Alan Watts - Philosophies of Asia

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 01 - Ecozen =====

I suppose most of you have heard of Zen, but before going on to explain any details about it, I want to make one thing absolutely clear.

I am not a Zen Buddhist. I am not advocating Zen Buddhism. I am not trying to convert anyone to it.

I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer.

That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music.

He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's.

And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or violinist with his violin.

I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy.

Now then, when that's been said, and I hope it's put your minds at rest, let me give you, first of all, some simple historical information.

Zen, Zen is a form of Buddhism.

It originated in China about 500 A.D.

And about 1200 A.D. it migrated to Japan, where it exists today.

And it is a form, it's a way of life that has had an immense influence on the arts and on the culture, the poetry and architecture of the Far East.

It has lately become of enormous interest to many people in other parts of the world.

Now, normally, when one talks about Buddhism, and Zen is a form of Buddhism, it is supposed that you're talking about a religion.

And people are apt to classify themselves as Buddhists, as they might say, I am a Catholic, or a Methodist, or a Baptist, or an Episcopalian, or a Jew.

But that is rather misleading.

Buddhism is not a religion in that sense.

If we want to find an equivalent to Buddhism in our society today in the West, probably the nearest thing to it is psychotherapy.

When a person goes to a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst to work out a serious personal problem, not because he's just nutty,

I mean, not necessarily because he has hallucination or excessive singing in the ears with no clear physical origin,

but when a person feels that his whole life is somehow disoriented and wrong,

and he doesn't go to the preacher because the preacher only moralizes to him and says,

my man, you should have more faith in God or something.

So he goes instead to a doctor because in our day, a man with the tag of science on him has more prestige than a man who has the tag of religion.

And so when a psychiatrist goes to work on you, his objective is more or less to change your state of consciousness.

That is to say, if your state of consciousness, your state of mind, is one of being day after day constantly depressed,

the objective of going to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist is to have your state of consciousness changed to one of happiness.

Now, in a somewhat similar way, the objective of Buddhism in all its forms is to bring about a fundamental change

change in a human being's everyday state of consciousness.

If I make it yet more specific, it's to bring about a change in your sense of personal identity,

that is to say, in your sensation of who and what you are.

And in this way, Buddhism, which I suppose you know, is a method of changing consciousness,

discovered or invented by a man called Gotama, who lived in India shortly after 600 BC,

who was given the title Buddha because the word means the awakened one,

the man who woke up.

And therefore, that very title suggests that ordinary people are asleep.

I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this.

And when he came in, he used to be silent and he would look at the audience

and he had gazed at everybody in the audience particularly for a long time

and everybody would begin feeling vaguely embarrassed.

And when he'd gazed at them for a long time, he'd say,

Wake up!

You're all asleep.

And if you don't wake up, I won't give any lecture.

Now, in what sense are we asleep?

The Buddhist would say that almost all human beings have a phony sense of identity,

a delusion, a hallucination as to who they are.

Now, I'm terribly interested in this problem of identity.

And I try and find out what people mean when they say the word I.

I think this is one of the most fascinating questions.

Who do you think you are?

Now, what seems to develop is this.

Most people think that I is a center of sensitivity somewhere inside their skin.

And the majority of people feel that it's in their heads.

Civilizations in different periods of history have differed about this.

Some people feel that they exist in the solar plexus.

Other people feel that they exist about here.

But in American culture today, or in the Western culture in general,

most people feel that they exist in here.

And there is, as it were, a little man sitting inside the center of the skull.

And he has a television screen in front of him,

which gives him all messages from the eyeballs.

He has earphones on, and that gives him all messages from the ears.

And he has in front of him a control panel with various dials and buttons and things

which enable him to influence the arms and legs

and to get all sorts of information from the nerve ends.

And that's you.

So we say in popular speech,

I have a body.

Not I am a body, but I have one,

because I am the owner of the body in the same way as I own an automobile.

And I can take the automobile to the mechanic,

and occasionally in the same way I have to take my body

to the mechanic, the surgeon, the dentist, the doctor,

and have it repaired.

But it belongs to me.

It goes along with me.

I'm in it.

A child, for example, can ask mother,

Mom, who would I have been

if my father had been someone else?

That seems a perfectly simple and logical question for a child to ask.

Because of the presumption that

your parents gave you your body

and you were popped into it,

maybe at the moment of conception

or maybe at the moment of birth,

from a repository of souls in heaven,

and your parents simply provided the physical vehicle.

So that age-long idea that is indigenous,

especially to the Western world,

is that I am something inside a body,

and I am not quite sure whether I am or am not my body.

Some doubt about it.

I say I think.

I walk.

I talk.

But I don't say I beat my heart.

I don't say I shape my bones.

I don't say I grow my hair.

I feel that my heart beating,

my hair growing,

my bone shaping

is something that happens to me.

And I don't know how it's done.

But other things I do.

And next,

I feel quite surely

that everything outside my body

is quite definitely not me.

There are two kinds of things outside my body.

Number one is other people.

And they're the same sort of thing as I am.

But also, they're all little men

locked up inside their skins.

And they're intelligent.

They have feelings and values.

And are capable of love and virtue.

But number two

is the world that's non-human

that we call nature.

And that's stupid.

It has no mind.

It has emotions, maybe, and animals.

But on the whole,

it's a pretty grim business.

Dog eat dog.

And when it gets to the geological level,

it's as dumb as dumb can be.

It's a mechanism.

And there's an awful lot of it.

And that's what we live in the middle of.

And the purpose of being human

is, we feel,

to subjugate nature.

To make it obey our will.

And we arrived here.

We don't feel that we belong in this world.

It's foreign to us.

In the words of the poet

Haussman,

I, a stranger and afraid

in a world I never made.

And so, all around us today,

we see the signs of man's battle with nature.

I'm living at the moment

in a marvelous house

in the Hollywood Hills.

And we are overlooking a lake.

And on the other side of the lake,

the whole hill

has suddenly been interrupted

with a ghastly gash

where they have made level lots

for building tract homes

of the kind you would build

on a flat plain.

This is called

the conquest of nature.

These houses will eventually

fall down the hill

because they are causing soil erosion

and they're being maximally stupid.

The proper way to build a house

on a hillside

is to do it in such a way

as to effect

the minimum interference

with the nature of the hill.

After all,

the whole point of living in the hills

is to live in the hills.

There's no point

in converting the hills

into something flat

and then going and living there.

You can do that already

on the ground.

So people,

the more people live in the hills,

the more they spoil the hills

and they're just the same

as people living on the flat ground.

I mean, how stupid can you get?

Well, anyway,

this is one of the symptoms

of our phony sense of identity,

of our phony feeling

that we are something lonely,

locked up in a bag of skin,

confronted with a world,

an external, alien, foreign world

that is not me.

Now, according to certain

of these great ancient philosophies

like Buddhism,

this sensation of being

a separate, lonely individual

is a hallucination.

It's a hallucination

brought about

by various causes,

the way we are brought up,

being the chief of them,

of course.

I remember as a child,

and you probably have

very similar memories to mine,

that all our parents

were desperately interested

in identifying us.

Don't you remember

that sometimes you went out

and played with other children,

and there was someone

in the group of other children

you admired and look up to,

and you came home

imitating the mannerisms

of that other child.

And your mother said to you,

Johnny, Johnny,

that's not you,

that's Peter.

And you felt a little bit ashamed,

because somehow

you would let her down.

She wanted you to be you,

her child,

and not Mrs. Jones' child,

Peter.

And so, in many ways,

we are all taught this.

For example,

the main thing

that we are all taught

in childhood

is that you must do

that which will only be appreciated

if you do it voluntarily.

Now, darling,

a dutiful child

must love its mother.

But now,

I don't want you to do it

because I say so,

but because you really want to.

Or,

you must be free.

See, this comes into politics.

Everybody must vote.

You see, imagine,

you're members of a democracy.

And you must be members of a democracy.

See, you're ordered to.

Crazy.

Also,

thou shalt love the Lord thy God.

Is that a commandment or a joke?

You know,

if you suggest that the Lord is joking,

most people in our culture are offended

because they have a very moronic conception of God

as a person totally devoid of humor.

But the Lord is highly capable of joking

because joking is one of the most constructive things you can do.

So,

when you are told

who you are

and that you must be free,

furthermore,

that you must survive,

you must go on living,

and that becomes a kind of compulsion,

you get mixed up.

It's very simple.

Of course you get mixed up.

If you think you must do something

which will only be the thing required of you

if you do it freely,

these are the sort of influences, then,

that cause human beings all over the world

to feel isolated,

to feel that they are centers of awareness

locked up in bags of skin.

Now, this sensation of our identity

can be shown and demonstrated to be false.

by some of the disciplines of our own science.

When we describe a human being

or any other living organism

from a scientific point of view,

all that means is that we're describing it carefully.

We are going to describe very carefully

what a human being is

and what a human being does.

All right.

And we find that as we go on with that description,

we can't describe the human being

without describing the environment.

We can't say what a human being is doing

without also saying

what the world around him is doing.

Just imagine for a moment

that you couldn't see anything up here except me.

You couldn't see the curtains behind me.

You couldn't see the stage.

You couldn't see the microphone.

You could only see me.

That was all you could see.

What would you be looking at?

You wouldn't see me at all

because you wouldn't see my edges.

And my edges are rather important

for seeing me.

My edges would be identical

with the edge of your eyesight

with that vague oval curve

which is the field of vision.

And what you would be looking at

would be my necktie,

my nose,

my eyes,

and so on.

But you wouldn't see my edges.

So you'd be confronted

with a very strange monster

and you wouldn't know

it was a human being.

Because to see me

you need to see my background.

And therein lies a clue

of which we are mostly ignorant.

In Buddhist theory,

the cause of our phony sense of identity

is called avidya

and that means ignorance.

Although it's better to pronounce it

ignorance,

the having a deluded sense of identity

is the result of ignoring certain things.

So when you look at me

and I manage by behaving up here

in a kind of a more or less interesting way,

I cause you to ignore my background

because I concentrate attention on me.

Just like a conjurer,

a stage magician,

in order to perform his tricks

misdirects your attention.

He talks to you about something

he's doing here

and he talks to you about his fingers

and how empty they are

and he can pull something out of his pocket

in plain sight

and you don't notice it.

And so a magic happens.

That's ignorance.

Selective attention.

Focusing your consciousness

on one thing

to the exclusion

of many other things.

So in this way,

we concentrate on the things,

the figures,

and we ignore,

we don't concentrate

on the background.

And so we come to think

that the figure

exists independently

of the background.

But actually,

they go together.

And they go together

just as inseparably

as backs go with fronts,

as positives go with negatives,

as ups go with downs,

and as life goes with death.

You can't separate it.

So there's a sort

of secret conspiracy

between the figure

and the background.

They are really one,

but they look different.

They need each other

just as male needs female

and vice versa.

But we are ordinarily

completely unaware of this.

So then,

when the scientist

starts paying attention

to behavior of people

and things carefully,

he discovers

that they go together

that the behavior

of the organism

is inseparable

from the behavior

of its environment.

So, you see,

if I'm to describe

what I am doing,

what am I doing?

Am I just waving my legs

back and forth?

No.

I'm walking.

And in order

to speak about walking,

you have to speak about

the space

in which I am walking,

about the floor.

About the direction,

left or right,

in relation to what kind

of room,

what kind of stage,

what kind of situation.

Because if, obviously,

if there isn't a ground

underneath me,

I can't very well walk.

So the description

of what I am doing

involves the description

of the world.

And so the biologist

comes to say

that what he is describing

is no longer

merely the organism

and its behavior.

He is describing

a field

which he now calls

the organism

hyphen environment.

And that field

is what

the individual

actually is.

Now this is very

clearly recognized

in all sorts

of sciences.

But the average

individual,

and indeed

the average scientist,

does not

feel

in a way

that corresponds

to his theory.

He still feels

as if he were

a center

of sensitivity

locked up

inside a bag

of skin.

The object

of Buddhist

discipline

or

methods

of

psychological

training

is, as it were,

to turn

that feeling

inside out.

To bring about

a state of affairs

in which

the individual

feels himself

to be

everything

that there

is,

the whole

cosmos,

focused,

expressing

itself

here.

And you,

as the whole

cosmos,

expressing

itself

there and

so on.

That what,

in other words,

the reality

of myself

fundamentally

is,

not something

inside my

skin,

but everything,

and I mean

everything,

outside my

skin,

but doing

what is my

skin and

inside it.

I mean,

imagine that

every one of

us,

look,

in the same

way that the

sea,

when the

ocean,

has a wave

on it.

The wave

is not

separate from

the ocean,

is it?

Every wave

on the ocean

is the whole

ocean waving.

The ocean

waves and it

says,

yo-hoo,

I'm here,

see?

But I do,

I can wave

all over the

place.

I can wave

in many different

ways.

I can wave

this way

and wave

that way.

So,

the ocean

of being

waves every

one of us

and we

are its

waves.

But the

wave is

fundamentally

the ocean.

Now,

in that

way,

your sense

of identity

would be

turned inside

out.

You wouldn't

forget who

you were,

you wouldn't

forget your

name and

address,

your telephone

number,

your social

security

number,

and what

sort of

role you're

supposed to

occupy in

society.

But you

would know

that this

particular role

that you play,

this particular

personality that

you are,

is superficial

and the real

you is all

that there is.

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 02 - Hinduism I =====

I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream.

And you would, of course, be able to alter your time sense and slip, say, 75 years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep.

You would, I suppose, start out by fulfilling all your wishes.

You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life, love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, music beyond belief.

And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at 75 years a night, you would be getting a little taste for something different.

And you would move over to an adventurous dimension where there were certain dangers involved and the thrill of dealing with dangers.

And you could rescue princesses from dragons and go on dangerous journeys, make wonderful explosions and blow them up, eventually get into contest with enemies.

And after you'd done that for some time, you'd think up a new wrinkle, to forget that you were dreaming, so that you would think it was all for real, and to be anxious about it.

And then, because it'd be so great when you woke up, and then you'd say, well, like children who dare each other on things, how far out could you get?

What could you take?

What dimension of being lost, of abandonment of your power, what dimension of that could you stand?

You could ask yourself this, because you know you'd eventually wake up.

And after you'd gone on doing this, you see, for some time, you would suddenly find yourselves, sitting around in this room, with all your personal involvements, problems, etc., talking with me.

How do you know that that's not what you're doing?

Could be.

Because, after all, what would you do if you were God?

If you were what there is, the self.

In the Upanishads, the basic texts of Hinduism, one of them starts out saying, in the beginning was the self.

And looking around, it said, I am.

And thus it is that everyone to this day, when asked who is there, says it is I, and thereafter gives whatever particular name he may have.

For if you were God, and in the sense that you knew everything, and you were completely transparent to yourself through and through, you would be bored.

Because, if looking at it from another way, we push technology to its furthest possible development.

And we had, instead of a dial telephone on one's desk, a more complex system of buttons, and one touch, beep, would give you anything you wanted.

Aladdin's lamp.

You would eventually have to introduce a button labelled surprise.

Because all perfectly known futures, as I pointed out, are past.

They have happened, virtually.

It is only the true future is a surprise.

So if you were God, you would say to yourself, man, get lost.

And it's strange that this idea is obscurely embedded in the Christian tradition, when in the epistle to the Philippians, St. Paul speaks of God the Son, the Logos, the Word of God, who is incarnate in Christ, and says,

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought not equality with God a thing to be clung to, but made himself of no reputation, and humbled himself, and was found in fashion as a man, and became obedient to death.

Same idea.

Same idea as the idea of the dream.

You get in that very far-out dream, of getting as extreme as you can get.

And so this, then, is the basis of the Hindu view of the universe and of man.

The Hindu looks upon the universe as a drama.

The Westerner, of course, looks upon the universe as a construct, as something made.

And it is not, therefore, insignificant that Jesus was the son of a carpenter.

The Chinese looks upon the universe as an organism, as we shall subsequently see.

But the dramatic idea is basic to Hinduism.

Now, you can speak about Hinduism on two levels, at least.

One I will call the metaphysical level, and the other the mythological level.

If you speak on the metaphysical level, you can speak only in negative language.

You can say what the divine, the ultimate reality, is not.

If you speak on the mythological level, you may speak of what the divine is like.

Because myth is not a falsehood, as one uses the word in a sophisticated way.

A myth is an image, a concrete image, in terms of which man makes sense of the world.

And thus, the idea of God the Father, or God the Maker, is a myth.

Because it's an image.

And Christian theologians distinguish equally between two kinds of theological language,

which are respectively called cataphatic and apophatic.

Apophatic language is negative, as when we say God is infinite and eternal.

Cataphatic language is mythological, as when we say God the Father, God is love,

and all the positive designations.

We are not saying God is a cosmic male parent, but is analogous with the Father.

So with Hinduism.

But what I'm going to speak to you, first of all, is the mythological language of Hinduism.

The idea of the universe as the big act.

The universe is God playing hide-and-seek with himself.

For God is thought of fundamentally to the Hindu as the self, the self, the cosmic I.

And it is a basic proposition for the Hindu, that only the self, the Godhead, is real.

