Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series #3, Eastern and Western Zen.
 This talk is taken from a seminar called "Inevitable Ecstasy" on Zen Buddhism, in which Alan Watts
 compares man's effort toward attaining enlightenment to a mosquito biting an iron bull.
 It's part one of "Biting an Iron Bull."
 Here's Alan Watts.
 This seminar called "Inevitable Ecstasy" is about a very sticky problem, which is to say
 the problem to which the Buddha primarily addressed himself, which is that of agony,
 suffering.
 But before we get into that, we have to be clear about certain basics, and these basics
 have to do not so much with concepts and ideas as they do with the state of mind.
 You could call it also a state of feeling, a state of sensation, a state of consciousness,
 and we need to understand that, even be in that, before we can really go very far.
 And this is an extraordinarily difficult state of mind to talk about, even though in its
 nature it's extremely simple, because it is in a way like we were when we were babies.
 And we hadn't been told anything and didn't know anything other than what we felt, and
 we had no names for it.
 Now of course as we grow older, we learn to differentiate one thing from another, one
 event from another, and above all, ourselves from everything else.
 Well and good, provided you don't lose the foundations.
 Just as mountains are differentiated, but they're all based on the earth, so the multiple
 things of this world are differentiated, but they have, as it were, a basis.
 There is no word for that basis, not really, because words are only for distinction.
 And so there can't really be a word, not even an idea, of the non-distinction.
 We can feel it, but we can't think it.
 But we don't feel it like an object.
 You feel you're alive, you feel you're conscious, but you don't know what consciousness is,
 because consciousness is present in every conceivable kind of experience.
 It's like the space in which we live, which is everywhere.
 It's like a fish being in water, and presumably a fish doesn't know it's in the water, because
 it never goes out.
 A bird presumably knows nothing of the air, and we really know nothing of consciousness,
 and we pretend space isn't there.
 So however, when you grow up and become fascinated, which is really the right word, spellbound,
 enchanted, by all the things that adults wave at you, you forget the background, and you
 come to think that all the distinctions which you've been learning are the supremely important
 things to be concerned with.
 You become hypnotized, just in the same way as when the beak of a chicken is put to a
 chalk line, it gets stuck on that line.
 And so when we are told to pay attention to what matters, we get stuck with it, and that's
 what in Buddhism is called attachment.
 Attachment doesn't mean that you enjoy your dinner, or that you enjoy sleeping, or beauty.
 Those are responses of our organism in its environment as natural as feeling hot near
 a fire or cold near ice.
 So are certain responses of fear or of sorrow.
 They are not attachment.
 Attachment is exactly translated by the modern slang term "hanger."
 It's a kind of stickiness, or what in psychology would be called blocking, when you are in
 a state of wobbly hesitation, not knowing how to flow on.
 That's attachment, what is meant by the Sanskrit word "klesha."
 So when the chicken has its beak put to the chalk line, it's got a hang-up.
 It's stuck on that line.
 And so in the same way we get a hang-up on all the various things that we are told as
 we grow up by our parents, our aunts and uncles, our teachers, and above all by our peer group.
 And the first thing that everybody wants to tell us is the difference between ourselves
 and the rest of the world, and between those actions which are voluntary and those which
 are involuntary, what we do on the one hand and what happens to us on the other.
 And this is of course immensely confusing to a small child, because it's told to do
 all sorts of things that are really supposed to happen, like going to sleep, like having
 bowel movements, like loving people, like not blushing, stopping being anxious, and
 all sorts of things like that.
 The child is told in sum that we, your parents, elders and bettors, command you to do what
 will please us only if you do it spontaneously.
 And no wonder everybody's completely confused.
 We go through life with that burden on us.
 We therefore develop this curious thing.
 We develop a thing which is called an ego.
 Now I've got to be very clear to you what I mean by an ego.
 An ego is not the same thing as a particular living organism.
 For my philosophy, the particular living organism, which is inseparable from a particular environment,
 that is to say from the universe as centered here and now, is something real.
 It isn't a thing.
 I call it a feature of the universe.
 But what we call our ego is something abstract, which is to say it has the same order and
 kind of reality as an hour or an inch or a pound or a line of longitude.
