Here I changed what MacBeth says, just a little bit. I said “weapon” instead of “dagger,” because I look at weapon as whatever the attempt to awaken appears to be:  the weapon is the method--your approach to the attempt--floating there before your eyes.  MacBeth knows he's hallucinating.  He says, "Is this real or is it a dagger of the mind?"  I almost stopped there.  I had forgotten that line, "the dagger of the mind.”

I almost want to say, "Well now I know one of the incarnations of Buddha.  He came back as Shakespeare.  And he wrote this whole play just to get in the line about 'the dagger of the mind’.” Of course--and this is just to me--the whole play is almost worth that one line.  Think about, "Is this real or is it a dagger of the mind?  A false creation preceding from the heat of an oppressed brain?"  Now that is the actual line.  Think about it.  It is all one sentence and it came from this guy who’s supposed to be in a fight for the throne of Scotland.  Is this dagger--is this thing that I'm dealing with, this struggle to awaken--is it just my imagination about my mind or my mind's imagination about changing itself?  "Is this weapon real or is it a dagger of the mind?  A false creation preceding from an overheated, oppressed brain?"

 I almost came over and started the meeting before you got here. I got up and walked around and walked outside.  I went to light a cigarette and discovered I didn't smoke.  I had just forgotten—

And then they kill the King.  Then they let one of the other noblemen discover the body.  He believes he discovered it. He believes that no one else knows except him and the guards, who were lying next to the King, have bloody daggers in their hands.  He comes out and attempts to spread the news, "The King is dead!"  I see that as the old state of mind.  It gets kind of shaky because you can't do a story, but the actual truth is the struggle to kill the old state of mind.  I submit to you that it is like the ghost of Banquo.  It's the old state of mind continuing to pop back up.

 MacDuff discovers the body and shouts out to all the other characters still in bed, "Wake up.  Shake off your drowsy sleep!"  That is, shake off your ordinary sleep, the kind that man sleeps at night and when he wakes in the morning, he believes that he is awake.  He is not awake.  So here is MacDuff , who finds the King dead, the old state of mind dead to a huge degree.  The King is pretty seriously dead and MacDuff says, 

Wake up!  Shake off your downy sleep which is death's counterfeit 
and come look at the real thing.  

Now that one I just don't want to talk about.  That makes me laugh out loud.  I repeat, I am going to leave that one to you.  If you' re my kind of mystic, that's got enough to propel you way outside of this solar system.  "Wake up!  Shake off your downy sleep which is death's counterfeit and come see the real thing."

 How about a hint?  Face up to what is possible and what is not possible.  There is death and there is the counterfeit, a faux death.  He is saying, "All you people are being accustomed to being in bed.  You can take that as being dead, but it is a counterfeit of death.  Compare what is real and final to what is temporary."  Sleep is like temporary death.  He is saying, "Arouse from that temporary death, which is sleep, and get your asses out of bed and see the real thing."  Anyway, if I keep on--I will laugh too hard.  It's too enjoyable; you take it.

Are we not men my liege?  
Aye, in the general catalogue you pass for same.

 Now the fifth line, when he decides he has to murder his compatriot Banquo, because Banquo’s heirs would be the line of succession and not MacBeth's. MacBeth had much to fear, according to the witches, from his friend, so he had to be done in.  MacBeth calls in these nefarious characters, these murderers, and wants to be sure he has them on his side:  "You will go do this deed.  You will go murder a potential king.  You will murder he who is my potential competitor.  I hate him.  He is a great danger to me but he is also a great danger to you.  You just don’t know and it's a good thing you've got me here to tell you about it.  He's the one who got you in this position and fucked up your lives.  Now what do you think of that?"  And they realize, "Hey, we're not the kind of lily wastes that are going to put up with that kind of shit."  

Again, I'm not going into this one much because it’s so good, it makes me think Shakespeare is Abraham or Zoroaster reincarnated.  Out of the clear blue sky comes this line, that has little to do with the play.  It's just a fancy way of saying, "Well yes, we know what to do.  Would not any decent man seek revenge and hate this guy because of what you told us?"  Having nothing to do with the play, MacBeth says, "In the general scheme of things you can pass for, all the way from a bull mastiff to a stringy cur dog."  They reply, “Are we not men my liege?"  He says, "In the catalogue you go for men."  That one is even better than the third line or the fourth line.  At least lie to me and tell me you will work on it.