There is nothing other than the Godhead.

So that the appearance, the feeling that there are other things than the Godhead, is called Maya.

Maya.

We ordinarily translate that word illusion.

But you must be careful about the word illusion.

Illusion is related to the Latin ludere.

And that means play.

And this is why the analogy of the world is dramatic.

It's a play.

In the sense of a stage play.

Now, when you go to the theatre, you know what you're going to see is not for real.

Because the proscenium arch tells you that.

That everything that happens on the far side of that arch is only in play, not serious.

But the actor, and you will hope that he will be good at it, is going to try and persuade you that it's for real.

So that he will so move you that you are crying or sitting in anxiety upon the edge of your chair.

And so the audience is almost persuaded to be taken in.

Now, what about if this would happen with the very best actor of all, the great actor?

The audience would, of course, be completely taken in.

But in this case, of course, the actor and the audience are the same.

The self.

The self has thus the capacity to abandon itself.

To forget itself.

To hide from itself.

And thus, to make the most completely convincing illusion.

But in play.

And so the activity, the creative activity of the Godhead in Hinduism is called Leela.

Which means play.

Our word lilt is related to it, I think.

But so also in the book of Proverbs.

You will find a discourse being given by the divine wisdom.

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways before his works of old.

I think it's the 22nd chapter of Proverbs.

In the course of which, the wisdom says that its delight was to rejoice, the King James Bible says, in the presence of God and with the sons of men.

But the Hebrew translated rejoice says play.

Rejoice is a sort of dignified Elizabethan.

But it says play.

And St. Thomas, aware of this, said that the divine wisdom was above all to be compared with games.

Because games are played for their own sake.

And not for any sort of ulterior motive.

So also music is a kind of non-purposive thing.

Because you don't either play music to reach a destination, nor do you dance to reach a particular place on the floor.

It is the doing of it itself that is important.

Because after all, if the object of music were to gain a certain destination, those orchestras that played fastest would be considered the best.

So the idea is that dancing and music, more than other arts, represent the nature of this world.

That it is playful.

That it is sport.

That it may be sincere, but is definitely not serious.

And as G.K. Chesterton well put it once, the angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

How much more so the lord of the angels.

So if a beautiful lady should say to me, I love you.

And I were to reply, are you serious or are you just playing with me?

That would be quite the wrong response.

Because I hope she's not serious and that she will play with me.

I should say, are you sincere or are you just toying with me?

Because you see, the word play has many different senses.

A person who is playing the organ in church is certainly not doing something trivial.

When you go to see a play called Hamlet, you're not seeing something trivial.

When the concert artist plays Mozart, he is certainly entertaining you, but it's not a trivial entertainment.

But on the other hand, we would use play in quite a different sense when we mean just fooling around, doing it for kicks.

So it is fundamental, as a matter of fact, to both the Hindu and the Christian traditions that the universe is the play of God.

But the Christian thinks of it in the terms of construction play, like building with blocks.

And the Hindu thinks of it as dramatic play, of the actual participation of the Godhead in the creation, so that every being whatsoever is God in disguise.

Hinduism speaks of the Godhead as uses the word Brahman.

This is a neuter form in Sanskrit from the root brich, which means to grow, to expand, to swell.

The neuter form, Brahman, does not have quite the connotation then, you see, of kingship that we will find attached to the Western idea of God, but is also referred to as Atman.

And this word, and this word, we translate ordinarily, the self.

So you can have the para, param, you put the M in to connect the particle, paramatman, which means para, the supreme self,

or sometimes just the Atman alone, and that means the self in you.

But the fundamental principle of Indian philosophy is Atman is Brahman.

Your self is the supreme self.

Or, it is expressed also in the formula, tat, tvam, assi, colloquially translated, you're it.

Or, tat, that, tvam, Latin tuam, you, assi, are, you are that, that thou art.

Uh, tat, of course, is, uh, the first word uttered by a baby.

Da, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.

And fathers flatter themselves that it's saying dada.

It's not. It's saying that.

Da, da, da, da, da, da.

And so it's pointing to thatness in everything.

It's very important to see this, because, um, everything is just that.

Uh, I could say it in a negative way, which you won't appreciate,

which you won't appreciate at first, perhaps.

Everything is meaningless.

Only words have meaning.

Because they point to something other than themselves.

The sound water is undrinkable.

Heh.

But it points to the drinkable reality.

But you say, though, what is that pointing at the water?

And somebody says water.

He's not being correct.

Because what you're pointing at is not the noise water.

So it's not water.

It's that.

Da.

And water's a kind of jazz.

Blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub.

And, uh, it's just doing that.

And, uh, you can get to see, too, people are a kind of jazz.

They talk and communicate with each other.

But what does that mean?

Well, they get together, and they make more people, and they do this, and they do that,

and they eat, and they go on doing this jazz.

But it's just jazz.

And you begin to see, as you do that, everything's like music, you see.

It's all these complicated vibrations.

Ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo.

In all kinds of ways.

That's that.

Or thatness.

Ta-tha-tha, also called in Sanskrit.

So anyway, this is the fundamental notion that you, uh, are really what there is.

The works.

Only you're playing hide and seek with yourself.

And on a stupendous scale, Hindus measure time in units which in Sanskrit are called kalpa.

And a kalpa is a period of 4,320,000 years.

And, uh, there are two kinds of kalpa.

One is called manvantara, and the other is called pralaya.

Manvantara is the kalpa in which the universe is manifested.

In other words, in which God puts on his big act.

And pralaya is the kalpa, succeeding kalpa, in which the universe is unmanifested.

And the Godhead does not dream, but is awake to its own nature.

So that for, uh, these are called respectively, the days and the nights of the Brahman.

And this goes on forever and ever and ever and ever.

The days and nights adding up into years and centuries and eons.

They speak of crore.

There's a Sanskrit measure, crore.

C-R-O-R-E.

Uh, sort of a word that really, I think, means umpteen.

Uh, crores of kalpas.

And, uh, this is the in-breathing and the out-breathing.

Uh, there's the word hungsa.

In this word in Sanskrit, hungsa, means a swan or a big water bird like a gander.

There's a myth that the, there is in the beginning the divine bird which lays the egg of the world.

And the egg splits and the upper is the heavens and the lower is the earth.

Now, so when, uh, the worlds are manifested, the Lord breathing out says, hung.

And when the worlds are withdrawn, the breath comes back, hung.

But if you say hungsa, hungsa hung, sah hung, it becomes sah hung, sah hung.

Sah, uh hung, that means, sah means that, the truth, uh hung, I am, I am that.

It's like, uh, imagine, uh, when we get, uh, to the final moment in which the world is blown up.

You know, imagine the countdown.

This is the end, somebody's pushed the button.

Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

What are you listening to?

The sound of the waves.

And you can sit and listen to the little waves on the seashore.

And you get back here into this kind of thinking and you're hearing the ocean of the universe going.

And that's your breathing too.

It's all one rhythm.

So it may be that every star was once a planet populated by intelligent people

who found out about the fundamental energy of the universe and blew themselves up.

And as they blew up, they scattered all kinds of stuff out which became little planets.

Which, in a long time, life started all over again.

Because the Hindu theory is very odd.

Every Kalpa in the Manvantara period, where there's a manifested world, is divided into four subdivisions of time,

each one of which is called a Yuga.

That means roughly an epoch or an era.

And there are four Yugas, and they're named after the different throws in the Indian game of dice.

There are four such throws, and the first is called Krita.

That means, Kri means to do, as when we say something is done, truly done.

It's the perfect throw of four.

The second is called Tretta, which is the throw of three.

The next is called Dvapara, which is the throw of two.

And the final one is called Kali, which means the worst throw, which is the throw of one.

Now, each of these periods of the Kalpa are of different lengths.

Krita is the longest, and Kali is the shortest, and so ranged.

So that when the world is first manifested, as in those dreams that I were mentioning to you,

the world is in a golden age to begin with.

It's perfect.

And that is the longest period of time.

Then when we get a little bit more adventurous, you see,

the Tretta means that in this era a kind of disharmonious element enters into things.

It's like a three-legged chair isn't so secure as a four-legged chair.

It's just a bit inclined to tip.

And there's a fly in the ointment, the snake in the garden.

Then comes Dvapara, in which the forces of good and evil are equally balanced.

And finally Kali, which is the shortest period, where the forces of evil are triumphant,

and the world is destroyed at the end of it.

For then the Godhead appears in the form of Shiva,

who represents the destructive aspect of the divine energy,

whereas Brahma is the creative, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer.

But Shiva is always the destroyer in the sense of the liberator,

the guy who breaks up the ruts.

And he comes on with a blue body and ten arms and a necklace of skulls.

Indian gods have many arms because they are cosmic centipedes.

They do all things without having to think about it,

like the centipede doesn't have to think about how to manipulate its legs,

like you don't have to think how to grow your hair.

And as Shiva dances what is called the Tandava,

which is the dance of destruction at the end of the cycle,

at the end of the Kalpa,

you will see that his hands contain clubs and knives and bells,

but one hand is like that.

And that gesture means don't be afraid.

It's a big act.

It is all, as it were, the outflowing of your own consciousness,

of your own mind.

Now then, Hindu life is related to this cosmology.

And the objective of life is, of course, in the end,

to wake up from the dream when you've had enough.

And so the dreaming process is called sometimes sangsara.

Sangsara is the round, the rat race.

And sangsara is divided into six divisions.

I'd better draw a map, I think.

This is common, you see, cosmology to both the Hindus and the Buddhists.

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 03 - Hinduism II =====

This is the world of the deva, and this is the same root from which we get both divine and devil.

But deva means angel.

The highest and most successful beings in the universe.

And so opposite, this is the world of naraka, naraka, who are the most unsuccessful.

These are the purgatorial worlds of extreme suffering.

This is the world of ashura.

They are also angels, but they are angry angels, representing the wrath potential of energy.

This is the world of animals.

This is the world of preta, for which we have no English equivalent.

They are hungry or frustrated spirits who have enormous stomachs but mouths only the size of needles.

Vast appetite and no means of fulfillment.

And this is the manu world, that is to say, the world of man.

You don't have to take this literally.

You could say, when you are extremely happy or ecstatic, you're here.

When you are miserable, you're here.

When you're dumb, you're here.

When you're mad, you're here.

When you're frustrated, you're here.

But when you're more or less your normal, rational self, you're here.

Now, so, all life, through the period of the Kalpas, goes grinding around this wheel.

And if you go up, and you succeed, and you get to the top, you have to come down.

They don't see success, in other words, in the world, as a method of liberation, because it implies failure.

So, the idea of liberation, which is called moksha, is the ideal of Hindu life.

Wake up, it's a dream.

And in time, there is no hope in time.

Everything is going to get worse in time.

Because, as you know, it does.

We all fall apart in the end.

Everything falls apart.

Institutions, buildings, nations.

It all crumbles.

And people say, well, that's an awfully pessimistic philosophy.

Well, is it?

I would rather say that the people who have hope in the future are the miserable people.

Because they're like donkeys, chasing carrots that are dangled before their noses,

from sticks attached to their collars.

And they pursue, and they pursue in vain.

Always hoping that tomorrow will be the great thing.

And therefore, incapable of enjoying themselves today.

People who live for the future never get there.

Because when their plans mature, they are not there to enjoy them.

They're the sort of people who spend their lives saving for their old age.

They're trying to teach their children to do the same thing.

So that when they retire at 65, you know, they have false teeth and wrinkles and prostate trouble and all that sort of thing.

Where were you going?

What did you think it was all about?

Furthermore, the fact that life is transient is part of its liveliness.

The poets, in speaking of the transients of the world, always utter their best poetry.

You know, our revels now are ended.

And these, our actors, as I foretold you, are all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples,

the great earth itself, I, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

And like this insubstantial and pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

And said so well, it doesn't seem so bad after all, does it?

You see, there's always in the poetry of Evanescence a kind of funny nostalgia.

Moralists will say,

Those lovely lips which you so delight to kiss today

will in a few years rot and disclose the grinning teeth of a skull.

So what?

The skull says,

Lying in the grass,

Chattering finch and waterfly are not merrier than I.

Here among the flowers I lie, laughing everlastingly.

No, I may not tell the best.

Surely, friends, I could have guessed

Death was but the good king's jest.

It was hid so carefully.

And monks used to keep skulls on their desks.

And people nowadays think that was very morbid.

But it's only,

I went and visited a chapel in the Via Veneto in Rome,

where there's a crypt where all the altar furnishings are made out of human bones.

The altars are piles of skulls.

There are rib bones arranged across the ceiling like floral patterns with vertebrae representing flowers.

And they're all dead Capuchin monks.

And there's a funny little monk collecting the admissions up at the top.

And he has one of the funniest grins on his face I've seen in a long time.

I said to him, you know, on the day of resurrection,

there's going to be an awful lot of scuttling up this narrow staircase.

People trying to reassemble their bones.

Oh, dear father, isn't that my fifth metatarsal?

So,

the whole idea, you see,

is that everything's falling apart.

So don't try and stop it.

When you're falling off a precipice,

it doesn't do you any good to hang on to a rock that's falling with you.

See?

But everything is doing that.

And so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy

in trying to prevent the world from falling apart.

Don't do it.

And then you'll be able to do something

interesting

with the free energy.

So that's moksha.

Because when the Hindu says

everything is unreal,

the Westerner reacts and says,

no, no, you can't treat life as a dream.

It's serious.

It's real.

It's for real.

And what do you mean by that?

Look, how real do you want it to be?

This is, in other words,

everything, insofar as it's falling apart,

everything is changing,

it is like smoke.

And we all feel that smoke has a lesser degree of reality than wood.

It's an image of the evanescent,

of the ghostly.

So there's this idea,

the whole world is this mirage.

That doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

It's only bad if you cling to it,

if you try to lean on it.

But if you don't lean on it,

it's a grand illusion.

So the word maya,

that means not only illusion,

but it means art,

it means magic,

and it means creative power.

So this is the big act.

And, uh,

it's perhaps

easier to feel the world in that way

in a tropical country

where

death is very common

and where you just watch things dissolve before your eyes

and yet burst out and grow again.

The whole world is changing.

It may be easier to think that way

than in our environment.

Although when you're out in California,

um,

the human landscape changes so fast

that, uh,

no,

no town is the same for two years.

Any mailing list that you have,

uh,

changes

one-third

addresses per annum.

Nothing stays put.

The hills are shadows

and they flow from form to form

and nothing stands.

Now, uh,

this, you see,

is not a pessimistic attitude,

therefore, at all.

To be able to realize

that this world

is simply a dream.

A dancing play of smoke.

Fascinating, yes,

but don't lean on it.

Life is a bridge,

says one of the Hindu sayings.

Pass over it,

but build no house upon it.

And so,

immediately you see that.

This is responsible

for the enormous gaiety

of certain Hindu sages.

This is a thing

that often puzzles Westerners.

Uh,

the element of,

they expected anybody

who's an ascetic

or a sage or something

to be rather miserable.

With a glum face.

But on the contrary,

you take this character

who's going around these days,

Maharshi Mahesh,

he's always laughing.

Because,

you see through it,

he looks on every side

and there is the face

of the beloved,

of the divinity,

in everybody,

in every direction,

in everything,

playing at being you.

And you can look down

into a person's eyes,

way, way in,

and you see the self,

the eternal divine.

And what is so funny

when it puts on an expression,

saying,

what, me?

And the guru,

the teacher.

When people go to a guru,

they get all sorts

of funny ideas.

They think,

oh, he's looking right through me.

He sees me through and through.

He knows how awful I am.

Reads my most secret thoughts.

Because he has a funny look

in his face.

He isn't even interested

in your secret thoughts.

He is looking straight

at the Godhead in you

with a funny expression

on his face

which is saying,

why are you trying

to kid me?

Come off it, Shiva.

I know who you are.

But,

and therefore,

you see,

his role

is to

gently

humor you

into waking up

as to your true nature.

Now, of course,

as I intimated earlier,

the Hindu is therefore saying,

everybody is God.

And this is why

when a Hindu greets you,

he does this.

That is the act of puja,

or worship

to the Godhead in you.

And our theologians

get rather worried about that.

Because, you see,

the two conceptions of God

are different.

Our conception

is of the boss man,

the king.

Theirs is of the cosmic centipede

with the many arms,

who does not have to think

how to make the world,

or rather to act the world.

That would be

an insufferable nuisance.

You may think it

rather wonderful

when St. Thomas tries

to explain

that God is fully aware

of everything that happens,

and in every detail

is willing

each single vibration

of any mosquito's wing.

But when you really

begin to think about it,

that approach is

intellectual elephantiasis.

Imagine the Lord

being aware

of all the prayers

and having to listen

to the sort of prayers

that go on every night.

God heard the embattled nation shout,

God strafe England

and God save the king.

God this, God that,

and God the other thing.

Good God said God,

I've got my work cut out.

So therefore,

when somebody in India

suddenly announces

that he's God,

nobody accuses him

of blasphemy

or of being insane.

They say simply,

congratulations,

at last you found out.

And they don't

immediately request

a miracle.