 It is for purposes of discussion.
 It is for convenience.
 In other words, it is a social convention that we have what is called an ego.
 But the fallacy that all of us make is that we treat it as if it were a physical organ,
 as if it were real in that sense, when in fact it is composed on the one hand of our
 image of ourselves, that is our idea of ourselves, as when we say to somebody, "You must improve
 your image."
 Now this image of ourselves is obviously not ourselves, any more than an idea of a tree
 is a tree, any more than you can get wet in the word "water."
 And to go on with, our image of ourselves is extremely inaccurate and incomplete.
 Would that some God the gifted give us to see ourselves as others see us.
 We don't.
 So my image of me is not at all your image of me.
 And my image of me is extremely incomplete in that it does not include any information
 to speak of, about the functioning of my nervous system, my circulation, my metabolism, my
 subtle relationships with the entire surrounding human and non-human universe.
 So the image I have of myself is a caricature.
 It is arrived at through mainly my interaction with other people who tell me who I am in
 various ways, either directly or indirectly, and I play about with what their picture is
 of me and they play something back to me so that we set up this conception.
 And this started very, very early in life.
 And I was told, you see, and you were told, that we must have a consistent image.
 You must be you.
 You have to find your identity in terms of image.
 And this is an awful red herring.
 A lot of the current quest for identity among younger people is a search for an acceptable
 image.
 What role can I play?
 Who am I in the sense of what am I going to do in life, and so on?
 Now, while that has a certain importance, if it's not backed up by deeper matters, it's
 extraordinarily misleading.
 So therefore on the one hand there is this image which is intellectual, emotional, imaginative,
 and so forth.
 Now we would say, I don't feel that I am only an image.
 I feel there's something more real than that, because I feel, I mean, I have a sense of
 there being a particular sort of – how do we say – a centre of something, some sort
 of sensitive core inside the skin, and that corresponds to the word "I".
 Let's take a look at this.
 Because the thing that we feel as being myself is certainly not the whole body.
 Because a lot of the body can be seen as an object.
 In other words, if you stand, stretch yourself out, lie on the floor, and turn your head
 and look at yourself, you know, you can see your feet and your legs and all this up to
 here, and finally it all vanishes and there's a sort of a vague nose in front.
 And you assume you have a head because everybody else does, and you've looked in a mirror
 and that told you you had a head, but you can never see it, just like you can't see
 your back.
 So you tend to put your ego on the side of the unseen part of the body, the part you
 can't get at, because that seems to be where it all comes from, and you feel it.
 But what is it that we feel?
 Because if I see clearly, and my eyes are in functioning order, the eyes certainly are
 not conscious of themselves.
 There are no spots in front of them, no defects, in other words, in the lens or in the retina
 or in the optic nerves that give hallucinations.
 So also therefore, if my ego, my consciousness is working properly, I ought not to be aware
 of it as something sort of there, being a nuisance in a way in the middle of things,
 because your ego is awfully hard to take care of.
 Well what is it then that we feel?
 Well I think I've discovered what it is.
 It's a chronic, habitual sense of muscular strain, which we were taught in the whole
 process of doing spontaneous things to order.
 When you're taking off in a jet plane, and the thing has gone rather further down the
 runway than you think it should have without getting up in the air, you start pulling at
 your seatbelt, get this thing off the ground.
 Perfectly useless.
 So in the same way, when our community tells us, "Look carefully, now listen, pay attention,"
 we start using muscular strains around our eyes, ears, jaws, hands, to try to use our
 muscles to make our nerves work, which is of course futile.
 And in fact it gets in the way of the functioning of the nerves.
 Try to concentrate.
 And then when we try to control our emotions, we hold our breath, pull our stomachs in,
 or tighten our rectal muscles, to hold ourselves together.
 Now pull yourself together!
 Immediately, what are you to do?
 What does a child understand by that?
 He does it, muscularly, pulls himself together, because it's useless.
 So everybody chronically pulls themselves together, so that, it's so funny, if you get
 a person to just lie on the floor and relax, but there's the floor under you as firm as
 can be holding you up, nevertheless you will detect that the person is making all sorts
 of tensions, lest he should suddenly turn into a nasty jello on the floor.