  I am telling you there is something there and it is far removed from the ordinary run of  “Well, here's what we should do to awaken."  The cells, in somebody's brain, were having a big old time.  I know there are those who think that people didn’t have much fun in the old days before computers.  But I know one man who, in his head, hell was being raised.  There was a party going on in his head--and he was known as Shakespeare.

What is it you do?  
It is a deed with no name.

On with the story--Now MacBeth has had Banquo done in and he is wondering if he is safe.  "I've killed the King and they're blaming it on his sons.  Have I covered my ass?  Did I forget anything?"  So he goes to look up the witches.  They are already talking about how he has screwed up his life and is suffering over it, but that's not enough.  They are going to make it worse.  

Imagine the witches doing all this-- the point is there are some forces somewhere and they are involved in activities that cannot be understood by the audience.  The witches are dancing around a cauldron and mumbling, "toads blood!” They are saying shit like that, and there are other things they are saying to each other, fairly enigmatic, that just don’t make sense.  If you are not some suspicious boom, even in the 1590's, if you are a reasonably sane person, then what they are saying is irrational.  Their incantations and what they are doing makes no sense at all to the audience.  But the point I am making is that to the witches, within their circle—to the three of them dancing around the cauldron—their words, within that context, made sense.

 I'm not talking about fights over Scotland. Forget the actual words they are saying.  Remember they’re just putting more and more into the mix.  The purpose is to stir up more vexation in the life of MacBeth.  Then he pops in suddenly and realizes he caught them doing something.  He says, "What is this that you do?"  Of course, them being magical, they realize they can outsmart him.  They don't try to hide anything.  The action just stops and he says, "What is that that you are doing?"  They just look at him and say, "The deed we do has no name."  Here are the three forces that put all of this into action--it was them that put him on the course of attempting to awaken--that is, to kill the King.  They look him right in the eye (one eye), and say, "The deed we do has no name."  Another interpretation is, "You will never understand."

 If it has no name, then a human is not going to understand it.  Looking at the witches as being, I say, other than human forces, it could be cellular forces.  I don't mean some supernatural gods, but they are at a different level than MacBeth.  That is my interpretation--that they are at a different level, they are speaking a different language, operating on different frequencies.  And so he says, "What is this deed you do?"  I'm suggesting to you when they say, "It is a deed without a name,” that is their answer.  They don't say any more and he doesn't push it.  But what they are saying is, "You will never understand it."  Yeah, they are doing something.  You are aware of that, but you can look at it as MacBeth's own brain saying, "Well, I'm certainly up to something, what is it?"  And his own brain says, "I guess you will never know."

That without remedy should be that without regard.

 MacBeth’s still whining, expressing regrets over things he's done.  In this case it's the murder of the King and the murder of his friend.  "God, I wish I hadn't done it, I wish I could undo it."  Don't get hung up on specifics.  The point is that he's whining about conditions.  "Boy, I would give anything--here I am King--to have my friend back.  To have Good King Duncan rise from the grave, but here I am helpless."  And Lady MacBeth is saying, "Shut up.  Quit your whining.  Be a man."  What she really says, (pithier than I can put it) is,  "That without remedy should be without regard.”  Things that you cannot change, you shouldn't think about, you dummy!  She's been telling him this throughout the play.  Every time they are alone, after he gets through killing someone, he starts, "Oh, I wish I hadn't done that."  And she keeps saying, "Snap out of it!  What kind of a man are you?"

 Now, and this is not even near the end of the play but about half way,  she says, "Things without a remedy should be without regard."  I don’t know whether I should make that the last one for the night or make it the last one of the seven, or should I have made the last one the line when he says, "I dare do that which becomes a man to do.  He who does more is none."  Or can you get a whole wider interpretation of his conversation with the two murderers:  "Well, what are you going to do about this affair?"  And they go, "Ah, are we not men my liege?"  And he says, "Well in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue maybe you pass for men."  Does anybody see that as being the climax of the night?

