[Music]
 Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life
 with Alan W. Watts
 Produced by KQED San Francisco
 for the Educational Television and Radio Center.
 [Music]
 Alan Watts is a scholar, lecturer, and the author of many widely read books
 on comparative philosophy and religion.
 [Music]
 This is not the figure of a strange pagan god.
 It is the figure of a man, an awakened man, a Buddha.
 I expect you may have wondered why almost all figures of Buddha
 or of many other Eastern sages that you see are seated like this.
 This figure of Buddha is in the posture of meditation
 and the way in which he is seated and the whole cast of his features and of his expression
 symbolize a certain attitude to life, a certain way of looking things,
 which in Indian and Chinese philosophy is considered essential to sanity.
 Perhaps I can give you some idea of the meaning of this attitude
 by demonstrating it with a Chinese character,
 a word which represents this whole attitude to life.
 Most of you probably know that Chinese characters are originally picture writing.
 And in this particular character, this half of the character is said
 originally to have represented some water bird, perhaps a stork or a heron.
 And this other part of the character is first of all a sign meaning the human eye.
 And then you put legs on it, the activity of the eye, and that means seeing.
 And the whole character is pronounced "guan."
 And it means a certain kind of observation, a certain way of looking at things,
 which might be typified by the image of a heron standing at the edge of the water,
 as in this painting, which is by the great Japanese artist Hanno Motonobu.
 There is the heron standing quietly and serenely, watching the water.
 And so the whole meaning of this attitude to life
 is what is summed up in the entire Eastern idea of meditation
 typified in these Buddha figures.
 And I want to try today to explain to you
 something of the meaning of this attitude to life.
 For fundamentally, meditation is not so much an exercise
 as it is a certain way of using one's mind or one's consciousness.
 Because normally, most human beings, when they use their eyes or their ears,
 are constantly and chronically straining to see and to hear.
 And when you come to think of it, that's very odd,
 because our eyes don't work by effort.
 They don't have to go out and get the light.
 The light comes to them.
 And in the same way, sound comes to our ears.
 And even the sense of touch comes to our fingertips.
 We don't, for example, have to press a thing hard.
 If I want in the dark, I'm trying to fumble and feel what this is.
 I don't have to press very hard to feel it,
 because the sensation simply of the hard object
 comes to the nerve ends in my skin.
 And so it's strange, isn't it, that we have acquired the habit
 of a constant and chronic effort to see clearly and to hear clearly.
 I think part of it comes from school.
 You know, when children are listening to a teacher in class,
 they're always fidgeting or doing something like this, you know,
 and looking around and twisting and jiggling.
 And the teacher says, "Pay attention!"
 And the children, immediately, to ingratiate the teacher,
 are able to sort of ham or act what paying attention is like.
 And paying attention, of course, is staring at the teacher.
 Yes, they're very interested in what you say.
 And sometimes, to get their concentration clear,
 they curl up their legs around the legs of the chair
 and go into all these strained attitudes
 so that the teacher knows they really are trying very hard to attend.
 And it is through such conditioning of that,
 through being taught that we must try to see and try to hear
 in order to have clear sight and clear hearing,
 that we learn constantly to strain our senses in their use.
 But as a matter of fact, this impedes the clarity of our senses
 because if you will try staring hard at a book in front of you
 or staring very hard at the TV screen you're looking at right now,
 you'll find that it becomes fuzzy.
 Also, in the same way, if you're trying to listen, say,
 to a telephone conversation while the children are running all over the house and screaming,
 if you try to listen to the telephone, you'll get very angry
 and you'll have to stop to yell at the children to make them be quiet.
 But on the other hand, if you just let the sound come to your ears,
 you'll have no difficulty at all in hearing.
 So, you remember then that heron I showed you?
 When that heron was watching the fish,
 it wasn't sort of going like this, getting all over the place,
 "Fish here, fish here." No, the heron was just quiet like this.
 And as it were, the whole area of vision is simply coming to the heron's eyes.
 And the moment it sees a ripple in the water, it darts down and gets the fish.
 Now, I don't think it's only that we have been taught by teachers and parents and so on
 to try to see and try to hear clearly.
