DICK: I see no objection to the image.