As you see,

if we get across

someone who says

I'm God

or I'm Jesus Christ,

they say what they said

to Jesus Christ

in the first place.

Command that this bread,

these stones,

be made bread.

And you know,

he used to wangle

out of it

by saying,

your wicked

and deceitful generation

seeketh after a sign

and there shall no sign

be given.

It's going the way

I want it to anyhow.

Only really and truly

there is not this idea

of God the technician,

but rather the power

of omnipotence

is not to be able

to do anything

but to be doing all things,

whatever it is

that's going on,

and spontaneously

without having to think

about it,

which is very clumsy.

Now then,

I must say something

about how then

this relates

to the life

of the Hindu.

Hindu divide life

into certain stages,

what are called

the ashramas.

The first is called

brahmacharya,

the second

grihasta,

and the third

vana prastha.

Brahmacharya

means the stage

of the student,

the apprenticeship.

Grihasta,

the stage

of the householder,

and vana prastha,

the stage

of the forest dweller.

This is related

to cultural history

of early India.

Before we have

agrarian communities,

we have a hunting culture

which is on the move.

In a hunting culture,

every male

knows the whole culture.

There is no division

of labor.

And the holy man

of the hunting culture

is of course

called a shaman.

A shaman

is a

realized man,

a man who knows

the inner secret.

He's seen through

the game.

And he finds it

by going away

alone into the forest

and

cutting himself off

from the tribe.

That is to say,

from social conditioning.

And he goes maybe

for a long period

into the forest

and comes back.

He's found out

who he is.

And he sure

isn't who he was

told he was.

But as hunting cultures

settle into agrarian

patterns of life,

what do they do?

They build a village.

And around the village

they set up

a stockade,

which is known

as the pale.

And the village

is always, of course,

standing at crossroads.

And there you get

in agrarian society

a division of labor.

And the division of labor

comprises four.

In medieval Europe

we call them

lords spiritual,

lords temporal,

commons,

and serfs.

In India

they are

Brahmins,

Kshatriya,

that means

fighters,

Vaishya,

merchants,

traders,

Shudra,

laborers.

So you've got

the priests,

the warriors,

the merchants,

and the laborers.

Division of labor.

The four sections of town.

So the four basic castes.

So when you are born,

you are born into a caste,

and your duty

as a grihasta

or householder

is to fulfill

your caste function

and to bring up a family.

When you've done that,

you go back to the forest,

back to the hunting culture,

and you drop your role,

and you become nobody,

a shaman again.

So a Hindu calls

one who does this

a shramana,

which is of course

the same word

as shaman,

and the Chinese

call him

a shiaman.

Shaman.

A shaman is an immortal.

Why immortal?

Because it's only the role

that's mortal.

The big front,

the persona.

The one who you really are,

the common man,

that is to say,

the man who is common

to us all,

which you could call

the son of man,

that's the real self.

That's the guy

who's putting on

the big act.

And of course,

he has no name.

Nobody can put

the finger on him

because you can't

touch the tip of the finger

with the tip of the finger.

So that means

in practice then

that when you hand over

your vocation

in life,

which is called

your svadharma,

that means sva,

that's the same

as the Latin

suus,

one's own.

Dharma means function.

Your own function,

or we would call

your vocation,

when you've completed it,

you drop out

and become nobody

because you're going

to find out now

who you really are.

You're no longer

Mr. Mukhopadhyaya,

who is a

class salesman.

you drop that name

and you take on

one of the names

of God,

Swami Brahmananda,

Swami Bliss of Brahman.

And you may go

quite naked

like the Shivite

holy men.

No clothes.

And they just

go out and wander

and don't make

any provision

for anything.

They literally

take no thought

for the morrow.

What you shall eat,

what you shall drink,

or wherewithal

they shall be clothed.

But you see,

people respect them.

They say,

yeah,

we've got to have

those people up there

because they are doing

what a human being

is ultimately supposed

to do

and we shall do it

in our turn

and so give them

some food.

Now,

naturally,

caste,

holy men,

and all that kind

of thing

can be exploited.

Anything can be

exploited

and abused.

And we can look

at it all

and say,

what a mess.

Why don't you

do something

for yourselves?

Why don't you

kill the sacred cows

and eat them?

Why don't you

clean up?

Why do you

permit all this disease?

Just try and see

something from another

point of view

for a change.

I'm not saying

that we should do

what the Hindus do,

but just look at it

from another point

of view.

And they would

smile at us

and say,

you really think

it's as real

as all that?

Have you never

experienced what's

on the inside

of this game?

See,

the trouble with

you Westerners

is you've never

experienced bliss.

You've never

got down

to the root

of reality.

You don't know

that state

of consciousness.

And so you're

frantically

trying to patch

everything up

and pin it

all together

and screw the

universe up

so it's fixed.

You can never

do it.

All it is

is going to

wildly rushing

around and

creating trouble.

Of course,

Western-educated

Hindus think

the same way.

They are now

for rushing

around and

patching India

up.

And what's

going to happen

is they're

going to arm

all the millions

of people in

India.

And they're

going to create

a lot of

trouble in Asia

one of these

days when they

become powerful

society.

Yeah?

Of course.

Yeah,

that's true,

you know.

Because of the

big fight with

the devil.

You see?

The war in

heaven, you

see?

Now, the funny

thing about

that is, when

you read

Milton's

Paradise Lost,

long before

Lucifer decided

to rebel, the

whole of

heaven was

armed.

And he

describes the

legions of

angels with

their escutcheons

and gonfalons

and military

deportment.

Who was

looking for

trouble?

Lucifer was a

good guy back

then, see?

The bearer of

light.

So the

Hindu looks at

our Christianity

and sort of

thinks, my

goodness, here

is the

eternal self.

But in the

idea of

Christianity, the

godhead is

having a

real far-out

one.

Because not

only is he

incarnating himself,

say, as some

wretched beggar, but

he's incarnated

himself as a

Christian soul who

believes that in

this one short

life he will

decide his

eternal destiny.

And the

possibilities of

making a mistake

are far greater

than of being a

lousy beggar.

the possibility

involved in the

Christian gamble

is to fry in

hell forever and

ever and ever

and ever.

Even the

Avicii hell at

the bottom of

the Naraka only

goes on for

about one

kalpa.

But the

everlasting

damnation, what

an idea.

So the

Hindu says,

bravo, you

know, God

has really done

a dare on

himself this

time to be a

Christian soul.

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 04 - Intro To Buddhism I =====

The idea of a yana or vehicle comes from the basic notion or image of Buddhism as a raft for crossing a river.

This shore is ordinary everyday consciousness, such as we have mainly the consciousness of being an ego

or a sensitive mind locked up inside a mortal body.

A consciousness of being you in particular and nobody else.

The other shore is release or nirvana, a word which means literally blow out.

As one says in heaving a sigh of relief, nirvana is never, never, never to be interpreted

as a state of extinction or a kind of consciousness in which you are absorbed into an infinitely formless, luminous ocean

which could best be described as purple jello, but luminous, you know, kind of spiritual horrors.

It isn't meant to be that at all.

Nirvana is, has certain, many senses, but the primary meaning of it is that it's this everyday life

just as we have it now, but seen and understood and felt in a very, very different way.

Buddhism is called in general a dharma and this word is often mistranslated as the law.

It's better translated as the doctrine and still better translated as the method.

And the dharma is formulated originally by the Buddha who was the son of a North Indian Raja

living very close to Nepal who was thriving shortly after 600 BC.

The word Buddha is a title, the proper name of this individual was Gotama Siddhartha, and the word

Buddha means the awakened one from the Sanskrit root buddh, B-U-D-H, which means to wake or to know.

So, so we could say Buddha means the man who woke up, and the, the Buddha was a very, very skillful psychologist.

He is in a way the first psycho-therapist in history, a man of tremendous understanding of the wiles and deviousnesses of the human mind.

Buddhism is made to be easily understood.

Everything is numbered so that you can remember it.

And the basis of Buddhism are what are called the four noble truths.

The first one is the truth about suffering.

The second, the truth about the cause of suffering.

The third, the truth about the ceasing of suffering.

And the fourth, the truth about the way to the ceasing of suffering.

So let's go back to the beginning, suffering.

The Sanskrit word is dukkha, D-U-H-K-H-A, dukkha.

It means suffering in the widest possible sense, but chronic suffering, chronic frustration, is probably as good a translation as any.

Chronic frustration.

And the Buddha, Buddhism says, the life of mankind and of animals, indeed also of angels, if you believe in angels, is characterized by chronic frustration.

And so that constitutes a problem.

If I, if anyone, if any one of you says, I have a problem, I don't suppose you would be here if you didn't in some way have a problem.

Well, that's dukkha.

Now, the next thing is the cause of it.

The cause of it is called Trishna.

T-R-I-S-H-N-A.

Trishna is a Sanskrit word that is the root of our word thirst.

First, thirst, but more exactly craving, or clutching, or desiring.

Because of craving, or of clutching, in us, we create suffering.

But in turn, this second truth includes that behind Trishna, there lies another thing called ignorance.

A-V-I-D-Y-A.

Non-vision.

You see, Vidya, Vid in Sanskrit, is the root of the Latin video, and of our vision.

And A-in front of the word is non.

As we say, atheist is a non-theist.

So, A-V-I-D-Y-A is not seeing.

Ignorance, or better, ignorance.

Because our mind, as it functions consciously, is a method of attending to different and particular areas of experience, one after another, one at a time.

When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything else.

That is why to know is at the same time to ignore.

And because of that, there arises Trishna or craving.

Why?

Because if you ignore what you really know, you come to imagine that you are separate from the rest of the universe, and that you are alone.

And therefore, you begin to crave, to thirst, for, you develop an anxiety to survive.

Because you think that if you are separate, if you are not the whole works, you are going to die.

Actually, you are not going to die at all.

You are simply going to stop doing one thing and start doing something else.

You know, when you die, in the ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing called Alan Watts.

But you do something else.

Later.

Later, man.

You know, like that.

And you...

And it is nothing to worry about at all.

Only if you are entirely locked up in the illusion that you are only this, then you begin to be frightened and anxious.

And that creates thirst.

So, if you can get rid of ignorance, ignorance, and widen your mind out, so as to see the other side of the picture,

then you can stop craving.

That doesn't mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner anymore.

And that it won't be nice to make love to girls or anything like that.

It doesn't mean that at all.

It means you are enjoying your dinner and making love and generally enjoying the senses and all the experience.

That only becomes an obstacle to you if you cling to that in order to save yourself.

But if you don't need to save yourself, you can enjoy life just as much as ever.

Uh, you don't have to be a Puritan.

So, then, uh, that state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything.

Supposing, you know, you are in business and you have to make money and, uh, keep a family supported or something like that, you know.

So, the thing is, do that.

But don't, don't, uh, let it get you down.

Do it what the Hindus call Nishkama Karma.

Nishkama means passionless karma activity.

And that means doing all the things that one would do in life.

One's business, one's occupation, etc, etc.

But doing it without taking it seriously.

Do it as a game.

And then everybody who depends on you will like it much better.

Because if you take it seriously, they'll be feeling guilty.

Because they'll say, oh dear, Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us, you see.

And they all get miserable.

And they go on, they, they live their lives out of a sense of duty.

Which is a dreadful thing to do.

So, uh, that's nirvana, you see.

To, to live in a let-go way.

Then the fourth noble truth describes the way, the method, of realizing nirvana.

And that's called the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path is a series of eight human activities, such as understanding or view, effort, vocation or occupation, speaking, conduct, etc.

And they're all prefaced by the Sanskrit word, samyak.

Uh, which is very difficult to translate.

Most people translate it right, in the sense of correct.

But, this is an incomplete translation.

The word sum, the root sum, in Sanskrit, is the same as our word sum, through the Latin summa.

And sum, of course, the sum of things means completion.

But, it also has the sense of balanced.

Or, middle-weighed.

Not W-E-I-G-H, but W-A-Y-E-D.

Middle-weighed.

Because Buddhism is called the middle way.

We'll find out a great deal about that later.

But, the thing that you must recognize is this.

Buddhism, although when you say, uh, write speech, in other words, don't tell lies.

Well, let me put it this way.

Every Buddhist, who, uh, belongs to the Theravada school, in the South, expresses the fact that

he is a Buddhist, by reciting a certain formula.

And it's called, Tisarana and Panchasila.

This is, I'm talking Pali now, not Sanskrit.

Tisarana means the three refuges, Panchasila, the five precepts.

And, put your hands together like this, and say,

Buddham Sarananga Chami

Dhamham Sarananga Chami

Sangham Sarananga Chami

That means, I take refuge in Buddha.

I take refuge in the method, the Dhamma.

I take refuge in the Sangha, which means the fraternity of the followers of Buddha.

And then, he goes on, and he takes the five precepts.

Pāna-ti-pāta-veramani

And this precepts, one after another, I promise to abstain from taking from life, taking life.

Adina-dhāna-veramani, I promise to abstain from taking what is not given.

Kamesu Mityahara, I promise to abstain from exploiting my passions.

Musavada-veramani, I promise to abstain from false speech.

Surah, Maryamaja, Pāna-dhāna, I promise to abstain from getting intoxicated by a list of various boozes.

Now, every Buddhist in the Southern School says, Mahayanists have a different formula.

Well, this is the method, and the method, the Dharma, is therefore a moral law.

Just like the Ten Commandments.

But it isn't.

It's nothing, it's quite different.

You see, you don't take the five precepts in obedience to a royal edict.

You take them upon yourself.

And there is a very special reason for doing so.

How can you fulfill the precept not to take life?

Every day you eat, even if you're a vegetarian, you must take life, and so on.

Now, therefore understand this, and this is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism.

Buddhism is a method, it is not a doctrine.

Buddhism is a dialogue, and what it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it would state at the end.

The method of Buddhism is, first of all, a relationship between a teacher and a student.

The student creates the teacher by raising a problem, and going to someone about it.

You see?

Now, if he chooses wisely, you see, he'll find if there's a Buddha around to use as the teacher.

And then he says to the Buddha, my problem is that I suffer, and I want to escape from suffering.

So the Buddha replies, suffering is caused by desire, by Trishna, by craving.

If you can stop desiring, then you will solve your problem.

Go away and try to stop desiring.

And he gives him some methods, how to practice meditation, and to make his mind calm and still, to see if he can stop desiring.

The student goes away and practices this.

Then he comes back to the teacher and says, but I can't stop desiring not to desire.

What am I to do about that?

So the teacher says, try then to stop desiring not to desire.

Now, you can see where this is going to land up.

Or he might put it in this way.

All right, if you can't completely stop desiring, do a middle way.

That is to say, stop desiring as much as you can stop desiring.

And don't desire to stop any more desire than you can stop.

See how that's, see where that's going to go?

Because he keeps coming back.

Because what the teacher has done, in saying stop desiring, he has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan.

This is a Japanese word that means a meditation problem.

Or more strictly, it means the same thing as case means in law.

Because koans are usually based on anecdotes and incidents of the old masters, cases, precedents.

But koan, the function of a koan, is a challenge for meditation.

Well, who is it that desires not to desire?

Who is it that wants to escape from suffering?

And here we get to a methodological difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question of who are you?

The Hindu says, you, yourself, he calls Atman, A-T-M-A-N, the Self.

And he says now, strive to know the Self.

Realize, I am not my body because I can be aware of my body.

I am not my thoughts because I can be aware of my thoughts.

I am not my feelings for the same reason.

I am not my mind, etc., because I can be aware of it.

Therefore, I really am other than, above, transcending, all these finite aspects of me.

Now, the Buddhist has a critique of that.

He says, why do you try to escape from yourself as a body?

The reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape from it.

Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?

The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to escape from them.

You don't want to have to be afraid.

You don't want to have to be in grief or anger.

And love, even, is too much, you see.

It involves you in suffering.

Because if you love someone, you have a hostage to fortune.

So, the Buddhist says, the reason why you believe you are the Atman, the eternal Self,

which in turn is the Brahman, the Self of the whole universe,

is that you don't want to lose your damn ego.

And if you can fix your ego and put it in the safe deposit box of the Lord,

you think you've still got yourself.

You haven't really let go.

So, the Buddhist, the Buddha said, there isn't any Atman.

He taught the doctrine of un-Atman, non-self.

Your ego is unreal.

And, as a matter of fact, there's nothing you can cling to.

No refuge, really.

Just let go, man.

There's no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere, you see.

How clever that was.

You see?

Because what he was really saying is,

any Atman that you could cling to, or think about, or believe in,

wouldn't be the real one.

This is the accurate sense of the original documents of the Buddha's teaching.

If you carefully go through it, that's what he's saying.

He's not saying that there isn't the Atman, or the Brahman.

He says, anyone you could conceive wouldn't be it.

Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one.

Because believing is clinging, still.

There's no salvation through believing.

There's only salvation through knowledge.

And even then, the highest knowledge is non-knowledge.

And here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the Upanishads, in the Kena Upanishad,

if you think that you know Brahman, you do not know him.

But if you know that you do not know the Brahman, you truly know.

Why?

Well, that's very simple.

If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it.

