Here's Alan Watts You start from noticing all the particular things and being baffled by their multiplicity and dealing with the multiplicity of things But as you go into this you discover as you understand things, what do you mean when you understand things? it means you become aware of their relationships to each other and Eventually you see the unity behind them and It is as if the multiplicity of the world dissolved into unity And so here you encounter a problem I Can see the world as a unity I Can see the world as a multiplicity, but how the devil am I going to put the two visions together? If I am to be a practical success In business in family life and so on I have to observe the world of particulars its particulars that matter I Have to know chalk from cheese but if I become a Saint a monk or a hermit then I can or even perhaps a poet or an artist I will forget about the practical matters and contemplate the unity the secret meaning underlying all events But then every all those people people are going to say to me you're you're falling down on the job you've escaped from life Because they feel that the world of particulars is the real world, but the other guy says no your particulars are not real You make a success of things. Yes, but it's completely temporary You think you're an important person that you're really contributing to human life but actually Your success in doing this sort of thing lasts for a few years and then you fall apart like everybody else does Where's your success now when you're dead? What happened to the millions of dollars you made? Where are you all gone? So that isn't real? From the standpoint of the person who concentrates on the unity So then to perfect our understanding we have to go to the third of these worlds, which is called Riji Muge Now that means between re the unity and G the particulars Moo, there is no guess That means the world of the universal and the world particulars are not incompatible Let's take two very different things And see how they can be united take shape and color Never in a million years. Can you with a black pencil that can draw shapes make red? But if you have read you can draw a circle You can draw a red circle even though the circle shape and the red color Will never be the same Yet red circle they go beautifully together So think of circle as G and red as re The circle is the particular the color is the universal they go together so Then we might say the properly rounded out person Is both spiritual and material both Other worldly and worldly This is the supreme attainment of the human being to be both don't get one-sided a person who is What you might call just a materialist Ends up by being very boring It's you know, you can live the successful life of the world and You can own every kind of material refinement You can have the most beautiful Home delicious food marvelous yachts and cars and everything but if you have no touch of mysticism it eventually is all perfectly boring and You will get tired of it Then on the other hand there are people who are purely spiritual and They live in a kind of dry world where all luxury has been scrubbed away and They are very intense people when you are in their presence of the very spiritual person an excessively spiritual person You feel inclined to sit on the edge of your chair. You are not at ease because you know the eye of judgment is looking through you and Going down into your very soul and finding that you're just a scallywag after all and here's this absolutely sincere this dreadfully honest and Unselfish person this is something which is always puzzling to people brought up in a Western environment Because Great spiritual people Are often very very senses Because they they can't be materialist In the ordinary sense they can't be straight open sensuous Because for them the world is too wonderful for that Any any human being is too marvelous to be treated as just a kind of sexual object They may be very much a sexual object, but so marvelous You have to stop with it and really go into the whole of that marvelous wonderful personality So there is a trouble keeps coming up for the West when you go to church, and you suddenly go to a church where there's a marvelous clergyman and You think he is a very exemplar of life And you idealize him and then suddenly there develops a frightful scandal that he has an affair with his secretary and You think all is lost that the faith has been sold out that everything is going to rack and ruin because he was not purely spiritual and He himself may be terribly confused and worried about this Because in our world you see we make the spiritual and the material mutually exclusive But read gmugga this third world means that between the spiritual and the material there is no obstruction So we might say this Would sound as if it were the highest level But it's one more to come Which is called GG mugge? This means then a suddenly he has disappeared But between G and G there is no obstruction Between one event and any other event or events there is no Mutual exclusiveness shall I put it that way? This is the doctrine the highest doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism which you could call the doctrine of the mutual interpenetration of all things or the mutual interdependence of all things and Its symbol is the what is called Indra's net that is used in the avatar Suka Sutra Imagine at dawn and Three-dimensional spiders web covered in dew a Vast vast spiders web that is the whole cosmos and There's not only a kind of a flat thing about a solid thing and a solid in four five six and n dimensions Covered with Jewels of dew all of which have rainbow coloring and Every drop of dew contains in it the reflection of every other drop of dew and Since every drop of dew contains the reflections of all the others Each reflected drop of dew contains the reflections and see of all the others and so at infinite Now this is the Mahayana vision of the world Which is to say this is relativity? that Whatever exists in this world and Is characterized as something particular as a thing as an event has something or other you see as a unit? This does not exist without all other such things and events So that you might say any one event implies all events and All events the total universe past present and future Depends on every single