Now, down in the subconscious is an “I want” machine that Freud calls the id. The id is what you’re born with. When you’re just born, the id within you doesn’t know the date. It doesn’t know whether it is the period of the ordination caves in the early Neolithic or the height of the modern age; it doesn’t know whether you’re born in Timbuktu or Washington, D.C. All it knows is that you are a human animal and that you have human needs. In other words, it is sheer organism, wanting something.

The environment says, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” This interplay is the wish-prohibition conflict we talked about earlier. So you begin to take a lot of “I mustn’ts” down into the unconscious; the society’s “I mustn’t” coun- ters the id’s “I want.” What Freud calls the superego provides the stream of “I mustn’ts.” The superego is the internalization of the parental, societal voice, balancing out the id by saying, “Don’t do this, do that.”

According to Freud, ego is the function that relates the individual to reality. Reality in this terminology is nothing metaphysical whatsoever. It is empirical reality: what is here around you now, what you are doing, what your size is, what your age is, what people say to you and about you. Ego is a function that relates you to reality in terms of your personal judgment-not the judgments that you have been taught to make but the judgments that you do make.

You can judge a situation in terms of how you know you ought to judge it, and then you realize, I don’t think of it that way at all. You may consistently differ from the judgment system that your environment has given you. Only if you have made the transition to adult responsibility are you able to make your own judgments and let society’s judgments drop. Of course, if you are not really detached, they’re not going to drop; they will keep drumming back at you with feelings of guilt.

Traditional cultures in the West differ here from those in the Orient. Oriental religious instruction tells one to cancel ego. In this tradition, one is told to behave in terms of the societal ideal dictated by the superego. There is no systematic development of the ego in relationship to reality or the individual situation. Often, in conversation with someone from the Orient, if you ask a question having to do with now, the response is a deluge of all of the clichéd answers you can imagine. It is very, very difficult to get a reality judgment in terms of the immediate situation. Since the ego is not devel- oped in the Oriental traditions, you don’t get the same kind of response that we would expect in the West, with the individual taking responsibil- ity for his own judgment, his own discernment.

Well, let me give now as an illustration of the very formal attitude, the classical Indian social structure. I’d like to look at the classic notion of individual life and its development.

Of course, there are four castes or classes. In India, the four castes are the brahmin, the ksatriya, the vaiśya, and the śūdra.

Brahmin means “related to or in touch with brahman,” the cosmic power. Brahman is a genderless noun for the power that infuses and suffuses the whole world. The brahmin is the one who knows that and tells the truth about it and interprets and writes the holy books. The brahmin is the head of the social order.

The ksatriya is the one who administers the true law. He administers what the brahmin tells him to administer; this is the ideal, at any rate. The ksatriya is the sword-bearing arm of the order.

The vaisya is the citizen or merchant. The word comes from the root vis, which means “neighbor.” He is the man of money, the property owner, the landowner, the employer, and so forth. He pays his taxes, he pays his tithes, and he employs the sudras. He’s the body of the society, the guts.

The sudra is the servant, who is excluded from the religious order. He has his own religious teachers and village priests and so forth, but the Vedic and traditional Hindu Brahminical order concerns the upper three castes only; these upper three castes are called the twice born. The śūdra is the legs of the outfit, carrying the rest of the society along.

Now the goal, as I’ve said, of the Oriental society is always to cancel ego, that ego should be wiped out. The śūdra cancels ego by doing what he is told. The vaiśya cancels ego by serving, by doing as he is told, by paying his debts and bringing his family up; his goal is to make money. The ksatriya serves by administering the law with justice, without prejudice, and without favoring himself. He’s supposed to represent the perfect administration of the law. The brahmin is to know the law.

This system has excluded the majority of the people, who are called the outcasts. In a census recently made of a Bengali village community, it was found that more than half of the people were outcasts; they are simply out. The only way they come in is in extremely menial and untouchable social functions. Otherwise, they have villages of their own, living, as it were, lives outside of the domain of the holy order.

The sūdras are the craftsmen and the peasants and so forth who function within the society. Of the remaining half of that village, so percent were sudras, so that the group served by the outcasts was actually this peas- ant class. And you realize the fierceness of these divisions when you read one of the texts in the Manava-Dharmaśāstra, the “Laws of Manu.” It says if a sudra heats a recitation of a verse of the Vedas-even by accident he shall have boiling lead poured into his ears.