 There are other factors in the problem.
 And one of them is that while we are seeing and hearing,
 we are trying to make sense of our world by thinking about it.
 And the act of thinking also introduces an element of strain into the use of our minds.
 And I think the reason for this is,
 perhaps you will remember how I showed you on a previous program,
 that thought is linear.
 You know, it goes one word after another.
 It's strung out in a line.
 We think, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought,
 in a line like this, one after another.
 Whereas when we see, we see to what is going on entirely.
 We take in a volume when we see.
 We take in a great area.
 Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line.
 But when we think, we get one thought after another.
 And so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing
 and using our consciousness or our mind as a whole.
 And this then requires a certain effort to make thought keep up
 with what we are seeing or what we are hearing.
 Also, you see, thought works by abstraction.
 What do I mean by abstraction?
 Well, a lot of Chinese characters are abstractions.
 If we take, for example, the Chinese character for man,
 it is written this way.
 Now that was originally the head and legs of a human figure.
 Something, you know, like this, when we draw an abstract figure of a man.
 Everybody knows that's a man.
 But as a matter of fact, it cuts out a great deal of man.
 This figure cuts out all the details and gives us a simple image
 which we can grasp all at once.
 And we have to do that in order to think,
 so that we can use a series of very simple images or grasps of the world,
 and these are abstractions.
 And it is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think.
 Now, thought, as I said, is slower because it goes in a line,
 thought after thought.
 And also, thought is abstract.
 That is to say, it lacks the full living quality of real life,
 just as this figure here is just a sort of skeleton,
 a ball on top of sticks,
 and therefore it lacks the vitality, the aliveness of a real man.
 Now, the more we tend to live in a world of thought,
 the more we tend to live in an abstract world
 that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature.
 And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world
 that is in some ways unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life.
 And also, people tend to think all the time.
 This becomes, for every civilized community,
 every civilized person, a sort of habit,
 which is like constantly talking to yourself.
 Now, of course, when you meet me here on the TV screen,
 I'm always talking, or almost always.
 But I assure you, I'm not always talking.
 I'm often silent, because after all,
 we have to be silent some of the time, don't we,
 in order to hear what other people have to say,
 and therefore to have something to talk about.
 In just the same way, our minds have to be silent some of the time
 if we are really to have anything to think about except thoughts.
 You know, there is a popular proverb
 which says that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.
 And there's some truth in this,
 because constant thinking,
 as distinct from simply experiencing through our senses,
 constant thinking about our experiences,
 coding our experiences into words, into signs, into the symbols of thought,
 is a buzz that goes on day in and day out inside our heads
 except when we are sleeping.
 And as a result of that,
 we begin to live in a world increasingly divorced from reality.
 And that is why in those oriental cultures,
 in India and China and Japan,
 it has always been considered important
 for everybody to spend some of his time,
 by no means all of his time, but some of it,
 not thinking, but simply in the attitude
 which was represented by that Chinese character
 which I drew at the beginning,
 pronounced "one" or "quiet observation."
 Remember this point, it's important.
 This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance,
 is a thing that human beings shouldn't do.
 On the contrary, it's a highly important acquisition of math.
 But thinking is of no real value to us
 unless we also can practice non-thinking,
 unless we can have our minds silent
 and make immediate contact with the real world
 as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.
 And so this leads to a very common practice in Asia
 among Hindus, among Buddhists, among Taoists,
 called meditation.
 And I want to try and show you something about it.
 By sitting in the posture of meditation,
 which is commonly used,
 and is done approximately like this.
 One sits upon a firm cushion,
 usually a big shitty telephone directory
 is about the right thickness.
 And ordinarily, among Oriental peoples,
 they sit in what is called lotus posture,
 or half lotus posture as I'm sitting now,
 which means that the right foot is lifted up onto the left thigh.
 You will find, of course,
 that that's an extraordinarily uncomfortable position
 if you're not used to it.
 But one of the reasons for sitting that way
 is that it locks your legs together
 so that you don't easily fall over if you should go to sleep.
 And also that this position gives you a sense
 of being very, very firmly rooted to the ground.
 And then the hands are laid like this.
 And one then turns attention to letting oneself breathe.