And you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need to look at themselves.

You see?

So, that's the difference of method in Buddhism.

Now, understand method here.

The method is a dialogue.

And the so-called teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the dialogue.

And when they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason is that the books

only give you the opening gambits.

Then, having read the book, you have to go on with the method.

Now, you can go on with the method without a formal teacher.

That is to say, you can conduct the dialogue with yourself, or with life.

You have to explore and experiment on such things as, could one possibly not desire?

Could one possibly concentrate the mind perfectly?

Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?

And you have to work with it, you see?

So that you understand the later things that come after trying these experiments.

These later things are the heart of Buddhism.

So then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice of Buddhism continued as a tremendous

ongoing dialogue among the various followers.

And eventually, they established great universities, such as there was at a place called Nalanda

in northern India.

This discourse was going on, and if you looked at it superficially, you might think it was

nothing but an extremely intellectual bullsession, where philosophers were outwitting each other.

Actually, the process that was going on was this, that the teacher, or guru, in every case, was

examining students as to their beliefs and theories, and destroying their beliefs.

Showing that any belief that you would propose, any idea about yourself or about the universe

that you want to cling to, and make something of, used for a crutch, a prop, a security.

The teacher demolishes it.

This is how the dialogue works.

Until you are left with not a thing to hang on to.

Any religion you might propose, even atheism, they'll tear up.

Agnosticism, they'll destroy.

Any kind of belief, they're experts in demolition, so that they finally get you to the point where

you've got nothing left to hang on to.

Well, then you're free.

Because you're it, you see.

Once you're hanging on to things, you put it somewhere else, you see.

Something I can grab.

And even when you think as an idea, then I'm it, you're still hanging on to that,

they're going to knock that one down.

So when you are left without anything at all, you've, you've seen the point.

That's the method of the dialogue, essentially.

That is the Dharma.

And all Buddhists make jokes about that.

Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra, you see,

when I attained complete, perfect, unsurpassed awakening, I didn't attain anything.

Because it's like, to use a metaphor that is used in the scriptures,

it's like using an empty fist to deceive a child.

So, you know, you say to a child, what have I got here?

The child gets interested immediately and wants to find out.

You hide it, and the child climbs all over you, can't get at your fist.

And finally, you do let him get it, and there's nothing in it.

So I'm going to say, can you just use every day?

And I can use every minute.

That's what I'm putting in it.

I'm putting in it.

But no way, that's what I'm putting on it.

Now I'm putting it on the side of my show, I'm putting on it.

That's why, you know, I'm putting it on it.

And I'm putting it on and so forth to the conclusion of my skin.

So if I want you to try and make it on the side of my thumb,

Just, like, I'm putting it on the side of my mind.

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 05 - Intro To Buddhism II =====

Many of the problems that are now being discussed by modern logicians are unbeknownst to them already in the ancient Indian books.

Problems of semantics, problems of meaning, problems of the nature of time and of memory.

All these were discussed with very, very meticulous scholarly sophistication.

So that it is my opinion that this was a very, very fertile period of human history

and that the philosophy in which it eventually emerged, the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism

is as yet the most mature and really intelligent theory of human life and of the cosmos that man has ever devised.

It is characteristic of this point of view that it adheres to the middle way.

And the middle way doesn't mean moderation.

It means the bringing together of opposites.

Of what we might call in our world, spirit and matter, mind and body, mysticism and sensuality,

unity and multiplicity, conformity and individualism.

All these things are marvelously wedded together in the world view of Mahayana.

And fundamental to Mahayana Buddhism is the idea of what is called the bodhisattva.

Bodhisattva means a person who has as his essence sattva, bodhi, awakening.

And it is usually used to mean a potential Buddha, someone who is, as it were, just about to become a Buddha.

That was the original sense.

And so part of the Pali Canon is a book called the Jataka Mala, the tales of the Buddha's previous lives.

How he behaved when he was an animal.

How he behaved when he was a man long before he became Buddha.

And in all these stories, he is represented as sacrificing himself for the benefit of other beings.

But since he had not yet become a fully fledged Buddha, he is called in these stories a bodhisattva.

That really means a potential Buddha.

But the point is that as a potential Buddha, as a bodhisattva, he is always involved in situations where he is feeding himself for the hungry tigers and so on.

Now in the course of time, the term bodhisattva underwent a transformation.

A bodhisattva matures and becomes a Buddha.

And what does that mean popularly?

It means that whoever is fully awakened to the way things are, is delivered from any necessity to be involved in the world anymore.

In other words, you can go on to a transcendent level of being where time is abolished, where all times are now, where there are no problems, where there is perpetual eternal peace.

Nirvana in the sense of the word parinirvana means beyond nirvana, super nirvana.

So that if you are fed up with this thing, and you don't want to play the game of hide and seek anymore, you can go in the parinirvana state and be in total serenity.

However, and again I am talking the language of popular Buddhism, a person who stands on the threshold of that peace, can turn back and say I won't be a Buddha, I'll be a bodhisattva.

I won't make the final attainment, because I would like to go back into the world of manifestation they call sangsara, go back into that world and work for their liberation.

So then, when a Mahayana Buddhist does his formula for puja, you know, he says,

Sentient beings are numberless, I take a vow to save them.

Deluding passions are inexhaustible, note this, inexhaustible, I take a vow to destroy them.

The gates of the method, the Dharma, are manifold, I take a vow to enter them.

The Buddha way is supreme, I take a vow to complete it.

All this is impossible.

You see, numberless sentient beings, because they are numberless, can never be delivered.

Deluding passions, which are inexhaustible, can never be eradicated.

So, this then, the Mahayanists, you know, they go,

Shujo muhen seigandho,

Vannomujin seigandhan,

Homanmuryo seigandhyaku,

Butzodomujo seigandhyo.

And, that's their formula.

The bodhisattva who returns into the world, and becomes involved again,

Is, in fact, regarded as a superior kind of being,

To the one who gets out of it.

The person who gets out of the rat race,

And enters into eternal peace,

Is called Pratyeka Buddha.

Which means private Buddha.

Buddha who does not teach,

Who does not help others.

And in Mahayana literature, that is almost a term of abuse.

Pratyeka Buddha.

Pratyeka Buddhas are classed with unbelievers, and heretics, and infidels, and fools.

But the great thing is the bodhisattva.

All beings are thought of, in popular Buddhism, as constantly reincarnating,

Again, and again, and again, and again, into the round of existence.

Helplessly, because they still desire.

They are therefore drawn back into the cycle.

The bodhisattva goes back into the cycle with his eyes wide open, voluntarily.

And allows himself to be sucked in.

And this is normally interpreted as an act of supreme compassion.

And bodhisattvas can assume any guise.

They can get furiously angry, if necessary.

In order to discourage evil beings.

Even could assume the role of a prostitute.

And live that way.

So as to deliver beings at that level of life.

Could become an animal.

Could become an insect.

Become a maggot.

Anything, you know.

All deliberately and in full consciousness.

To carry on the work of the deliverance of all beings.

Now that's the way the popular mind understands it.

And therefore the bodhisattvas are all revered and respected.

And worshipped.

And looked upon as gods.

As we look upon God in the west.

And as saviours as the Christian looks upon Jesus.

But underneath this myth.

There is a profound philosophical idea.

And that is this.

It goes back to the Hindu philosophy of Advaita.

And non-duality.

Namely.

The apparent dualism.

Of I and thou.

Of the knower and the known.

The subject and the object.

Is unreal.

And so also.

The apparent duality between.

Maya.

The world illusion.

And reality.

Is unreal.

The apparent duality.

Or difference between.

The enlightened and the ignorant person.

Is unreal.

So the apparent duality.

Of.

Bondage.

And deliverance.

Or liberation.

Is unreal.

The wise.

The perfectly wise man.

Is the one who realises.

Vividly.

That.

The ideal place.

Is the place where you are.

If this is an impossible thing.

To put in words.

The nearest I could get to it.

Would be to say.

That.

If you could see.

This moment.

That.

You need nothing beyond this moment.

Now.

Sitting here.

Irrespective of anything.

I might be saying to you.

Of any ideas.

You might have rattling around.

In your brains.

That.

Here.

And now.

Is.

The.

Absolute.

Witch.

Then which.

There is no witcher.

Only.

We.

We prevent ourselves.

From seeing this.

Because.

We're always saying.

Well.

There ought to be something more.

Am and I missing something.

Somehow.

See.

And nobody sees it.

Now.

Uh.

Then.

Also.

The.

Most.

Far out.

Form.

Of.

Mahayana.

Buddhism.

Is.

In.

Is.

Shinshu.

True.

Sect.

And.

Uh.

This.

Is.

Based on the idea.

That.

There was.

In.

Immeasurably.

Past.

Ages.

A.

Great.

Bodhisattva.

Called.

Amitabha.

And.

He made a vow.

That.

He would never.

Never.

Become a Buddha.

Unless.

Any.

Being.

Who.

Is.

The.

Pure.

Land.

Over.

Which.

He presides.

The.

Kind of.

Paradise.

He did.

Become a Buddha.

And.

So.

The.

Vow.

Works.

All.

You have to do.

Is.

To.

Repeat.

The name.

Amitabha.

And.

This.

Will.

Assure.

The.

Western.

Paradise.

You see.

Is.

Some.

Kind of.

A.

Level.

Of.

Consciousness.

It.

In.

And.

Wonderful.

Pictures.

Where.

The.

Buddha.

Amitabha.

Who.

Is.

A.

Related.

To.

Ahura.

Mazda.

And.

He.

Means.

Boundless.

Light.

In.

The.

In.

The.

Open.

Is.

Amitabha.

So.

There.

He.

Sits.

Surrounded.

With.

His.

Court.

And.

This.

Court.

Is.

Full.

Of.

Apsaras.

And.

Apsaras.

Are.

Beautiful.

Girls.

And.

There.

You.

Find.

Yourself.

Sitting.

Coming.

Out.

Of.

The.

Water.

And.

Here.

On.

The.

Clouds.

In.

Front.

Of.

You.

Are.

The.

Apsaras.

Sitting.

Strumming.

Their.

Lutes.

With.

The.

It.

This.

Fast.

The.

Said.

Any.

Many.

Times.

You see.

And.

So.

You.

're Quite.

You.

Okay.

ONG AS.

To see.

You.

More.

that anything good you try to do is done with a selfish motive

and therefore doesn't affect your deliverance

therefore the only way to get deliverance is to put faith

in the power of this Amitabha Buddha

and to accept it as a free gift

and to take it by doing the most absurd thing

saying Namo Amida Buttsi

don't even worry whether you have to have faith in this

because trying to have faith is also spiritual pride

it doesn't matter whether you have faith or whether you don't

the thing works anyway

so just say Namo Amida Butts

see

now that's the most popular form of Buddhism in Asia

the two most vast temples in Kyoto

the Inishi and Higashi Honganji temples

represent this sect

and everybody loves Amitabha

Amida they call him in Japan

boundless light

infinite Buddha of compassion

sitting there with this angelic expression on his face

it's alright boys

just say my name

it's all you have to do

so when we add together

prayer wheels

Namo Amida Buttsi

they call it Nembut

so that's the means of remembering Buddha

bookcases

and all these things

where you just have to

and the work is done for you

then wouldn't we westerners say

especially if we are protestants

oh what a scoundrelly thing that is

what an awful degradation of religion

what an avoidance of the moral challenge

and the effort and everything that is required

is this what the bodhisattva doctrine of infinite compassion

deteriorates into

now you see

there is a profound aspect to all that

just as the

there is the diamond and the ice

as we were talking about this morning

just as there is desperation and despair

nirvana

desperation and despair

of the horrors

so there are two ways of looking at this

nothing to do

no effort to make idea

depending completely on the saviour

for who is Amitabha

popularly Amitabha is somebody else

he is some great

compassionate being

who looks after you

esoterically

Amitabha is your own nature

Amitabha is your real self

the inmost boundless light

that is

the root and ground of your own consciousness

you don't need to do anything to be that

you are that

and saying Nembutsu's

is simply a symbolical way of pointing out

that you don't have to become this

you are it

and Nembutsu therefore

on its deeper side builds up

a special kind of sage

which they call Myokonin

Myokonin in Japanese means

a marvelous fine man

but the Myokonin is a special type of personality

who corresponds in the west to the holy fool

in Russian spirituality

or to something like the Franciscan

in Catholic spirituality

Myokonins

well I'll tell you some Myokonin stories

that's the best way to indicate their character

one day Myokonin was traveling

and he stopped in a Buddhist temple overnight

and he went up to the sanctuary

where they have all these big cushions

like here you know for the priest to sit on

and he arranged the cushions in a pile on the floor

and went to sleep on them

in the morning the priest came in

and saw this tramp sleeping

he said what are you doing here

desecrating the sanctuary

by sleeping on the cushions

and so on

right in front of the altar

and Myokonin looked at him in astonishment

and said

he said why you must be a stranger here

you can't belong to the family

in Japanese

when you want to say

that a thing is just the way it is

you call it sonomama

so there's a haiku poem which says

weeds in the rice field

cut them down

sonomama fertilizer

cut the weeds

leave them exactly where they are

and they become fertilizer

sonomama

and sonomama means reality

just the way it is

just like that

now there's an expression

a parallel expression

konomama

konomama means

I just as I am

just little me

you know like that

with no frills

no pretense

except that I naturally have some pretense

that's part of konomama

and the Myokonin is the man you see

who realizes that he

konomama

just as I am

am Buddha

am delivered by Amitabha

because Amitabha is my real nature

if you

if you really know that

you see

that makes you a Myokonin

but

but be aware of the fact

that you could entirely miss the point

and become a monkey instead

by saying I'm alright just as I am

and therefore I'm going to rub it in

and I'm going to be

going around

parading

my unregenerate nature

because this is Buddha too

you see

the fellow who does that

doesn't really know that it's okay

he's doing too much

he's coming on too strong

the other people

who

are always

beating themselves

they're doing the opposite error

you see

the middle way

right

down the center

is where you don't have to do a thing

to justify yourself

and you don't have to justify not justifying yourself

which is the mistake that most beatniks make

they justify not justifying themselves

and go too far

so you see there's something quite fascinating and tricky

in this doctrine

of the great bodhisattva Amitabha

who

saves you just as you are

who delivers you from bondage

just as you are

and you only have to say

Namo Amida Butch

fascinating

but that is the principle of Mahayana

and that is

you see

your acceptance of yourself

as you are

is the same thing as coming to live now

as you are

you see

now is as you are

in the moment

but you can't

come to now

and you can't accept yourself

on purpose

because the moment you do that

you're doing something unnecessary

you're doing a little bit more

that's what they call in Zen

legs on a snake

or a beard on a eunuch

you've overdone it

you see

how

can you

neither

do something about it

nor do nothing about it

as if that was something you had to do

you see

this is the same problem

as originally posed in Buddhism

how do you cease from desiring

because when I try to cease from desiring

I am desiring not to desire

you see this

all of this

is a

what is called upaya

or skillful device

to slow you down

so that

you can really be here

by seeing that there is nowhere else you can be

you don't have to come to now

where else can you be

it isn't

a task

it isn't a contest

what the Greeks called agon

agony

a contest

there is nowhere else to be

so they say

nirvana is no other than samsara

this shore is really the same as the other shore

it's not a

so if you look for this

lankavatara sutra says

if you look

to try and get nirvana in order to escape suffering

and being reborn

that's not nirvana at all

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 14 - Swallowing A Ball Of Hot Iron =====

The object of Buddhist discipline or methods of psychological training is, as it were, to

bring about a state of affairs in which the individual feels himself to be everything

that there is, the whole cosmos focused, expressing itself here.

Now, in that way, your sense of identity would be turned inside out.

You wouldn't forget who you were, you wouldn't forget your name and address, your telephone

number, your social security number, and what sort of role you're supposed to occupy

in society.

But you would know that this particular role that you play, this particular personality

that you are, is superficial, and the real you is all that there is.

And that inversion, turning upside down of the sense of identity, of the state of consciousness

which the average person has, is the objective of Buddhistic disciplines.

The method of teaching something in Buddhism is rather different from methods of teaching

which we use in the Western world.

In the Western world, a good teacher is regarded as someone who makes the subject matter easy

for the student, a person who explains things cleverly and clearly.

So you can take a course in mathematics without tears.

In the Oriental world, they have an almost exactly opposite conception, and that is that a good

teacher is a person who makes you find out something for yourself.

In other words, learn to swim by throwing the baby into the water.

There's a story used in Zen about how a burglar taught his child to burgle.

He took him one night on a burgling expedition and locked him up in a chest in the house that

he was burgling and left him.

And the poor little boy was all alone, locked up in the chest.

And he began to think, how on earth am I going to get out?

So he suddenly called out, fire, fire.

And everybody began running all over the place.

And they heard this shriek coming in from inside the chest and they unlocked it.

And he rushed out and shot out into the garden.

And just then, everybody was in hot pursuit, calling out thief, thief, and he went by a

well.

And he picked up a rock and dropped it in the well.

And everybody thought, the poor fellow has jumped into the well and committed suicide.

And he got away.

