Indras Net

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