 You don't do a breathing exercise,
 taking deep inhalations and exhalations.
 You simply let your breath come as it wants to.
 But you, if anything, let the out-breath,
 you know the breath that goes with a sigh of relief,
 you let that be the emphasized breath rather than the in-breath.
 You don't close your eyes.
 You usually drop them a little on the floor in front of you.
 Because the object is not to cut out all the things
 that you might be experiencing through your eyes
 and through your ears,
 and through your nose and your nerve ends on the skin.
 The object is simply to let one's mind alone
 to experience but not to try to catch hold of one's experience in thoughts.
 Simply to think, to...
 No, I wouldn't say think.
 That's a word we use very ambiguously.
 When I use the word think, I mean talk to yourself
 or bring a lot of images before your mind
 which have nothing to do with what's right in front of you.
 So the function of this exercise, this posture,
 is to let the whole world come to you
 without interfering with it in any way,
 just sitting like that.
 You may say, "Oh, that's a great waste of time.
 There are all sorts of interesting things in life to do.
 Why just spend some hours sitting?"
 And the reason, though, as I try to explain,
 is that it is through this that one comes to have a contact
 no longer with a world of abstractions,
 no longer with a world of thought,
 but with the world that actually is.
 Now as you do this,
 you begin to notice a rather curious change
 in your general feeling of life.
 You notice that there ceases to be what I would call
 an interruption or an interval
 between your experience and yourself.
 You see, in our ordinary way of using our minds,
 the chronic sense of strain,
 the chronic attempt to think about and make sense
 of what we are feeling,
 is what we call our ego.
 If you say, "I experience my own existence.
 I am aware constantly of a knower
 behind and receiving all that is known,"
 then you get this chronic sensation
 of there being an "I," a self,
 who has all these experiences.
 And that "I" or self is what we call the ego.
 And this chronic sense of strain is our,
 we might call it our psychological blocking
 against our experience.
 The thing that seems to divide us
 from an external world,
 from the whole universe.
 But when in this way,
 the interval begins to diminish,
 we begin to experience our world as ourselves.
 There is no interval.
 There is no interruption between the knower and the known.
 Just as when we are completely absorbed
 listening to music or dancing to music,
 we are not aware of our separation from it.
 We go right with it.
 And so in the same way,
 when the mind responds instantly
 to what the senses bring,
 it seems almost as if the mind
 and what it experiences were one and the same.
 Now in a way, of course, this is actually true.
 We can understand this theoretically,
 but we don't ordinarily really feel it.
 For example,
 you know the old saying,
 "If a tree falls in a forest with nobody listening to it,
 will there be any noise?"
 Perhaps you know the limericks in which this problem is posed.
 There was a young man who said,
 "God, I find it exceedingly odd
 that a tree, as a tree,
 simply ceases to be when there's no one around in the quad."
 And the answer was,
 "Young man, your astonishment's odd.
 I'm always around in the quad,
 so the tree, as a tree, never ceases to be
 since observed by your faithfully God."
 But this is a great philosophical puzzle for the Western world.
 Does what we know depend on there being a knower?
 Now in a way, obviously it does.
 Because when a tree falls in the forest,
 it certainly makes vibrations in the air.
 But those vibrations in the air do not become noise
 unless they vibrate an eardrum.
 So in the same way,
 the light from the sun does not become light
 unless it falls on an eye, an eyeball.
 And two, we could say,
 the external world is full of hard things.
 But nothing is hard except in relation
 to the soft surface of the human skin.
 Nothing is heavy except in relation to human muscles.
 So if there is not a human organism,
 the world does not appear to us at all
 as having any of the characteristics
 which we attach to an external world.
 In other words, we could say,
 the sun is light but only because of eyes.
 Rocks are hard but only because of soft fingers.
 Falling rocks are noisy
 but only because of sensitive human ears.
 We cannot form any idea at all
 of what the world would be like
 without an observing mind.
 Even such things as duration,
 the span of time,
 depend upon the human mind to appreciate.
 Space depends on a human mind
 to observe the world from a particular position
 and so know that there are things
 which are distant from it.