member In other words you may say I can understand that I depend on this whole universe There could not be me unless there was everything else. It is harder to see the corollary of that That the whole universe depends on you You might say well how can that be because I come into being and then I go out of being and When I'm before I was born. I'm sure the universe was here and After I die, I'm sure it will go on. How can you say then that the whole thing depends on me very simply? It depends on your supposing you're dead and we're talking about someone in the past. Let's say we're talking about Socrates and I'm going to say this whole universe depends on Socrates I May put it more exactly It depends on Socrates having existed You see your parents now Some of your parents may be alive, but some of your parents may be dead Without your parents you would not have come into being So you depend on your parents even when your parents have gone? So everything Even when you disappear the universe will still depend on you on Your having been here or you have not yet arrived. It depends on you're going to be here So we can say obviously going back to Socrates The fact that Socrates existed tells us something about the kind of world we're living in this world once Socrates And that Socrates and his wisdom was a symptom of the kind of universe We're living in in just the same way as I showed you that an apple is a symptom of a tree Certain kind of tree tells us something about that tree what it functions how it produces things So a world which produced Socrates or a world which produced John Doe Who was nobody in particular and nobody ever remembered him or thought to write his biography Nevertheless for all his obscurity the whole universe depends on him and it depends equally on every fruit fly Every gnat every vibration of every gnat's wing and it depends on every last electron However brief its manifestation may be So that what what this is saying is That everything that there is You Implies everything else and all those other things Collectively in their totality which we call the universe in turn imply Each individual object event and so on that's the meaning of him brothers net So that This is called in Zen to take up a blade of grass and use it as a golden Buddha 16 feet high When you have a chain and you pick up a link all the other links come up with it see Because it implies if this is a link it is a link in a chain if it isn't it's just an oval piece of metal But if it's a link Up come all other links so if you are event Every event no, no such thing as a single event. The only possible single event Is all events whatsoever? That could be regarded as the only possible atom The only possible single thing is everything But the things that we call things all in imply each other. We know What we are only in relation to what what we aren't We know of the sensation of oneself only in relation to a sensation of something other So the other goes with the self as the back goes with the front and your life, however short Everything depends on it If that did not happen nothing would happen So in this sense the whole world bears your signature It would not be the same world if it weren't for you You've heard haven't you what is called the pathetic fallacy? This was a idea Of the 19th century which said that It was false wrong to project human feelings on the world The wind in the pine trees is not sighing if you were sighing The Sun is not happy If you are who are happy when the Sun shines, so don't mix up Your happiness with the Sun the Sun has no feeling the Sun is not human the wind has no feeling and is not human The poet says the moon Doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare and The logician says no the poet looks round with delight at the moon in the bare heavens How awful I Mean if that's what is if that's the point you see better not say any poetry just have prose But actually the moon does look round with delight when the poet looks round with delight because The world of which one symptom is the moon is the same world of which another symptom is the poet They go together a world where there is a moon implies a world where there is a poet a World whether it's a poet implies a world where there is a moon So in this sense the moon can be said to look round with delight through the agency of the poet Because You can't separate poet and moon Just as you can't separate head and feet without destroying the unity of the body So in that sense then this whole world is a human world And we should not take the silly attitude Philosophy called the philosophy of the pathetic fallacy Which says outside our skins it's all inhuman and dumb and blind force And only inside that the skin is there a human world All this world is human Because it depends not only on the existence of humanity in general But on the existence of Mary Smith in particular So the whole world is covered as it were with your personal signature But at that moment when you suddenly seem to be everything and to be Mr.. A you know You suddenly see the obverse of this that your particular personality Is nothing at all without everything else? without everybody else I Need in order to be Alan Watts. I need every single other human being and the Uncontrollable the uncontrollable otherness of all those other human beings that I can't do anything about they're going to be themselves whatever I do and yet at the same time I Depend on all that difference from me and yet they all depend Likewise on me So that I'm in a very funny position the moment I would Be ego lowless and say I'm nothing without you Then suddenly I find I'm the kingpin they all depend on me then suddenly when I get Swell headed about being the kingpin I find I'm nothing at all without them So everything keeps going But a bit of blood in other words the moment you think got it in one state it transforms itself into the other That's the Gigi Muge Now in Gigi Muge you see You've got a vision of the world in which Everybody is boss and nobody is boss There is no one boss who governs the whole thing it takes care of itself, it's a colossal democracy But yet every man and every who we sue and every snail is king in this world {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.78 sec Decoding : 0.63 sec Transcribe: 1620.29 sec Total Time: 1621.70 sec