 So that chronic tension, which in Sanskrit is called sankocha, which means contraction,
 is the root of what we call the feeling of the ego.
 So that in other words, this feeling of tightness is the physical referent for the psychological
 image of ourselves.
 So that we get the ego as the marriage of an illusion to a futility.
 Even though the idea of an "I" with a name, with a being, is naturally useful for social
 communication, provided we know what we're doing and take it for what it is.
 But we are so hung up on this concept, that it confuses us, even in the proposition that
 it might be possible for us to feel otherwise.
 Because we ask the question, if we hear about people who have transcended the ego, well
 we ask, "How do you do that?"
 Well I say, "What do you mean, you?
 How do you do that?"
 Because the "you" you're talking about doesn't exist.
 So you can't do anything about it.
 Any more than you can cut a cheese with a line of longitude.
 Now that sounds very discouraging, doesn't it?
 But let's suppose now, you are babies again, and you don't know anything.
 Now don't be frightened, because anything you know you can get back later.
 But for the time being, here is our awareness.
 And let's suppose you have no information about this at all, and no words for it.
 Imagine that my talking to you is just a noise.
 Now don't try to do anything about this, don't make any effort.
 Because naturally, by force of habit, certain tensions remain inside you, and certain ideas
 and words drift all the time through your mind.
 Just like the wind blows, or clouds move across the sky.
 Don't bother with them at all.
 Don't try to get rid of them.
 Just be aware of what's going on in your head, like it was clouds in the sky, or the crackling
 of a fire.
 There's no problem to this.
 All you have to do, really, is look and listen, without naming, and if you are naming, never
 mind.
 Just listen to that.
 Now that you can't force anything here, that you can't willfully stop thinking and stop
 naming, is only telling you that the separate you doesn't exist.
 It isn't a mark of defeat, it isn't a sign of your lack of practice in meditation.
 That it runs on all by itself simply means that the individual separate you is a figment
 of your imagination.
 So you are aware at this point of a happening.
 So you don't know anything about the difference between you and it.
 You haven't been told that.
 You've no words for the difference between inside and outside, between here and there,
 and nobody has taught you that what you see out in front of you is either near or far
 from your eyes.
 Watch a baby put out a finger to touch the moon.
 You don't know about that.
 Just therefore, here it is.
 You'll just call it this.
 And if you will feel it, the going on, which includes absolutely everything you feel.
 Well, whatever that is, it's what the Chinese call Tao, what Buddhists call Satchnas, or
 the unconscious, and it's a happening.
 It doesn't happen to you, because where is that?
 You, what you call you, is part of the happening, or an aspect of it.
 It has no parts, it's not like a machine.
 And it's a little scary, because you say, well, who's in control around here?
 Why should there be anyone?
 That's a very weird notion we have, that processes require something outside them to
 control them.
 It never occurred to us that processes could be self-controlling, even though we say to
 someone, 'Control yourself!'
 We can always, in order to think about self-control, we split a person in two.
 So that there's a you separate from the self that's supposed to be controlled.
 Well, how can that achieve anything?
 How can a noun start a verb?
 Yet it's a fundamental superstition that that can be done.
 So you have this process, which is quite spontaneous, going on.
 We call it life, it's controlling itself.
 It's aware of itself.
 It's aware of itself through you.
 You are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself.
 And because of it, so the universe looking at itself through you, there's always an aspect
 of itself that it can't see.
 So it is like that snake, you see, that is pursuing its tail, because the snake can't
 see its head, like you can't.
 We always find, as we investigate the universe, make the microscope bigger and bigger and
 bigger and we will find ever more minute things.
 Make the telescope bigger and bigger and bigger and the universe expands because it's running
 away from itself.
 It won't do that if you don't chase it.
 So the universe is chasing its own tail, you see, it's the thing we're talking about, this
 game, and it's a game of hide and seek.
 Really when you ask the question, 'Who is doing the chasing?' you are still working
 under the assumption that every verb has to have a subject, that when there is an action
 there has to be a doer.