 I am assuming that seems to be the most obtuse line of all.  If you are trying to take my interpretation, I would assume that you have a much wider and different one than the words convey.  I would assume that seems to be the cloudiest part, but it is a fourth of July with fireworks display.  He says, "Are you going to leave the situation as it is; that you have been mistreated?"  I don't see that as being mistreated.  If I found out that Banquo is in charge of keeping my state of mind popping up, and I had a MacBeth say, "Well, I know what's causing you to be so distracted.  It's not you.  It's not your fault.  It's Banquo.  You're helpless!"  Think about it.

 Of course, there is another one that I didn't do.  I can't begin to quote it, I don't think, but when he says, "It's Banquo; he's the one." And they say, "are we not men, my liege?"  Then he makes his wise-ass remark, "in a cheap catalogue, then I guess you'd pass for them."  But then back to the subject, he says, "Well, do you have it in you to do what you know needs to be done?"  Then they are winking at each other, and it's obvious that they are not complete idiots.  They understand that the new king, MacBeth, wants harm to come to Banquo.  He says, "Do you have the nerve, do you have the backbone to do it?"  One of them says, "the ills and the injustices that life has inflicted on me even scare me, the smyth with which I would return and care not what I do."  What he's saying, in Shakespeare's kind of words is, "Don't worry about me.  The way life has pissed on me, it's frightening the things I would do.  There's nothing I wouldn't do to piss back on the world."  You know, "Who is this guy, just point me toward him."

Now back to my hinted interpretation.  Does anyone get this?  It's not your fault.  You are in this predicament in Life, you are condemned murderers, but it's not your fault. Also, what little we know about the murderers is just through MacBeth's speech to them.  They are pretty unsavory characters, from what he says on and off.  But then he ends up going, "It's not your fault.  You know who's responsible."  

What a relief, to finally find out, "Well, it's not my fault if I haven't made any better headway."  This is where I suggest to you that the comment MacBeth makes about them "passing for men" maybe -- just barely -- could come into play after he says a little bit more.  That is, "are they going to fall for this?"  Can you put all this in your brain?  "By the way, it's not your fault.  The blame lies over here.  Now will you do something about it?"  "Well damn right!--are we not men?"  Then that's where, after the fact, you could say that his comment about, "Well you could pass for it.  If you're dumb enough to fall for that, then you pass for a man."  

Do I have to do it for you?  "If you're a man who believes you can change your state of mind; if you're a man asleep and you believe you can awaken, then you are a man so asleep that you just barely pass for being a man."  Don't take it as a comment of futility.  I think most of you missed it anyway.  It was kind of a close shave.

Well, we spent an hour, and I didn’t talk about the brain.  I didn't talk about neural physiology or morphology or anatomy.  I guess that is a great relief for some people.  I agree, I think we should be entertained.  I just forgot how neat Shakespeare was.  Maybe it's just that I have a soft spot for anyone who enjoys language as much as he did.  I mean that as more than being a lover of language.  Somebody, as I repeat, in 1593 or 1594, whenever he wrote that particular one, the cortical cells in some guy's brain, apparently living somewhere in Southern England, were having themselves a ball.  

No particular consequence, but I almost think that it's a shame that there wasn't somebody, a Gurdjieff or somebody who wandered through town, that he could run across.  I'm telling you that whoever “Shakespeare” was, even if he never heard of this kind of activity—and the more sincere, the deeper philosophers (and it seems especially true of fiction writers and dramatists)-- are actually trying to figure out life.

Those writers trying to make a living, a reputation, all the way from the Greek dramatists, fiction writers, tellers of tales, of mythology--it was cellular activity in some men trying to figure out the nature of man.  And that is just another name for the struggle to awaken.  It's more than just another name.  The types of people who are satisfied with doing that are not really mystics.  The attempt to figure out man, in one sense, is just another name for the struggle to awaken.  But it's different types of people who follow the two different courses; different types of cellular people.  

Now you've had your culture for the night.  You can go home and turn on your TV or get out your rented movie.