He got home and his father said, congratulations, you have learned the art.

So do you see, William Blake once said, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

And so the method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools persist

in their folly.

But very rigorously and very consistently and very hard.

So then, if I may, now having given you the analogy, the image, let's go to the specific

situation.

Supposing you want to study Buddhism under a Zen master, what will happen to you?

Well first of all, let's ask the question, why would you want to do this anyway?

It, I mean, I can make the situation fairly universal.

It might not be a Zen master that you go to.

It might be a Methodist minister.

It might be a Catholic priest.

It might be a psychoanalyst.

But what's the matter with you?

Why do you go?

And surely the reason that we all would be seekers is that we feel some disquiet about

ourselves.

Many of us want to get rid of ourselves.

We can't stand ourselves.

And so we watch television and go to the movies and read mystery stories and join churches in

order to forget ourselves.

In order to merge with something greater than ourselves.

We want to get away from this ridiculous thing locked up in a bag of skin.

So I have a problem.

I hurt.

I suffer.

I'm neurotic or whatever it is.

And one goes to the teacher and say, my problem's me.

Change me.

Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he'll say, well, I have nothing to teach.

Change.

There is no problem.

Everything's perfectly clear.

And you think that one over.

And you say, he's probably being cagey.

He's testing me out.

To see if I really want to be his student.

So I know, according to everybody else who's been through this, that in order to get this

man to take me on, I must persist.

Do you know our saying, anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

That's a very, there's a double take in that saying, you see.

So in the same way, anybody who goes with a spiritual problem to a Zen master defines himself

as a nut, and the teacher does everything possible to make him as nutty as possible.

But the teacher says, quite honestly, I haven't anything to tell you.

I don't teach anything.

I have no doctrine.

As I said to you in the beginning of this talk, I have nothing whatsoever to sell you.

So the student thinks, this is very deep, because this nothing that he's talking about,

this nothing that he teaches, is what they call in Buddhism, Shunyata.

And Shunyata is the Sanskrit for nothingness.

But, and it's supposed to be the ultimate reality.

But as you know, if you know anything about these doctrines, this doesn't mean real nothingness.

Not kind of just nothing there at all, not just blank.

But it means no thingness.

It's the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things.

And that's something very deep and profound.

So he knows that when the teacher said, I have nothing to teach, he meant this very esoteric, no thing.

Well, he might also say, then, if you have nothing to teach, what are all these students doing around here?

And the teacher says, they are not doing anything.

They're just, they're just a lot of stupid people who live here.

And he knows, again, you see, the stupid doesn't mean just straight stupid,

but the higher stupidity of being people who are humble and don't have intellectual pride.

So, finally, the student, having gone out of his way to define himself as a damn fool in need of help,

he's absolutely worked himself into this situation.

He's defined himself as a nut.

And then the teacher accepts him.

And the teacher says, now, I'm going to ask you a question.

I want to know who you are before your father and mother conceived you.

That is to say, you've come to me with a problem.

And you've said, I have a problem.

I want to get one up on this universe.

Now, who is it that wants to get one up?

I mean, who are you?

Who is this thing called your ego, your soul, your eye, your identity,

for whom your parents provided a body?

Show me that.

And he says, further, I'm from Missouri, and I don't want any words.

I want to be shown.

So, the student may open his mouth to make an answer,

but the teacher says, uh-uh, not yet.

You're not ready.

And he takes him back and introduces him to the chief student,

all those so-called Zen monks who live together.

And the chief student says, now, what we do here is so-and-so.

We have this discipline.

But the main part of the discipline is meditation.

And we all sit cross-legged in a row.

And we do that.

And you sit cross-legged, and you learn how to breathe and be still.

In other words, to do nothing.

But you mustn't go to sleep, and you mustn't get into a trance.

You have to stay wide awake, not thinking anything, but perfectly doing nothing.

And there's a monk walking down all the time with a flat stick, rather long, about so long.

And if you go to sleep, or if you get into a trance, or if you get dreamy, he hits you on the back.

So that you'll stay quite clear and wide awake, but still doing nothing.

And the idea is that out of this state of profoundly doing nothing,

you will be able to tell the teacher who you really are.

In other words, the question, who are you before your father and mother conceived you,

is a request for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity.

As if I were to say to you, look, will you be absolutely genuine with me?

No deception, please.

I want you to do something that expresses you without the slightest deception.

No more role acting, no more playing games with me.

I want to see you.

Now imagine, could you really be that honest with somebody else?

Especially a spiritual teacher.

And you know he looks right through you.

He sees all your secret thoughts.

And he knows the very second when you've been a little bit phony.

And that bugs you.

Just like the psychiatrist.

You're sitting in there discussing your problems with him and you start picking your nose.

And the psychiatrist suddenly says to you,

Is your finger comfortable there?

You like that?

And you know, you know, you know, your Freudian slip is showing.

What do fingers symbolize?

What do nostrils symbolize?

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

And then you quickly put your hand down.

And you say, oh, no, it's nothing.

It's nothing.

I was just picking my nose.

And the analyst says, oh, really?

Then why are you justifying it?

Why are you trying to explain it away?

He has you everywhere you turn, you see.

Well, that's the whole art of psychoanalysis.

And it's Zen.

It's the same thing.

In other words, when you're challenged to be perfectly genuine, it's like saying to a child,

Now, darling, come out here and play and don't be self-conscious.

Or it's like I would say to you, now, look, if you come here tonight at exactly midnight

and put your hands on this stage, you can wish and have granted any wish you want,

provided you don't think of a green elephant.

And so everybody will come, they'll put their hands here, and they will be very careful not

to think about a green elephant.

Well, now, do you see the point?

That everybody, if we transfer this to the dimension of spirituality, where the highest

ideal is to be unselfish, to let go of oneself, when you are trying to be unselfish, you're

doing it for a selfish reason.

You can't be unselfish by a decision of the will any more than you can decide not to think

of a green elephant.

There is a story about Confucius, who one day met Lao Tzu, who was a great Chinese philosopher.

And Lao Tzu said, sir, what is your system?

And Confucius said, it is charity and love of one's neighbor and elimination of self-interest.

Lao Tzu said, stuff and nonsense.

Your elimination of self is a positive manifestation of self.

Look at the universe.

The stars keep their order.

The trees and plants grow upwards without exception.

The waters flow.

Be like this.

All your nonsense about elimination of self is like beating a drum in search of a fugitive.

So in this way, these are all examples of the thing, the trickery, the master is playing on you.

You came to him with the idea in your mind that you are a separate, independent, isolated individual.

And what he is simply saying to you is, show me this individual.

I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan, and he got pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is.

And on his way to an interview with the master to give an answer to the problem,

he noticed a very common sight in Japan, a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden.

And he swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono.

And then he went into the master, and to give the answer of who he was, he suddenly produced the bullfrog.

And the master said, mm-mm, too intellectual.

In other words, this answer is too contrived.

It's too much like Zen.

You've been reading too many books.

It's not the genuine thing.

So, after a while, you see, what happens is this.

When the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his true self,

not only is there no way of doing it,

there is also no way of doing it by not doing it.

You can't do it by doing something.

You can't do it by not doing something.

Let me, to make this clearer, put it into Christian terms.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.

Now, what are you going to do about that?

If you try very hard to love God, and you ask yourself, why am I doing this?

You'll find out you're doing it because you want to be on the side of the big battalions.

You want to be right.

After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, isn't he?

And if you don't love him, you're going to be in a pretty sad state.

So, you realize I'm loving him just because I'm afraid of what will happen to me if I don't.

Then you think, that's pretty lousy love, isn't it?

And you think, that's a bad motivation.

I wish I could change that.

I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart.

But why do you want to change?

Uh-uh.

See, I realize that the reason I want to have a different kind of motive is that I've got the same motive.

So, I say, oh, heaven's sakes, God, I'm a mess, and will you help me out?

Then he reminds you, why are you doing that?

Now, you're just giving up, aren't you?

You're asking someone else to take over your problem.

So, you suddenly find, you see, you're stuck.

So, in this way, what is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who swallowed a ball of red-hot iron.

He can't gulp it down, and he can't spit it out.

Or it's like a mosquito biting an iron bull.

It's the nature of a mosquito to bite, and it's the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable.

And both go on doing their thing that is their nature.

And so, nothing can happen.

You realize, absolutely, you're up against it.

Absolutely no answer to this problem.

No way out.

Now, what does that mean?

If I can't do the right thing by doing, and if I can't do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean?

It means, of course, that I, who is said to do all this, am a hallucination.

There is no independent self to be produced.

There is no way at all of showing it.

It's because it isn't there.

So, you recover from the illusion.

You suddenly wake up and think, what a relief.

And they call that satori.

That's awakening, the first step in awakening.

Let me try and translate this.

When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin.

That, by being, the teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it.

So, it isn't there.

And when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a new sense of identity.

And you realize that what you are is, as I said, the whole world of nature doing this.

Now, that's a difficult thing for many Western people, because it suggests to them a kind of fatalism.

It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces.

So, in the same way, when your own inner sense of identity changes, from being the separate individual, to being what the entire cosmos is doing at this place,

you become not a puppet, but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever.

However, this is the same paradox, which the Christian knows, in the form, whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.

Now, I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western world today,

because we have developed an immensely powerful technology.

Today, we have stronger means of changing the physical universe than has ever existed before.

How are we going to use it?

There is a Chinese proverb that if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.

Let us assume that our technological knowledge is the right means.

What kind of people are going to use this knowledge?

Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it?

Or people who love the physical world and feel that the physical world is their own personal body?

An extension, the whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one's extended body.

Now, at the moment, the general attitude of our technologists who are exploring space is represented in the term the conquest of space.

And they are building enormous shell-like phallic objects to go into the sky.

And this is downright ridiculous.

Because who is going to get anywhere in a rocket?

You know, it takes a terrible long time even to get to the moon.

And it's going to take longer than anybody can live to get outside the solar system, just to begin with.

The proper way to study space is not with rockets, but with radio astronomy.

Instead of going, bang, you know, with a tough fist at the sky, become more sensitive.

Develop subtler senses.

That's radio astronomy.

And everything will come to you.

Be more open.

Be more receptive.

And eventually, you will develop an instrument that will examine a piece of rock on Mars with greater care than you could if you were holding it in your own hand.

Let it come to you.

But you see, this whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world will succeed only in destroying the world.

As we are doing, with absurd and uninformed and short-sighted methods of getting rid of insect pests,

of forcing our fruit and tomatoes to grow, of stripping our hills of trees, and so on and so on,

thinking that all this is some kind of progress when actually it is turning everything into a junk heap.

It is said, you know, that Americans who are in the forefront of technological progress are materialists.

Nothing is further from the truth.

American culture is dedicated to the hatred of material and to its transformation into junk.

Look at Los Angeles.

Does it look as if it was made by people who loved material?

It's all made out of ticky-tacky, which is a combination of plaster of Paris, paper mache, and plastic glue, and comes in any flavor.

The important lesson, in other words, is technology and its powers must be handled by true materialists.

And true materialists are people who love material, who cherish wood, and stone, and wheat, and eggs, and animals, and above all, the earth.

And treat it with the reverence that is due to one's own body.

So, let's get started.

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 07 - Taoist Way I =====

The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principal components of Chinese thought.

There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy,

but there are two great currents which have thoroughly moulded the culture of China,

and they are Taoism and Confucianism.

And they play a curious game with each other.

Let me start by saying something about Confucianism,

originating with Kung Fu Tzu, or Confucius,

who lived approximately a little after 630 BC.

He is often supposed to have been a contemporary of Lao Tzu,

who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way,

but it seems more likely that Lao Tzu lived later than 400,

according to most modern scholars.

Confucianism is not a religion.

Confucianism is a social ritual and a way of ordering society,

so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China,

Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit,

found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism

to participate in Confucian rituals,

because he saw them as something of a kind of national character,

as one might pay respect to the flag or something of that kind in our own times.

But he found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism,

no commitment to any belief or dogma

that would be at variance with the Catholic faith.

So Confucianism is an order of society

and involves ideas of human relations,

including the government and the family,

based on the principle of what is called in Chinese Ren,

although Jiafu will notice that I never get my tones right,

which is an extraordinarily interesting word.

I'm going to put some of these things on the whiteboard.

This is the word Ren in Chinese,

and it's often translated benevolence,

but that's not a good translation at all.

This word means human heartedness.

That's the nearest we can get to it in English.

And it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues,

but one that he always refused to define.

It's above righteousness and justice and propriety

and other great Confucian virtues.

And it involves the principle that human nature

is a fundamentally good arrangement,

including not only our virtuous side,

but also our passionate side,

and also our appetites and our waywardness.

The Hebrews have a term which they call the Yetzir Hara,

Y-E-Z-E-R-H-A-R-A,

which means the wayward inclination,

or what I like to call

the element of irreducible rascality,

that God put into all human beings.

And put it there because it was a good thing.

It was good for humans to have these two elements in them.

And so a truly human hearted person

is a gentleman

with a slight touch of rascality,

just as one has to have salt in a stew.

Confucius said,

the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue,

meaning that to try to be wholly righteous

is to go beyond humanity,

to try to be something that isn't human.

So this gives Confucian approach to life

and justice and all those sort of things,

a kind of queer humor,

a sort of boys-will-be-boys attitude,

which is nevertheless

a very mature way

of handling human problems.

It was, of course, for this reason

that the Japanese Buddhist priests

who visited China to study Buddhism,

especially Zen priests,

introduced Confucianism into Japan.

Because, despite certain limitations

that Confucianism has,

and it needs,

it always needs the Tao philosophy

as a counterbalance,

Confucianism has been one of the most successful

philosophies in all history

for the regulation

of governmental and family relationships.

But, of course,

it is concerned with formality.

Confucianism prescribes

all kinds of formal relationships,

linguistic, ceremonial, musical,

in etiquette,

in all the spheres of morals.

And, for this reason,

has always been twitted

by the Taoists

for being unnatural.

You need these two components, you see,

and they play against each other

beautifully in Chinese society.

Roughly speaking, you see,

the Confucian way of life

is for people involved in the world.

The Taoist way of life

is for people who get disentangled.

Now, as we know,

in our own modern times,

there are various ways

of getting disentangled

from the regular lifestyle,

say, of the United States.

If you want to go through

the regular lifestyle

of the United States,

you go to high school and college,

and then you go into

a profession or a business.

And you own a standard house

and you raise a family

and you have a car or two cars

and do all that jazz.

But a lot of people

don't want to live that way.

And there are lots of other ways

of living besides that.

So you could say

that those of us

who go along with the pattern

correspond to the Confucians.

And those who are bohemians

or bums or beatniks

or whatever

and don't correspond

with the pattern,

they are more like the Taoists.

Because the Taoist is really

actually, in Chinese history,

Taoism is a way of life

for older people.

Lao Tzu,

the name given to

the founder of Taoism,

means the old boy.

And the legend is

that when he was born,

he already had a white beard.

So,

it's sort of like this,

that when you

have contributed to society,

when you've contributed children

and brought them up,

and you have assumed

a certain role

in social life,

you then say,

now it's time for me

to find out what it's all about.

Who am I ultimately

behind my outward personality?

What is the secret source of things?

And the latter half of life

is the preeminently excellent time

to find this out.

It's something to do

when you have finished

with the family business.

I am not saying

that that is

a sort of

unavoidable strict rule.

Of course,

one can study

the Tao

when very young

because it contains

all kinds of secrets

in it

as to the performance

of every kind

of art

or craft

or business

or any occupation

whatsoever.

But it does,

in China,

in a way,

it plays that

role

of a kind

of safety valve

for

the

more restricted

way of life

that Confucianism

prescribes.

And there is

a sort of

type

in China

who is known

as the old rogue.

He is

a sort of

intellectual bum

often found

among scholars

who is admired

very much

and who

a type

of character

which had

an enormous

influence

on the development

of the ideals

of Zen Buddhist

life.

He is one,

you see,

who goes

with nature

rather than

against nature.

Well,

now,

first of all,

I'm going to talk

about ideas

which come strictly

out of

Lao Tzu's book

The Tao Te Ching.

And,

of course,

the basic

thing

in the whole

philosophy

is the

conception

of Tao.

This word

has many

meanings

and the

book of Lao Tzu

starts out

by saying

that the Tao

which can be

spoken

is not

the eternal

Tao.

Or

you can,

there's a pun

in there

which you

can't quite

put into

English.

You can't

give all

the meanings

because the

word Tao

means

both

the way

or course

of nature

or of

everything

it also

means to

speak.

So,

the actual

opening phrase

of the book

following

this word

Tao

is this

and the

character

is repeated

again.

You see?

And this

character

means

can be

or can

able

something like

that.

So,

the way

which can

be

then

give it

its second

meaning

spoken

described

uttered

but it

also means

the way

that can

be

weighed

not

w-e-i-g-h

but

w-a-y-e-d

you know

you'd have

to invent

that word

the way

that can

be

traveled

perhaps

is not

the eternal

way.

In other

words

there is

no

way

in which

the Tao

or following

the Tao

can

there is

no recipe

for it.