 Well that's what I will call a grammatical convention, leading to what Whitehead called
 the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, like the famous 'it' in 'It is raining'.
 So when you say, 'There cannot be knowing without a knower', this is merely saying,
 no more than there can't be a verb without a subject, and that's a grammatical rule and
 not a law of nature.
 Anything you can think of as a thing, as a noun, can be described by a verb, and there
 are languages which do that.
 It sounds awkward in English, but face it, when you look for doers as distinct from deeds,
 you can't find them.
 Just as when you look for stuff underlying the patterns of nature, you can't find any
 stuff, you just find more and more patterns.
 There never was any stuff, it's a ghost.
 What we call stuff is simply patterns seen out of focus, and it's fuzzy, so we call it
 stuff, like that cake box.
 So we have these words, energy, matter, being, reality, even Tao, and we can never find them.
 They always elude us entirely, although we do have the very strong intuition that all
 this that we see is connected or related.
 So we speak of a universe, although that word really means one turn.
 It's your turn now.
 Like you make one turn to look at yourself, but you can't make two turns and see what's
 looking.
 You've been listening to Biting an Iron Bull, Part 1, with Alan Watts, from the Alan Watts
 Radio Series #3, Eastern and Western Zen.
 For information how to obtain the radio series on cassette tape, call 1-800-969-2887, or
 you can write to The Electronic University, P.O.
 Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.
 When you call or write, please indicate the name of your local station.
 You heard the program Biting an Iron Bull, Part 1, from the Alan Watts Radio Series #3,
 Eastern and Western Zen.
 Again, the phone number is 1-800-969-2887.
 That's 1-800-WO-WATTS.
 The address, The Electronic University, P.O.
 Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.
 The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by The Electronic University.
 Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records.
 I'm Neil Harvey.
 Thank you for listening.
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 [ Music ]
 Welcome to another talk from the Allen Watts Radio Series Number Three,
 Eastern and Western Zen.
 This is part two of a talk from the seminar, Inevitable Ecstasy,
 in which Allen Watts explores the doctrine of the void,
 one of the central themes in Zen Buddhism.
 It was recorded on the ferry boat Vallejo in the late '60s.
 It's called Biting an Iron Bull, Part Two.
 Here's Allen Watts.
 [ Music ]
 >> So, it's very simple, therefore.
 You only have to understand that you can't do anything about it.
 And as they say in Zen, you cannot take hold of it,
 but you can't get rid of it.
 And in not being able to get it, you get it.
 But there it is, that you can struggle and struggle and struggle,
 and indeed will do so, as long as you have the feeling inside you
 that you're missing something.
 And people, your friends, all sorts of people will do their utmost
 to persuade you that you're missing something,
 because they're missing something, and they think they're getting it
 through a certain way, and therefore,
 to assure themselves they'd like you to do it, too.
 So, there's this thing.
 And you see, a clever guru beguiles his students
 by letting them have the feeling of success and accomplishment
 in certain directions.
 A guru gives people exercises, A, that are difficult
 but can be accomplished, and B, that are impossible.
 You'll always be hung up on the impossible ones,
 but the possible ones, you will get a feeling of making progress,
 so that you will double your efforts to solve the impossible exercises.
 And then, they arrange things in many, many ranks and levels
 through which you can advance.
 This stage of consciousness, that stage of consciousness,
 or think of the degrees of masonry, or so on.
 Ranks in learning things, the different belts you get in judo
 and all that kind of jazz.
 You can do that, and it gives people the sense of competing
 with themselves, or even with others.
 Because of the feeling inside that there is just something I'm missing.
 And of course, if you are learning any sort of skill,
 and you haven't perfected the skill, there is indeed something you're missing.
 But in this thing that we're talking about, that isn't true.
 Because you, as the Buddhists say, are Buddhas from the very beginning.
 And all that searching is like looking for your own head,
 which you can't see, and therefore might conceivably
 imagine that you'd lost.
 So that indeed is the point.
 That we don't see what looks, and therefore we think we've lost it.
 And so we're in search of the Self, the Atman.
 So that's the one thing we can't find.
 Because we have it, we are it.
 But we confuse it with all these images.