 Without this mind,
 there could not be any world that we could think about
 or conceive or imagine in any way whatsoever.
 And so this shows in a very clear way
 that our mind and the external world go together.
 They are inseparable differences.
 You remember in a recent program
 how I tried to illustrate the idea
 of inseparable differences
 by taking a coin or an object here like a cigar
 which has two distinct ends
 but you cannot separate those ends.
 This is very important.
 It's worth repeating because it's quite fundamental.
 If I would want to take one of these ends off
 and break the thing and throw it away,
 it would still have another end.
 There would still be two ends there.
 I could never get rid of the situation
 of it having two ends.
 So you see that although the two ends are different,
 there is just one object.
 And so in the same way,
 although there is a difference in a way
 between the knower and the known,
 between man and the world,
 nevertheless, these two go together
 and they are fundamentally inseparable.
 And therefore, when our consciousness
 is responding instantly,
 without any interval or interruption,
 without any, shall we say, stopping to think about it,
 then we have a situation
 in which we are actually realizing,
 we are actually feeling
 the true physical relationship
 which exists between man and his environment.
 And this we could call the experience of oneness
 or unity with the universe,
 which is the function of meditation.
 Now,
 I think it's not difficult to see
 some very obvious values in this.
 Because, well, if we live entirely
 in a world of thought,
 all the things that we pursue in life
 tend in a way to become arid and unsatisfactory
 because we are living in an abstract world.
 In other words, nobody in his senses
 is going to eat a menu instead of dinner.
 Nobody in his senses is going to try and
 get a satisfactory diet of dollar bills.
 And yet, you see, dollar bills and menus
 stand in the same relation, on the one hand,
 to wealth, on the other hand, to dinner,
 the same relation in which thought stands to reality.
 They represent it. They symbolize reality.
 But they are in no sense substitutions for it.
 Yes, you can do a great deal of things
 if you have a lot of dollar bills.
 But unless you exchange those dollar bills
 into real concrete worth,
 they are of no value to you.
 And so, in the same way,
 if we try to live in the world of pure thought,
 we begin to feel a strange, unsatisfactory quality to the world.
 And this living in pure thought is not something
 that is only done by, you know, professors and intellectuals
 and thinking people.
 Perfectly ordinary people often live in the world of pure thought.
 As, for example, when we pursue certain goals in life,
 when we say, "I want to be successful,"
 "I want to be happy,"
 these are really abstractions.
 Because supposing you become enormously wealthy
 and you're able to afford three cars and six houses.
 You can't drive in three cars at once.
 You can't live in six houses at once.
 You have a symbol, which we call prestige,
 of your status.
 That is an abstract symbol.
 You can't really, you can't eat prestige.
 You can't eat success.
 And so, to overcome that kind of beguilement
 by the fantasies of thought,
 not thinking,
 is an important adjunct to thought.
 To be able, every so often,
 to cease the hubbub going on inside one's head,
 and to let talking to oneself stop
 and come to stillness.
 You needn't, of course, sit in the meditation posture like this to do it.
 This is simply the way it's done by Buddhists, Hindus.
 You can walk, you can sit in the ordinary way,
 you can lie in the bathtub and do it.
 You can lie on your back in bed
 before you get up in the morning and do it.
 Just let your mind alone,
 and stop trying to make sense of the world.
 So then, there is really something to think about
 other than thought itself.
 It's like if we wrote books about nothing but books.
 This is, I'm afraid, what a great deal of scholarship is.
 Books about books about books.
 And so in this way,
 through meditation,
 we come to that kind of profound peace,
 which is exhibited in the faces of the Buddhists.
 I remember particularly some words by Lafcadio Hearn,
 in which he gives a marvelous description
 of the whole attitude which these faces represent.
 "Each eidolon shaped by human faith
 remains the shell of a truth eternally divine,
 and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power.
 The soft serenity,
 the passionless tenderness of these Buddha faces
 might yet give peace of soul
 to a West weary of creeds transformed into conventions,
 eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim.
 I have the same feeling for the high as for the low,
 for the moral as for the immoral,
 for the depraved as for the virtuous,
 for those holding sectarian views and false opinions
 as for those whose beliefs are good and true."
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