I can't

give you

any

do-it-yourself

instructions

A B C D

as to

how it's

done.

It was

like when

Louis Armstrong

was asked

what is

jazz

he said

if you

have to

ask

you don't

know.

Now

that's

awkward

isn't

it?

But

we can

gather

what it

is

by

absorbing

certain

atmospheres

and

attitudes

connected

with those

who

follow

it

and

from

the

art

and

the

poetry

and

all

the

expressions

and

the

anecdotes

and

stories

that

illustrate

the

translated

Tao

as

the

Logos

taking

as

their

point

of

departure

the

opening

passage

of

St.

John's

Gospel

in the

beginning

was

the

word

now

if you

look up

a

Chinese

translation

of the

Bible

it

says

in the

beginning

was

the

Tao

and

the

Tao

was

with

God

and

the

Tao

was

God

the

same

was

in

the

beginning

with

God

all

things

were

made

by

it

and

without

it

was

not

anything

made

that

was

made

so

they

substituted

Tao

there

now

that

make

a

very

funny

effect

on

a

Chinese

philosopher

because

the

idea

of

things

being

made

by

the

Tao

is

absurd

the

Tao

is

not

a

manufacturer

and

it's

not

a

governor

it

doesn't

rule

as

it

were

in

the

position

of

a

king

although

the

book

the

Tao

de

Jing

is

written

for

many

purposes

but

one

of

its

important

purposes

is

as

a

manual

of

guidance

for

a

ruler

and

what

it

tells

him

is

essentially

rule

by

not

ruling

don't

lord it

over

the

people

and

so

he

says

the

great

Tao

flows

everywhere

both

to the

left

and

to

the

right

it

loves

and

nourishes

all

things

but

does

not

lord

it

over

them

and

when

good

things

are

it

lays

no

claim

to

them

in

other

words

the Tao

doesn't

stand up

and say

I have

made

all of

you

I have

filled

this earth

with its

beauty

and glory

fall down

before me

and worship

the Tao

having

having done

anything

you know

always

escapes

and

is not

around

to

receive

any

thanks

or

acknowledgement

because

it

loves

obscurity

and

Lao Tzu

said

the Tao

is like

water

it

always

seeks

the low

level

which

human

beings

abhor

so

it's a

very

mysterious

idea

Tao

then

is not

really

equivalent

with any

western

or Hindu

idea

of God

because

God

is always

associated

with being

the Lord

even in

India

the Brahman

is often

called

the Supreme

Lord

although that

was the term

more strictly

applicable to

Ishvara

the

manifestation

of Brahman

in the

form of

a personal

God

but

Bhagavan

the Lord

Krishna

his

song

is the

Bhagavad Gita

the song

of the

Lord

there's

always

the idea

of the

king

and the

ruler

attached

but not

in the

Chinese

Tao

philosophy

the

Tao

is not

something

different

from

nature

from

ourselves

from

our

surrounding

trees

and

waters

and

air

the

Tao

is

the

way

all

that

behaves

and

so

the

Chinese

the

basic

Chinese

idea

of

the

universe

is

really

that

it's

an

organism

and

as

we

shall

see

when

we

get

on

to

Zhuangzi

who

is

operating

together

so

that

nowhere

can

you

find

the

controlling

center

there

isn't

any

the

world

is

a

system

of

interrelated

components

none

of which

can

survive

without

each

other

just

as

in

the

case

of

bees

and

flowers

you

will

never

find

bees

around

in a

place

where

there

aren't

flowers

and

you

will

never

find

flowers

around

in

secretly

is

that

although

bees

and

flowers

look

different

from

each

other

they're

inseparable

they

to use

a very

important

Taoist

expression

they

arise

mutually

this

is

one

of the

great

phrases

from

the

second

chapter

of

Lao Tzu's

book

where

he

says

this

character

means

to

have

or

to

be

and

this

next

one

is

a

very

important

character

in Taoist

philosophy

it

means

no

negative

wu

in

Chinese

not

to

be

and

then

this

curious

expression

which

we

don't

have

a

really

good

corresponding

idea

in

traditional

western

thought

so

to

be

and

not

to

be

mutually

arise

this

character

is

based

on

the

picture

of a

plant

something

that

grows

out

of

the

ground

so

you

could

say

positive

and

negative

to

be

and

not

to

be

yes

and

no

light

and

dark

arise

mutually

come

into

being

there's

none

is

cause

and

effect

it's

not

that

relationship

at

all

it's

like

the

in

the

same

way

as

high

and

low

back

and

front

long

and

short

loud

and

soft

all

those

experiences

are

experienceable

only

in terms

of their

polar

experience

so

the

Chinese

idea

of

nature

is

that

all

the

various

species

arise

mutually

because

they

interdepend

and

this

total

system

of

interdependence

is

the

Tao

it

involves

certain

other

things

that

go

along

with

Tao

but

this

is

this

mutual

arising

is

the

key

idea

to

the

whole

thing

and

it

is

if

you

want

to

understand

Chinese

and

oriental

thought

in

general

it

is

the

most

important

thing

to

grasp

because

you

see

we

think

so

much

in

terms

of

cause

and

effect

we

think

of

the

universe

today

in

Aristotelian

and

Newtonian

ways

and

in

that

philosophy

the

world

is

all

separated

it's

like

a

huge

amalgamation

of

billiard

balls

and

they

don't

move

until

struck

by

another

or

by

a

cue

and

so

everything

is

going

tock

another

in

a

mechanical

way

but

of

course

from

the

standpoint

of

twentieth

century

science

we

know

perfectly

well

now

that

that's

not

the

way

it

works

we

know

enough

about

relationships

to see

that

mechanical

model

which

Newton

devised

was

all

right

for

certain

purposes

but

it

breaks

down

now

because

we

understand

relativity

and

we

see

how

things

go

together

in

a

kind

of

connected

net

rather

than

a

chain

of

billiard

balls

banging

each

other

around

so

in

the

philosophy

of

the

Tao

it

is

said

it's

always

being

said

this

is

you

read

this

in

every

art

book

about

Chinese

art

that

in

Chinese

painting

man

is

always

seen

as

in

nature

rather

than

dominating

it

you

get

a

painting

entitled

Poet

Drinking

by

Moonlight

and

you

see

a

great

landscape

and

after

some

search

with

a

magnifying

glass

at

last

you

see

the

poet

stuck

away

in a

corner

somewhere

drinking

wine

whereas

if we

painted

the

subject

poet

drinking

by

moonlight

the

poet

would

be

the

most

obvious

thing

in

a

picture

there

he

would

be

dominating

the

whole

thing

the

landscape

off

somewhere

behind

him

but

all the

Chinese

painters

put

man

I

mean

the

painters

of the

great

classical

tradition

there

are

Chinese

painters

who

specialize

in

family

portraits

and do

these

very

formal

paintings

of

someone's

ancestor

sitting

on a

throne

it's

quite a

different

category

but the

Taoist

inspired

painters

Zen

inspired

painters

have this

view of man

as an integral

part of

nature

something

in it

just as

everything else

is in it

flowers

and birds

and not

there

sent into

this world

and farm

it

and dominate

it

so then

the whole

conception

of nature

is as a

self-regulating

self-governing

indeed democratic

organism

but it has

a totality

it all

goes together

and this

totality

is the Tao

so then

we move

to a second

term

that is

extremely

important

the

expression

zi ran

is the

term

that we

translate

nature

when we

translate

Chinese

but this

term

expresses

this whole

point of

view

it doesn't

say

nature

natura

which means

in a way

class of

things

it means

literally

self

so

what is

so

of itself

what happens

of itself

and thus

spontaneity

and in the

Tao Te Ching

early on

Lao Tzu

says

the Tao's

method

is

to be so

of itself

now

we might

translate that

automatic

were it not

that the word

automatic

has a mechanical

flavor

zi ran

as this is called

or shizan

in Japanese

means

spontaneous

yes

it happens

as your

heart beats

you don't do

anything about it

you don't force

your heart to beat

you don't make it

beat

it does it

by itself

now figure a world

in which everything

happens by itself

it doesn't have to be

controlled

it's allowed

whereas you might

say

the idea

of God

involves

the control

of everything

going on

the idea

of the Tao

is the ruler

who abdicates

and lets all the

people

trusts all the

people

to conduct

their own

affairs

to let it

all happen

so

this doesn't

mean you see

that there isn't

a unified

organism

and everything

is in chaos

it means

that the more

liberty you give

the more love

you give

the more you

allow things

in yourself

and in your

surroundings

to take place

the more order

you will have

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 16 - Taoist Way Of Karma =====

This is Audible.

Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series No. 2,

Eastern Thought in the Modern World.

This is the first part of a program recorded in 1965

at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Here, Alan Watts delivers a brilliant discussion of the Hindu concept of karma

and the Taoist easy way to escape it through cleverness, not muscle.

From Hindu and Christian perspectives,

to Gurdjieff, Buddhism, T.S. Eliot, and the Zen pebble in the pond,

he reveals the way to see into the Tao without hesitation.

It's part one of The Taoist Way.

Here's Alan Watts.

It is believed generally in India

that when a person sets out on the way of liberation,

his first problem is to become free from his past karma.

The popular theory of karma,

the word that literally means action or doing in Sanskrit,

so that when we say that something that happens to you is your karma,

it's like saying in English, it's your own doing.

Karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution

such that all the bad things you do and all the good things you do

have consequences which you have to inherit.

And so long as karmic energy remains stored up,

all the bad things you do and all the good things you do

have consequences which you have to inherit.

And so long as karmic energy remains stored up,

you have to work it out.

And what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action

which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma.

Nishkama means without passion or without attachment,

karma, action.

And so whatever action he does,

he renounces the fruits of the action

so that he acts in a way that doesn't generate future karma

because future karma continues you

in the wheel of becoming,

samsara, the round,

and keeps you being reincarnated.

Now then, in that case,

when the time comes that you start

to get out of the chain of karma,

all the creditors that you have

start presenting themselves for payment.

In other words,

a person who begins, say, to study yoga

is felt that he will suddenly get sick

or that his children will die

or that he loses money

or all sorts of catastrophes will occur.

Because the karmic debt is being cleared up.

And there's no hurry to be cleared up

if you're just living along like anybody.

But if you embark on the spiritual life,

a certain hurry occurs.

And therefore, since this is known,

it's rather discouraging to start these things.

The Christian way of saying the same thing

is that if you plan to be,

to change your life,

shall we say,

to turn over a new leaf,

you mustn't let the devil know

because he will oppose you

with all his might

if he suddenly discovers

that you're going to escape from his power.

So, for example,

if you have a bad habit,

say you drink too much,

and you make a New Year's resolution

that during this coming year

you will stop drinking.

That's a very, very dangerous thing to do

because the devil will immediately know about it.

And what will happen will be this.

He will confront you

with the prospect of 365 drinkless days.

And that will be awful,

you know,

just overwhelming.

And you won't be able to make

much more than three days on the wagon.

So, in that case,

you compromise with the devil

and say,

just today I'm not going to drink,

you see,

but tomorrow maybe,

you know,

we'll go back.

Then when tomorrow comes,

you say,

oh, just another day,

let's try out,

that's all.

And the next day you say,

oh, one more day

won't make much difference.

So you only do it for the moment,

and you don't let the devil know

that you have a secret intention

of going on day after day

after day after day.

But, of course,

there's something still better than that.

And that is not to let the devil know anything.

And that means, of course,

not to let yourself know.

One of the many meanings of that saying,

let not your left hand know

what your right hand do,

if it's just this.

And that was why,

in the Zen discipline,

a great deal of it

centers around

acting without premeditation.

As those of you know

who read Herigl's book,

Zen in the Art of Archery,

it was necessary to release the bowstring

without first saying,

now.

There's a wonderful story

who may also have read

by a German writer

von Kleist

about a boxing match

with a bear.

The man can never defeat this bear

because the bear

always knows

his plans in advance

and is ready

to deal with any situation.

The only way

to get through to the bear

would be to hit the bear

without having first intended

to do so.

That would catch him.

And so this is one of the

great, great problems

in

the spiritual

life

or whatever you want to call it

is to be able

to have intention

and act

simultaneous.

By this means

you escape karma

and you escape the devil.

So

you might say

that the Taoist

is exemplary

in this respect.

that this is

getting free

from karma

without

making any

previous announcement

of simply

supposing we have

a train

and we want to

unload the train

of its

freight cars

you can go

to the back end

and you can

unload them

one by one

and shunt them

into the sliding

but the simplest

of all ways

of unloading

is to uncouple

between the engine

and the first car

and that gets rid

of the whole bunch

at once.

And it is in that

sort of way

you see

that the Taoist

gets rid of karma

without challenging it.

And so

it has the reputation

you see

of being

the easy way.

There are all kinds

of yogas

and ways

for people

who want to be difficult.

And one of the

great

gambits

of a man

like

Gurdjieff

was to

make it all

seem as difficult

as possible

because that

challenged the

vanity

of his students.

If some

teacher

some guru

says really

this isn't

difficult at all

it's perfectly

easy

some people

will say

oh

he's not

really

the real

thing

we want

something

tough

and difficult

and that

when we see

somebody

starts out

giving you

a discipline

that's very

very weird

and rigid

people think

now there

is the thing

that man

means business

see

and so

they flatter

themselves

by going

to such

a guy

that they

are

serious

students

whereas the

other people

are only

dabblers

and so on

alright

if you have

to do it

that way

that's the way

you have to

do it

but

the Taoist

is the kind

of person

who shows

you the

shortcut

and shows

you how

to do it

by intelligence

rather than

effort

because that's

what it is

Taoism

is in that

sense

what everybody

is looking

for

the easy

way in

the shortcut

using

cleverness

instead of

muscle

so the

question

naturally

arises

isn't it

cheating

when in

any game

somebody

really starts

using his

intelligence

he will

very likely

be accused

of cheating

and to

draw the

line

between

skill

and cheating

is a very

difficult thing

to do

you see

the inferior

intelligence

will always

accuse

the superior

intelligence

of cheating

that's its

way of

saving face

you beat

me by

means that

weren't

fair

we were

originally

having a

contest to

find out

who had

the strongest

muscles

and you

know we

were pushing

against it

like this

this

and this

would prove

who had

the strongest

muscles

but then you

introduce some

gimmick into it

some judo trick

or something like

that you see

and you're not

playing fair

so in the

whole domain

of

ways of

liberation

roots for the

stupid people

and roots for the

intelligent people

and the latter

are faster

this was

perfectly

clearly

explained by

Huinang

the sixth

patriarch of

Zen in

China

in his

sutra

where he

says the

difference

between the

gradual

school

and the

sudden

school

is that

they both

arrive at the

same point

but the

gradual is for

slow-witted

people

and the

sudden

is for

fast-witted

people

can you

in other

words

find a

way

that

sees

into

your own

nature

that

sees

into

the

Tao

immediately

and at

the end

of this

morning's

talk

I

pointed

out

to you

the

immediate

way

the

way

through

now

when you

know

that

this

moment

is the

Tao

and this

moment

is by

it's

considered

Tao

neither

coming

into

being

nor

going

out

of

being

there

is

nirvana

and there

is a

whole

Chinese

philosophy

of time

based

on this

it

hasn't

to my

knowledge

been very

much

discussed

by Taoist

writers

it's been

more

discussed

by

Buddhist

writers

but it's

all based

on the

same

thing

Dogen

the

great

13th

century

Japanese

Zen

Buddhist

studied

in

China

and he

wrote a

book

called

Shobo

Genzo

a

Roshi

recently

said to

me

in

Japan

that's

a

terrible

book

because

it

tells

you

everything

it

gives

the

whole

secret

away

but

in

the

course

of

this

book

he

says

you

don't

there

is

no

such

thing

as

a

progression

in

time

the

spring

does

not

become

the

summer

there

is

first

spring

and

then

there

is

summer

so

in

the

same

way

you

now

do

not

become

you

later

this

is

T.S.