 So therefore, if you understand perfectly clearly
 that you can't do anything to find that very, very important thing,
 God, enlightenment, nirvana, whatever, then what?
 Well, I find it so stupid, because even if I tell myself,
 "Well, there's nothing I can do about it," why did I say that?
 You see?
 Why did I say that?
 Why did I go out of my way to tell myself there's nothing I can do about it?
 Because in the back of my mind there was a funny little feeling
 that if I did tell myself that, something different would happen.
 See?
 All right.
 So even that doesn't work.
 Nothing works.
 Now, when absolutely nothing works, where are you?
 Well, here we are.
 I mean, there's this feeling of something going on.
 Now, the world doesn't stop dead when there's nothing you can do.
 Here's something happening.
 Now just there, that's what I'm talking about.
 There's the happening.
 When you are not doing anything about it, you're not not doing anything about it,
 you just can't help it, it goes on despite anything you think
 or worry about or whatever.
 Now, there is the point.
 Right there.
 And remember, although you will think at first that this is a kind of determinism,
 there are two reasons why it isn't.
 One, there is nobody being determined.
 Now, other people think of determinism as the direction of what happens by the past,
 the causation of what happens by the past.
 Now, if you will use your senses, you will see that that is a hallucination.
 The present does not come from the past.
 If you listen and only listen, close your eyes,
 where do the sounds come from according to your ears?
 You hear them coming out of silence.
 The sounds come and then they fade off.
 They go like echoes or echoes in the labyrinths of your brain, which we call memories.
 The sounds don't come from the past.
 They come out of now and trail off.
 You can do that later with your eyes.
 You can see, like when you're watching television,
 there's a vibration coming out from the screen to your eyes.
 And it starts from there somehow.
 Because we see the hands and then they move, we think that the movement is caused by the
 hands and that the hands were there before and so can move later.
 We don't see that our memory of the hands is an echo of their always being now.
 They never were, they never will be, they're always now.
 So is the motion.
 And that that is recollected as the trailing off echo like the wake of a ship.
 And so just as the wake doesn't move the ship, the past does not move the present,
 unless you insist that it does.
 And if you say, well, naturally I'm always moved by the past, that's an alibi.
 And it completely fails to explain how you ever learn anything new.
 That's why all the psychologists who are mostly behaviorists are completely bogged down in
 trying to find a theory of learning.
 Because according to the theory of learning that we have, everything new that you assimilate
 is really only learned when translated into terms of what you already know.
 So in that sense, learning becomes like a library which increases only by the addition
 of books about books already in it.
 A lot of libraries are indeed like that.
 So that's what we call scholasticism.
 So then you become aware that this happening isn't happening to you because you are the
 happening.
 The only you there is, is what's going on.
 Feel it.
 And disregard these stupid distinctions that you've been taught.
 I mean, stupid relatively speaking.
 And feel it genuinely.
 When you feel it genuinely, you get down to rock bottom, all that isn't there.
 That's a game that's been erected on it.
 And it isn't determined.
 In other words, you get this odd feeling of a synthesis between doing and happening.
 In which doing is as much happening as happening.
 And happening is as much doing as doing.
 And if you're not very careful at that point, you'll proclaim yourself God Almighty in the
 Hebrew Christian sense.
 Like Freud alleges, babies feel that they're omnipotent.
 And in a way they are.
 I am omnipotent insofar as I'm the universe.
 But I'm not omnipotent in the role of Alan Watts.
 Only cunning.
 So now then, this sensation of the happening is basic to all we want to explore.
 It's there as you see you can't do anything.
 And as you see you can't do anything, you don't go and distract yourself with something
 else like committing suicide or getting drunk or any sort of distraction.
 Because if you do that, you will miss what follows from the feeling of what is going
 on when you're not doing anything.
 When you're not able even to not do anything.
 See, this is a sticky place.
 You can't get in and you can't get out.
 That's why it's called in Zen the mosquito biting the iron bull.
 Or the man who swallowed the ball of red hot iron which he can't gulp down and can't spit
 out.
 See, it's that difficult.
 What are you to do or not do?
 And that tells you, you see, that dilemma.