Eliot's

idea

in

Four

Quartets

where

he

says

that

the

person

who

has

settled

down

in

the

train

to

read

the

newspaper

is

not

the

same

person

who

stepped

onto

the

train

from

the

platform

and

therefore

also

you

who

sit

here

are

not

the

same

people

who

came

in

at

the

door

these

states

are

separate

each

in

its

own

place

there

was

the

coming

in

at

the

door

person

but

there

is

actually

only

the

here

and

now

sitting

person

and

the

person

sitting

here

and

now

is

not

the

person

as

illusory

in

its

own

way

as

the

upward

movement

of

the

red

lines

on

a

revolving

barber

pole

you know

it

goes

round

and

round

and

round

and

the

whole

thing

seems

to be

going

up

or

going

down

whichever

the

case

may

be

but

actually

nothing

is

going

up

or

down

so

when

you

throw

a

pebble

into

the

pond

and

you

make

a

concentric

rings

of

waves

there

is

an

illusion

that

the

water

is

flowing

outwards

and

no

water

is

flowing

outwards

at

all

water

is

only

going

up

and

the

buddhist

say

suffering

exists

but

no

one

who

suffers

deeds

exist

but

no

doers

are

found

a

path

there

is

but

no

one

who

follows

it

and

nirvana

is

but

no

one

who

attains

it

in

this

way

they

look

upon

the

continuity

of

life

as

the

same

sort

of

illusion

that

is

produced

when

you

take

a

cigarette

and

the

illusion

of

the

circle

is

created

whereas

there

is

only

the

one

point

of

fire

the

argument

then

is

so

long

as

you're

in

the

present

there

aren't

any

problems

the

problems

exist

only

when

you

allow

presents

to

amalgamate

there's

a way

of putting

this

in

Chinese

which

is

rather

interesting

they

have

a

pronounced

nyon

in

Japanese

nin

and

the

top

part

of

the

character

means

now

and

the

bottom

part

means

the

mind

heart

the

shin

and

so

this

is

as

it

were

an

instant

of

thought

in

Sanskrit

they

use

it

they

use

this

character

as

the

equivalent

for

the

Sanskrit

word

shana

then

if

you

put

if

you

double

this

character

put

it

twice

three

times

and

I'll

write

the

Chinese

for

ditto

nyan

means

thought

after

thought

after

thought

now

the

Zen

master

Joshu

was

once

asked

what

is

the

mind

of

a

child

and

he

said

a

ball

in

a

mountain

stream

what

do

you

mean

by

a

ball

in

a

mountain

stream

he

said

thought

after

thought

after

thought

with

no

block

so

he

was

using

of

course

the

mind

of

the

child

as

the

innocent

mind

the

mind

of

a

person

who's

enlightened

one

thought

follows

another

without

hesitation

the

thought

arises

it

doesn't

wait

to

arise

as

when

you

clap

your

hands

the

sound

issues

without

hesitation

when

you

strike

flint

the spark

comes

out

it

doesn't

wait

to

come

out

and

that

means

that

there's

no

block

thought

nyan nyan nyan

describes what we call in our world the stream of consciousness

blocking

consists

in letting

the

the stream

become

connected

chained

together

in such a way

that when the present thought arises

it seems to be dragging its past

or

resisting its future

saying

I don't want to go

when

when then

the

connection

the dragging

it's better to call it

of these

thoughts

drops

you've broken the chain of karma

if you think of this

in comparison with certain problems in music

it's very interesting

because when we listen to music

we hear melody

only because we remember the sequence

we hear the intervals between the tones

but more than that

we

remember

the tones that led up to the one we are now hearing

and we are trained musically to anticipate certain consequences

and

to the extent that we get the consequences we anticipate

we feel that we understand the music

but to the extent that the composer does not adhere

to the rules

and gives us unexpected consequences

we feel that we don't understand the music

and if he gives us harmonic relationships

which we are not trained to accept

that is to say to expect

we say well this man is just writing garbage

but of course it becomes apparent

that the

perception of music

the ability to hear melody

will depend upon

a relationship

between past, present and future sounds

and you might say

well you're talking about a way of living

that would be equivalent

to listening

to music

with a tone deaf mind

so that you would reduce

you would eliminate the melody

and have only noise

and so in your Taoist way of life

you would eliminate

all meaning

and have only

senseless present moments

up to a point that's true

that is in a way

what Buddhists

and also mean

by seeing things

in their suchness

what is so bad about dying

for example

it's really no problem

when you die

you just drop there

that's all there is to it

but what makes it a problem

is that you're dragging a past

all those things you've done

all those achievements you've made

all these relationships

and people

that you've accumulated

as your friends

all that has to go

see it isn't here now

I mean a few friends

might be around you

but all that past

that identifies you

as who you are

which is simply memory

all that has to go

and we feel just terrible

about that

but if we didn't

if we were just dying

that's all

death wouldn't be a problem

so likewise

the chores

of everyday life

they become intolerable

when everything

ties together

all the past

and the future

you feel it dragging

at you every way

supposing you wake up

in the morning

and it's a lovely morning

let's take today

right here and now

here we are

in this paradise

of the place

big sir

and some of us

have got to go to work

on Monday

is that a problem

for many people it is

it spoils the taste

of what's going on now

when we wake up in bed

on Monday morning

and think of the various

hurdles we've got to jump

that day

immediately we feel

sad

whereas actually

we're just lying in bed

so the Taoist trick says

simply live now

and there will be no problems

that's the meaning

of the Zen saying

when you

are hungry

eat

when you are tired

sleep

when you walk

walk

when you sit

sit

Rinzai

the great

Tang Dynasty

master said

in the practice

of Buddhism

there is no place

for using effort

sleep when you are tired

move your bowels

eat when you are hungry

that's all

the ignorant

will laugh at me

but the wise

will understand

and so

also

the meaning

of this wonderful

Zen saying

of the character

for the sun

day

that is

every day

is a good day

on condition

that

day day

is like

nyan nyan

they come

one after another

and yet

there is only this one

you don't link them

this

as I

intimated

just a moment ago

seems to be

an atomization

of life

things

just do what they do

the flower goes

poof

and people go this way

go that way

and so on

and that's

that's

that's what's happening

it has no meaning

it has no destination

it has no value

it's just like that

and when you see that

you see

it's a great relief

that's all it is

but then

when you are firmly

established in suchness

in that it's just

this moment

you can begin again

to play with the connections

only

you've seen through them

but now you see

they don't haunt you

because you know

that there isn't any

continuous you

running on

from moment to moment

who originated

at some time in the past

and will die

at some time in the future

all that's disappeared

so you can have

enormous fun

anticipating the future

remembering the past

and

playing

all kinds of

continuities

this is the meaning

of that famous

zen saying

about

mountains

are mountains

to the naive man

mountains are mountains

waters are waters

to the intermediate student

mountains are no longer mountains

waters are no longer waters

in other words

they've all dissolved

into the point instant

to the kshana

but for the

fully perfected student

mountains are again mountains

and waters are again waters

you've been listening to

taoist way

part one

with alan watts

from the alan watts radio series

number two

eastern thought

in the modern world

the love of wisdom

with alan watts

is produced by

the electronic university

i'm neil harvey

thank you for listening

audible hopes you have enjoyed

this program

thank you for listening to

the

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 09 - Taoist Way III =====

In the philosophy of the Tao, it is said, it's always being said, this is, you read this

in every art book about Chinese art, that in Chinese painting, man is always seen as

in nature, rather than dominating it.

You get a painting entitled, Poet Drinking by Moonlight, and you see a great landscape,

and after some search with a magnifying glass, at last you see the poet stuck away in a corner

somewhere, drinking wine.

Whereas if we painted the subject, Poet Drinking by Moonlight, the poet would be the most obvious

thing in the picture.

There he would be, dominating the whole thing, and the landscape off somewhere behind him.

But all the Chinese painters put man, I mean, the painters of the great classical tradition,

there are Chinese painters who specialize in family portraits, and do these very formal

paintings of someone's ancestor sitting on a throne.

It's quite a different category.

But the Taoist-inspired painters, Zen-inspired painters, have this view of man as an integral

part of nature, something in it, just as everything else is in it, flowers, and birds, and not

there, sent into this world, commissioned by some sort of supernatural being to come into

this world and farm it, and dominate it.

The whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing, indeed democratic organism.

But it has a totality.

It all goes together, and this totality is the Tao.

When we speak in Taoism of following the course of nature, following the way, what it means

is more like this.

Doing things in accordance with the grain.

It doesn't mean you don't cut wood, but it means that you cut wood along the lines where

the wood is most easy to cut, and you interact with other people along lines which are the

most genial, and this, then, is the great fundamental principle, which is called Wu Wei, not to force anything.

I think that's the best translation.

It's often called not doing, not acting, not interfering, but not to force.

Seems to me to hit the nail on the head.

Like, don't ever force a lock, or you bend the key or break the lock.

You jiggle until it revolves.

So, Wu Wei is always to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist.

Don't impose on any situation a kind of interference that is not really in accordance with the situation.

For example, we have a slum, and the people are in difficulty and so on, and they need better housing.

Now, if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down, and you put in its place some architect's imaginative notions

of what is a super-efficient high-rise apartment building to store people, you create total mess, utter chaos.

Islam has what we would call an ecology.

It has a very complex system of relationships going in it, by which the thing is already a going concern,

even though it isn't going very well.

Anybody who wants to alter that situation must, first of all, become sensitive.

To all the conditions and relationships going on there, it's terribly important, then, to have this feeling

of the interdependence of every form of life upon every other form of life.

How we, for example, cultivate animals that we eat, look after them and build them up,

and see that they breed in reasonable quantities.

We don't do it too well, as a matter of fact, especially troubles arising about supplies of fish in the ocean.

All sorts of things.

But you have to see that life, that the so-called conflict of various species with each other,

is not actually a competition.

It's a very strange system of interrelationship.

Of things feeding on each other and cultivating each other at the same time.

The idea of the friendly enemy, the necessary adversary, who is part of you.

You have conflicts going on in your own body.

All kinds of microorganisms are eating each other up.

And if that wasn't happening, you wouldn't be healthy.

So all those interrelationships, whether they appear to be friendly relationships, as between bees and flowers,

or conflicting relationships, as between birds and worms,

they are actually forms of cooperation.

And that is mutual arising.

You have to understand this as the basis.

Apply this, not forcing anything, and you get spontaneity.

A life which is so of itself, which is natural,

which is not forced, which is not unduly self-conscious.

Now, another term that is important,

although I'm not aware that this word occurs in Lao Tzu's book,

it's found in greater use at a much later time in Chinese thought,

in a philosophy that is called Neo-Confucian.

And it's also used in Buddhism.

But it is a very useful word for understanding

the sort of order that all this constitutes.

It's the word Li.

And this means,

originally,

the markings in jade,

or perhaps the grain in wood,

or the fiber in muscle.

It is translated nowadays,

in most dictionaries,

as reason,

or principle.

But this isn't a very good translation.

Joseph Needham suggested that

organic pattern

was an ideal translation for this word.

Now, you see,

the markings in jade

are always regarded as beautiful.

You might say,

if you look down at the water here,

when you see the waves break,

there are patterns in the foam.

Now, if you watch those patterns,

you know they never make an aesthetic mistake.

Never.

But they are not symmetrical.

And they're very difficult to describe.

They're wiggly.

So are the markings in jade.

So is the grain in wood.

But we love the grain in wood.

And you see,

Jafu has done these paintings of rocks,

based on examples,

I think,

in the Chinese book

called The Mustard Seed Garden.

These all exhibit Li.

That is to say,

they are forms

which we know are orderly,

and we can distinguish them from messes

quite clearly.

And so, in the same way,

the foam patterns,

the rock patterns,

the patterns of vegetation

are once extraordinarily orderly,

but they don't have

an obvious order.

Nobody can ever pin it down.

That's what I'd like to say.

You know that there is order there.

There's something quite different from a mess.

But there's no way of really getting it.

Now, in order to be able

to paint that sort of way,

or to live that sort of way,

or to deliver justice that way,

if you were a judge,

you have to have it innately.

You have to have

an essential sense of Li,

and there's no way of prescribing it.

This is the very devil for teachers.

Because, you see,

all our universities and schools

are trying to teach creativity.

That's the great thing these days.

And here at the Esalen,

all sorts of people

are giving courses

and workshops in creativity.

Now, the trouble is this.

If we found out a method

whereby we could teach creativity,

and everybody could just explain

how it was done,

it would no longer be of interest.

What always is an essential element

in the creative

is the mysterious.

The dark,

it's like the black in lacquer.

The impenetrable,

and yet the profound depth

out of which glorious things come,

but nobody can see why.

There's a poem which says

that when the bird calls,

the mountain becomes more mysterious.

You imagine, for example,

you're in a mountain valley,

and everything is very silent,

and suddenly a crow squawks somewhere.

You don't know where that crow is,

and that little sound

emphasizes the silence.

Now, all those things

have in them, you see,

an element of mystery.

There's a Chinese poem

which puts it this way.

It is a poem written by a man

who has gone to find a sage

in the mountains,

and the sage has a little hut

at the foot of the mountain,

and a boy there

who is his servant.

I asked the boy

beneath the pines.

He said,

the master's gone alone,

herb gathering

somewhere on the mount,

cloud hidden,

whereabouts unknown.

In so many

athletic

and

artistic

skills,

you'll find a teacher

who teaches you

how to do it

without forcing it.

I once studied the piano.

I'm absolutely no good at it now.

Because I don't practice.

I'm

involved in other things.

But I had an absolutely

superb teacher

for a while.

He was a very, very

great musicologist.

You know,

there was nothing sloppy

about his standards.

They were the highest perfection.

But when I first went to him,

he said,

let me see what you can do.

So I played a Mascarlatti sonata.

He said,

yeah,

but the trouble with you

is you're trying too hard.

You're hitting the piano

and you should never

hit a piano.

He said,

actually,

all you've got to do

in order to play a piano

is to drop your hands on it.

And you need to have

relaxed arms.

So he made me practice

for a while.

He felt my muscles

to see whether I was

relaxed or not.

And he said,

now just drop your hand

on the piano.

I don't care what notes

you hit,

but just drop your hand.

Let it fall.

He said,

there's enough energy

in the weight of your arm

to play as loud

as you will

or as soft

as you will.

But just let it drop.

He said,

that's all you have to do,

drop your hands.

And he kept feeling my arms.

He said,

no, no,

you're getting too tense.

You must pretend

you are loud, sir.

And he was a very

educated man.

He knew about these things.

And then he said,

now after dropping

your hands,

all you've got to do

is to hit the right notes.

And he said,

you know,

the same thing is involved

in making a very complex

trill.

And he demonstrated.

He just dropped his hand

on the piano.

And at the same time,

his fingers went

like that.

And there was this

magnificent ornamentation.

Then we went on.

We'd practiced this

for some time.

He said,

now let's get around

to hitting the right notes.

And he found immediately

I had a block

on reading music.

Because when I was

a small boy

and studied piano

at the age of

roughly eight,

I had a

pestiferous teacher

who was a mistress

in this private school

I went to in England.

And she used to sit beside you

and hit your fingers

with a pencil

every time you made

a wrong note.

Gregory Bateson

I think was taught

piano as a child

in such a way.

And he has a total block

on reading music.

He's got a brilliant mind,

you know.

He's a mathematician

and great anthropologist,

ethnologist and so on.

But he has a total block

to reading music.

And so,

this man had to teach me

to overcome my block.

And he said now,

first of all,

feel perfectly free

to make mistakes.

Everybody's going to make

some mistakes

and it doesn't matter

if you make a mistake.

And if you do make a mistake,

don't go back

and do it over again,

but just go on.

So play as slowly

as you like,

don't hurry,

just so long as you keep

the relative rhythm,

the relative values

of the thing,

go slow

and take it easy.

Another thing

is to not to pay

so much attention

to the notes,

but to the distances

or intervals

between them.

Because that is

the significant jump.

And this sort of

overcomes to

the difficulty

of key signatures.

Where we start out

with this,

we started out

learning music

with this weird system

that the lines

on the stave

really represent

the major scale

of C.

And that therefore

when you put

a key signature

at the beginning,

you remember

that every time

you're playing

in F,

every time you hit B,

it should be B flat.

Well, that's

extremely tedious

way of learning music.

And you just have

to think

in different keys.

That's the only way

to adjust

to a key signature.

And play the thing

according to the

intervals appropriate

for that key.

But you see,

in this instance,

this man,

although he was

a great perfectionist

and was highly

skilled in music,

he used intelligence,

first of all,

to give you

a shortcut.

And then he also

used relaxation

to enter into

a difficult thing

by the easiest route.

in Zen training,

in its initial stages,

the master

discourages

intellectualization.

You know,

you come in

with a lot of ideas,

but this difficulty

you have

is not going

to be solved

by ideas.

It's not going

to be solved

by talk

and intellectualization.

So in the same way

this is discouraged

because

intellectualization

sets up

a kind of interval

or lack of rapport

between you

and your life.

You think about

things so much

that you get

into the state

where you're eating

the menu

instead of the dinner.

You're valuing

the money

more than the wealth.

you are confusing

as Korzybski would say

the map

with the territory.

And what they want

to do

is to get you

into the territory.

To get you

into relationship

with what is

as distinct

from ideas

about what is.

And this is

an important

preliminary discipline.

But later on

you can realize

that the process

of thinking

is also

what is.

thoughts in their own domain

are as real

as rocks.

Words

have their own reality

as much

as sky and water.

Thoughts about things

are in their own turn

things.

And so

they lead you

eventually

to the point

where you

intellectualize

and think

in an immediate way.

Let's go on

and ask then

a further problem.

How about thinking

about thinking?

Wouldn't that be

pretty far off?

Here is a person

removed from life

because he is

in the intellectual world

and he is all

living in symbols.

He is a kind

of a living bookworm.

Now what about

a librarian?

A person who

writes books

about books.

A bibliographer.

a classifier

of classifications.

That is a pretty

dusty occupation

and as we know

sometimes librarians

seem to be very dusty

people.

They seem way

removed from life.

All tied up

in their categories

and catalogues

and musts

and mustn'ts

and that too

you see

is also

its own level

of reality

and thinking

about thinking

can be lived

with just as much

direct fresh

spontaneity

as just living

without thinking.