 That what you thought was you just isn't there at all.
 Now don't make it difficult because that's a form of evading it.
 Don't make it easy, that's a form of evading it.
 It's neither difficult nor easy because if it were difficult it would have to be difficult
 for someone, if it were easy it would have to be easy for someone.
 And the someone we're talking about is just the one that isn't there.
 And if you think it is there, okay, it's a free country, you can have that thought, but
 it's a thought.
 In other words, your ego is a thought among thoughts.
 It is not in fact the controlling thinker or the feeler or the censor.
 It's one of them.
 So therefore this thing is going along.
 And as I say, we get anxious because we feel nobody's in control, but nobody ever was.
 You know, and you've lived thus far a reasonably orderly life.
 I mean there have been some catastrophes and messes, but it's amazing how we have got this
 far.
 I mean the thing looks after itself.
 And you will well remember that a lot of times that when you thought you were in charge and
 doing something sensible, you did something extremely foolish.
 And when you thought you did something extremely foolish, it turned out to be a blessing.
 That's the way things go.
 That's what it's going to all come to.
 With these physicists who think of the energy of the universe running down, dissipating
 in radiation gradually, gradually, gradually, gradually, until there's nothing at all left.
 And for some reason or other we're supposed to find this depressing.
 But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness, where does all
 this come from?
 Obviously from nothingness.
 Once again you get how it looks behind your eyes.
 So cheer up, you see.
 This is what is meant in Buddhist philosophy by saying we are all basically nothing.
 When the sixth patriarch says the essence of your mind, that's how it is behind your
 eyes, is intrinsically pure.
 The pure doesn't mean a non-dirty story state of mind, as it is apt to mean in the word
 Puritan.
 Pure means clear, void.
 So you know the story when the sixth patriarch was given his office as successor because
 he was truly enlightened, there was a poetry contest.
 And the losing one wrote the idea that the mind, the consciousness, was like a mirror
 which had to be polished.
 And constantly one, "I have to polish my mirror, I have to purify my mind, see, so
 that I'm detached and calm and clear-headed and, you know, Buddha'd."
 But the one who won the contest said, "There is no mirror and the nature of the mind is
 intrinsically void, so where is there anywhere for dust to collect?"
 See, so in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it's
 your reality, then how can anything contaminate you?
 All the idea of your being scared and put out and worried and so on is just nothing,
 it's a dream, because you're really nothing.
 But this is the most incredible nothing.
 And the sixth patriarch likewise went on to contrast emptiness of indifference, which
 is sort of blank emptiness, see, if you think of this nothingness as mere blankness and
 you hold on to the idea of blankness and kind of grisly about it, you haven't understood
 it.
 He said nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe.
 All the sun, moon and stars and the mountains and rivers and the good men and the bad men
 and the animals and the insects, the whole bit, all are contained in void.
 So out of this void comes everything and you are it.
 What else could you be?
 See, so what I'm showing you is that all this hocus-pocus about the fear of nothingness
 is that truly speaking nothingness is what we want to talk about when we talk about the
 spiritual.
 Only it's all been ignored, it's all been put down.
 You say, oh nothingness, bleh, heaven preserve us from that.
 But that's where the secret lies.
 And obviously the secret always lies in the place you never think of looking for it.
 In mythology this comes again and again.
 Okay, this is Christmas.
 Where is the Christ born?
 In a palace?
 No.
 Where nobody would think of looking.
 In pigsty.
 I thought that was rather funny.
 Well we don't know who the prince is without the carpenter, do we?
 Now it's in that sense really that I could suggest to you that you meditate on nothingness.
 I know you can't think about it.
 But yet when it becomes perfectly clear to you that that's what you are, and what you
 were before you were born, where can anybody stick a knife into you?
 Fundamentally, you see.
 If you see that, now we want to go on and be able to answer all the people who will
 come and bug us about it.
 Because whether you say anything about it to other people or not, people are going to
 bug you about this.
 And say, oh no, no, no, no, you really are something, you know, you'll know it, wowee,
 you know, life isn't the way you think, it can be awful, see, it can be real.
 They'll say, oh, you can't, where in such a philosophy as this is there any basis for
 the love of one's fellow men, for joy in children, for cultivating gardens, for doing this and
 that and the other thing?
 Well, I say, there is no basis in it.
 That's the same way there is no basis in emptiness for form, or so it seems.
 But only precisely to the degree that you have discovered the nothingness that you are.
 You find you're suddenly full of energy.
 That is energy.
 It's the source and origin of energy.
 So that when, you know, there's sort of nothing in your way, then you can do exactly what
 I was describing as having this glee for going into doing this, that and the other thing,
 and being thoroughly creative.
 But you can't be creative out of just plain somethingness.
 You need nothingness to be creative.
 And that's what we are.
 And this too is real nothingness.
 And I think it's not darkness.
 It's not like being buried alive forever.
 It's not like rest.
 Even when the Catholics sing, "Rest eternal, grant unto them, O Lord, and let light perpetual
 shine upon them."
 This isn't rest, because it isn't motion.
 Neither motion nor rest.
 What is it?
 Nobody can imagine.
 And it's at that point you see where the imagination completely runs out and stops.
 There we've hit the thing.
 See, there you are, right at the fundamental mystical reality.
 Now, what this is we're talking about is what mystics have quite often discussed.
 This isn't read very much.
 It's a state called agnosia, which means unknowing.
 There's a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an English monk in the 14th century,
 but it's based on another book called Theologia Mystica, which was written in the 6th century
 by an unknown Syrian monk who used the name of Dionysius the Areopagite.
 But this book ends up with a description of God, which is all in negatives.
 Not any kind of anything you can imagine at all.
 Not light, not power, not spirit, not fatherhood, not sonship, not this, that, and the other,
 all the way down the line.
 Anything that anybody's ever said or thought about God is denied, because God is infinite
 and therefore beyond the reach of any conception at all.
 So he says that anybody who, having a vision, thought he saw God would not have seen God
 but some creature that God has made that is less than God.
 So again, you approach, in a Christian context, said in such a way that even St. Thomas Aquinas
 bought it, that you can't impute heresy to it, because everybody's got to agree that
 God is the witch than which there is no witcher, and this guy spells it out.
 So in the same way you get Nagarjuna saying that the ultimate reality is shunyata, voidness.
 So Shankara gets at it, where he says that which is the knower or the knowing in everything
 can never itself be an object of its own knowledge, for fire doesn't burn itself, although it
 burns other things.
 So we never know what the Brahman is, just like the eyes don't ever see the head.
 If you put something there, you are stopping short of nothing, and you don't get the whole
 benefit of it, that's all.
 If you insist that there is something there, that there is the loving Father at the end
 of the line, or the Paradise Garden, you are really cheating yourself.
 Because it's only when you have thorough emptiness and real downright nothingness at the end
 of the line that you get the full impact.
 No holds.
 Look, Mama, no hands.
 See?
 Now I really think that's the simplest thing I can possibly tell you.
 I really don't know what else there is to be said about this whole Zen project, or mysticism,
 Vedanta, or what have you.
 It comes down to that, and there are infinitely many ways of evading.
 But what I'm trying to point out to you, you see, is the way in which you see the point,
 by taking the line of least resistance, by facing the facts, by not super-adding to truth
 something you contribute to it, your own business that you put up, but saying, "If I follow
 what I conceive or can see with my senses to be reality, as far as we can look, it seems
 that this is sort of the inevitable conclusion, which everybody has spent endless effort in
 arguing about and resisting, not realizing that if they went the whole way, how splendid
 it would be."
 And that's all you have to do.
 You've been listening to Biting an Iron Bull, Part 2, with Alan Walker.
 And this has been a presentation of the Biting an Iron Bull, Part 2.
 Thank you for listening.
 Allen Watts RADIO SERIES #3 - Eastern and Western ZEM
 Again, the phone number is 1-800-969-2887 That's 1-800-WO-WATTS
 The address, The Electronic University, P.O.
 Box 2309, San Anselmo, CA 94979.
 The Love of Wisdom with Allen Watts is produced by The Electronic University.
 I'm Neil Harvey.
 Thank you for listening.
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