But

in order to live it

with full spontaneity

you have to be

in a position

where you no longer

feel the symbol

the thought

the idea

the word

as a block

to life

no longer

feel it

as something

you are using

as a sort

of means

of escape.

To be able

to use the symbol

not as means

of escape

you have to know

in the first place

that you can't

escape.

And not only

that you can't

escape

but there is

no one to escape

there is no one

to be delivered

from the prison

of life

that

then

the

liberation

of the mind

from identifying

itself

with symbols

is the same

process

exactly

as breaking

up the links

between the

successive moments

the illusion

of a self

a continuing

self

travels

from moment

to moment

and picks

them all up

corresponding

to the illusion

of the moving

water

in the wave

and the moving

the solid circle

created by

the moving

cigarette point

in the dark

this is the meaning

then that there

is no one

who perceives

anything

no one

who experiences

anything

there is simply

seeing

and experiencing

there

we introduce

all these

redundancies

through talk

we talk about

seeing sights

hearing sounds

feeling feelings

all that is irrelevant

there are sights

there are sounds

there are feelings

you don't feel

a feeling

the feeling

itself

already contains

the feeling

of it

do you see

that's very simple

to have sight

you don't need

something to be seen

on the one hand

and a seer

of something

to be seen

on the other

and then

some mysterious

way

they come together

the seer

and the seen

the knower

and the known

are what we call

terms

terms mean

ends

and

they are

what in

mathematical language

are called

limits

now

when we take

a stick

the stick

has its two

ends

they are

the terms

of the stick

but the ends

of the stick

do not exist

as sort of

separate points

which encounter

each other

on the occasion

of meeting

at a stick

they are actually

abstract points

the ends

themselves

considered as

themselves

are purely

geometrical

they are

Euclidean

imaginations

the reality

is the stick

you see

so in the same

way with that

phenomenon

called

experience

the reality

is not

an encounter

of the knower

and the known

the reality

is an

experience

which can

be termed

as having

two aspects

two ends

the knower

and the known

but that's only

a figure

of speech

neurologically

this is true

everything

that you see

is yourself

what you are

aware of

is a state

of your nervous

system

and there is

no other

knowledge

whatsoever

that doesn't

mean

that your nervous

system is the

only existing

reality

and that there

is nothing

beyond your

nervous system

but it does

mean that all

knowledge

is knowledge

of you

and that

therefore

in some

mysterious

way

you

are not

different from

the external

world

that you

know

if you see

then that

what you

experience

and you

are the

same thing

then realize

also

going beyond

that

that you

are in

the external

world

you're

looking

at

you see

I'm in your

external world

you're in my

external world

but I'm in the

same world

you are

my inside

is not

separable

from the

outside world

it's something

the so-called

outside world

is doing

just as it's

doing the tree

and the ocean

and everything

else that

is in the

outside world

now isn't

that great

you see

we've

completely

got rid

of the

person

in the

trap

the one

who either

dominates

the world

or suffers

under it

it's

vanished

it never

was there

and when

that happens

you see

you can

play any

life game

you want

to

link the

past

and the

present

and the

future

together

play

roles

but you

know

you've

seen

owns

experiences

memories

sights

sounds

and from

that

other

people

possessions

so on

building up

always

this idea

of

oneself

as the

haver

of all

this

if you

think

that

you've

been

had

you've

got rid of it

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 15 - Intellectual Yoga =====

This is Audible.

Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series No. 2, Eastern Thought in the Modern World.

In this talk, Alan Watts gives an introduction to the Eastern traditions of yoga.

He describes the entrance into the unspeakable reality,

first from the East by practices of jnana yoga and zazen,

and then from the West through the intellectual perspectives of Lidwig Wittgenstein and Spencer Brown.

East and West all arrive at the same mysterious, that which is unspeakable.

Recorded in 1972 at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco,

a journey to unthinking.

It's called intellectual yoga.

Here's Alan Watts.

The word yoga, as most of you doubtless know,

is the same as our word yoke, y-o-k-e,

and the Latin word yungeri, to join.

Join, junction, yoke, union,

all these words are basically from the same root.

And so likewise, when Jesus said,

my yoke is easy,

he was saying, really, my yoga is easy.

And the word, therefore, basically denotes

the state that would be the opposite of what our psychologists call alienation,

or what Buddhists call Sakaya Drishti,

the view of separateness, the feeling of separateness,

the feeling of being cut off from being.

And most civilized people do, in fact, feel that way.

Because they have a kind of myopic attention,

focused on their own boundaries,

and what is inside those boundaries,

and they identify themselves with the inside.

And don't realize that you cannot have an inside without an outside.

That would seem, wouldn't it, to be extremely elementary logic,

that we could have no sense of being ourselves,

of having a personal identity,

without the contrast of something that is not ourselves,

ourselves, that is to say, other.

But the fact that we don't realize that self and other go together

is the root of an enormous and terrifying anxiety.

Because what will happen when the inside disappears?

What will happen when the so-called I comes to an end,

as it seems to?

Of course, if it didn't,

I mean, if things did not keep moving and changing,

appearing and dissolving,

the universe would be a colossal bore.

And therefore, you are only aware that

things are all right for the moment.

I mean, I hope most of the people in this gathering

have a sort of genial sense inside them

that for the time being,

things are going on more or less okay.

Some of you may be very miserable.

And then your problem may be just a little different,

but it's essentially the same one.

But you must realize that

that sense of life being fairly all right

is inconceivable and unfeelable

unless there is way, way, way in the back of your mind

the glimmer of a possibility

that something absolutely, unspeakably awful might happen.

Doesn't have to happen.

Of course, you'll die one day.

But there always has to be the vague apprehension,

the hint of gedanka,

that the awful, awfuls are possible.

It gives spice to life.

Now, these observations

are in line with what I'm going to talk about tonight,

of the intellectual approach to yoga.

There are basically certain principal forms of yoga.

Most people are familiar with hatha yoga,

which is a psychophysical exercise system.

And that's the one you see demonstrated most on television

because it has visual value.

You can see all these exercises

of lotus positions

and people curling their legs around their necks

and doing all sorts of marvelous exercises.

And they're good exercises.

The most honest yoga teacher I know

is a woman who teaches hatha yoga

and doesn't pretend to be any other kind of guru.

And she does it very well.

Then there is bhakti yoga.

Bhakti means devotion.

And I suppose in general,

you might say that Christianity

is a form of bhakti yoga.

Because it is yoga practiced

through extreme reverence for and love for

some being felt more or less external to oneself

who is the representative of the divine.

Then there is karma yoga.

Karma means action.

And incidentally, that's all it means.

It does not mean the law of cause and effect.

When we say that something that happens to you

is your karma,

all it's saying is it's your own doing.

Nobody's in charge of karma except you.

Karma yoga is the way of action.

Of using one's everyday life,

one's trade,

or an athletic discipline like sailing or surf riding,

or track running,

as your way of yoga,

as your way of discovering who you are.

Then there's raja yoga.

That's the royal yoga.

And that's sometimes also called kundalini yoga.

And that involves very complicated psychic exercises

having to do with awakening the serpent power

that is supposed to lie at the base of one's spiritual spine

and raising it up through certain chakras or centers

until it enters into the brain.

There's a very profound symbolism involved in that.

But I'm not going into that.

And then finally, there is,

there are several others.

There's mantra yoga.

Mantra yoga, which is the practice,

through chanting,

of humming,

either out loud or silently,

certain sounds,

which become supports for contemplation

for what is in Sanskrit called jnana.

Jnana and jnana is the state

in which one is clearly awake and aware

of the world as it is,

as distinct from the world as it is described.

In other words, in the state of jnana,

you stop thinking.

That is to say,

you stop talking to yourself

and figuring to yourself

and symbolizing to yourself

what is going on.

You simply are aware of what is.

And nobody can say what it is

because, as Korzybski well said,

the real world is unspeakable.

It's a lovely double take in that.

But, that's jnana.

That's zazen.

Where one practices to sit

absolutely wide awake with eyes open,

but not thinking.

That's a very curious state,

incidentally.

I knew a professor of mathematics

at Northwestern University

who one day said,

you know, it's amazing

how many things there are

that aren't so.

You know,

he was talking about old wives' tales

and scientific superstitions

and so on.

But when you practice jnana,

you're amazed

how many things there are

that aren't so.

Because when you stop

talking to yourself

and you are simply aware

of what is,

that is to say

of what you feel,

what you sense,

even that saying too much,

you suddenly find

that the past

and the future

have completely disappeared.

So also have disappeared

the so-called differentiation

between the knower

and the known,

the subject and the object,

the feeler and the feeling,

the thinker and the thought.

They just aren't there.

Because you have to talk

to yourself

to maintain those things.

They're purely conceptual.

They're ideas.

They're phantoms, ghosts.

So when you allow thinking to stop,

all that goes away.

And you find you're in an eternal

here and now.

And there's nowhere

you're supposed to be.

There's nothing you're supposed to do.

There's nowhere you're supposed to go.

Because in order to think

you're supposed to do something,

you have to think.

And so it's incredibly important

to unthink

at least once a day.

for the very preservation

of the intellectual life.

So if

we stop that

temporarily

and get our mind

clear of thoughts,

we become,

as Jesus said,

again as children

and get a direct

view of the world.

Which is very useful

once you're an adult.

There's not much you can do

with it when you're a baby.

Because everybody pushes you around.

And you know,

they pick you up

and sit you there.

They sit you there.

And you can't do much

except practice contemplation.

Only you can't tell anyone

what it's like.

But when,

as an adult,

you can recapture

the baby's point of view,

you will know

what all child psychologists

have always wanted to know,

how it is

that a baby feels.

And the baby,

according to Freud at least,

has the oceanic experience.

That is to say,

a feeling of

complete inseparability

from what's going on.

The baby is unable

to distinguish

between the universe

and his or her

action upon the universe.

And most of us,

if we got into

that state of consciousness,

might be inclined

to feel extremely frightened.

And being,

beginning to ask,

who's in charge?

I mean,

who controls

what happens next?

We would ask that

because we are used

to the idea

that the process

of nature

consists of

controllers

and controleses.

Things that do

and things that are done to.

This is purely mythological.

So many spiritual teachers

and gurus

will look

at their disciples

and say,

I am God.

I have realized.

See?

But the important thing

is that you are.

Whether I am or not

is of no consequence

to you whatsoever.

I could get up

and say,

I have realized.

I put on a turban

and yellow robe

and whatever.

And say,

come and have darshan.

I'm guru.

You need the grace of guru

in order to realize

and so on

and that it'd be

a wonderful hoax.

It'd be like

picking your pockets

and selling you

your own watch.

But the point is,

you are.

And what are we saying

when we say that?

We're obviously saying

something very important.

Alas and alack,

there is no way

of defining it.

That is to say,

going any further

into words about it.

See,

when a philosopher

hears such a statement

as Tattuamarsi,

you are it,

or

there is only

the eternal now,

the philosopher says,

I don't see why

you're so excited about it.

What do you mean by that?

And that he asks

that question

because he wants

to continue

in a word game.

He doesn't want

to go on

into an experiential dimension.

He wants to go on

arguing

because that's his trip.

And all these

great mystical statements

mean nothing whatsoever.

They're ultimate statements.

Just as,

you know,

the trees

and the clouds

and the mountains

and the stars

have no meaning

because they're not words.

Words have meaning.

Because they're symbols.

Because they point

to something

other than themselves.

But

the stars

like music.

Music,

only bad music

has any meaning.

Classical music

never has a meaning.

And to understand it,

you must simply

listen to it

and observe

its beautiful patterns.

Go into its complexity.

So,

when your mind,

that is to say,

your verbal systems,

get to the end

of their tether,

that is to say,

when they arrive

at the meaningless statement,

here is the critical point.

And the method

of jnana yoga

is to exercise

one's intellect

to its limits

so that you get

to the point

where you have

no further questions

to ask.

You can do this

in philosophy study,

if you've got

the right kind

of teacher

who shows you

that all philosophical

opinions whatsoever

are false,

or at least,

if not false,

extremely partial.

And so,

you feel

a kind of

intellectual vertigo

which is called

in a Zen Buddhist poem,

above,

not a tile

to cover the head,

below,

not an inch

of ground

to stand on.

Well,

where are you then?

Well,

of course,

you always were.

You've discovered

you're it.

And that's

very uncomfortable

because

you can't grab it.

See,

here,

I've discovered

that whatever it is

that I am,

that's not something

inside my head.

It is just as much

out there

as it is in here,

but whatever it is,

I cannot get hold of it.

Well,

that gives you

the heebie-jeebies.

You get butterflies

in the stomach,

anxiety,

traumas,

and all kinds of things.

But this is all

explained by Shankara,

the great Hindu

commentator

on the Upanishads,

the great master

of the non-dualistic

doctrine

of the universe,

when he said,

that which knows,

which is in all

beings,

the knower,

is never an object

of its own knowledge.

So, therefore,

to everyone

who is in quest

of the supreme kick,

the great experience,

the vision of God,

whatever you want

to call it,

liberation,

when you think

that you're not it,

any old guru

can sell you

on a method

to find it.

And that may not

be a bad thing

for him to do,

because,

as Blake said,

a fool who persists

in his folly

will become wise.

And a clever guru

is the person

who leads you on.

Here, kitty, kitty,

kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.

I've got something

very good to show you.

Yeah.

You just wait.

Oh, but you've got

to go through

a lot of stages yet.

You say,

ha, ha, ha, ha,

ha, ha, ha, ha.

Can I get that?

Oh, I want to get that.

All the time,

it's you.

I was talking

to the Zen Master

the other day,

and he said,

you should be

my disciple.

I looked at him

and said,

who was Buddha's

teacher?

And he looked at me

in a very odd way

and said,

ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

So he birthed into laughter

and he gave me

a piece of clover.

So,

you see,

so long as you

can be persuaded

that there's something

more that you ought

to be than you are,

you've divided

yourself

from

reality,

from the universe,

from God,

or whatever you

want to call that,

the Tat

and you will find

constantly,

if you,

if you are interested

in anything like this,

in psychoanalysis,

in, uh,

gestalt therapy,

in, uh,

sensitivity training,

in any kind of yoga,

or what have you,

that there will be

that

funny sensation

of what I'll call

spiritual greed

that can be aroused

by somebody

indicating to you,

hmm,

there are still

higher stages

for you to attain.

You should meet

my guru.

So,

uh,

you

might say

then now,

to be truly

realized,

you have to get

to the point

where you're not

seeking anymore.

So then you begin

to think,

non-seekers.

You know,

like disciples

of Krishnamurti,

who,

because he says

he doesn't read

any spiritual books,

they can't read

anything but

mystery stories.

You know,

becoming, uh,

spiritually

unspiritual.

Well,

you'll find

that that too

is what is called

in Zen

legs on a snake.

It's irrelevant.

You don't need

not to seek.

Because you don't

need anything.

And I, you know,

it's like crawling

into a hole

and pulling the hole

in after you.

And the great

master of this

technique

was a

Buddhist

scholar

who lived

about, uh,

200 AD

called Nagarjuna.

He invented

a whole dialectic.

He had a whole

school

called

Madhyamika

where

the,

as it were,

leader of the

students

would simply

destroy all

their ideas.

absolutely

abolished

their

philosophical

notions.

And there

get the

heebie-jeebies.

They see

he didn't

have the

heebie-jeebies.

He seemed

perfectly relaxed

and not having

any particular

point of view.

Well,

they said,

teacher,

how can you

stand it?

We have to

have something

to hang on to.

Who does?

Who are you?

And eventually

you discover,

of course,

that it's not

necessary to

hang on to

anything,

to rely on

anything.

There's nothing

to rely on

because you're

it.

It's like the

universe.

It's like asking

the question,

where is the

universe?

And by that,

I mean the

whole universe.

Whereabouts

is it in

space?

Everything in

it is falling

around everything

else, but

there's no

concrete floor

underneath

for the thing

to crash

because the

space, you

can think

of infinite

space if you

like, you

don't have

to think of

curved space.

The space

that goes out

and out

forever and

ever and

has no

end, what

is that?

Of course,

it's you.

What else

could it be?

Only the

universe is

delightfully

arranged so

that as it

looks at

itself, in

order not to

be one-sided

and prejudiced,

it looks at

itself from

an uncountable

number of

points of

view.

We thus

avoid

solipsism,

which is if

I were to

have the

notion that

it's only

me that's

really here

and you're

all in my

dream.

Of course,

that point of

view cannot

really be

disputed,

except by

imagining a

conference of

solipsists

arguing as

to which

one of them

was the

one that

was really

there.

Now, you

see, if you

understand what

I'm saying

with your

intelligence,

and then

take the

next step

and say,

but I

understood it

now, but

I didn't

feel it.

Then next

I raise

the question,

why do you

want to

feel it?

You say,

I want

something more,

because that's

again that

spiritual greed.

And you

could only

say that

because you

didn't

understand it.

There is

nothing to

pursue because

you're it.

And if you

don't know

that, you

always were

it.

And if you

don't know

that, in

other words,

to put it in

Christian terms,

or Jewish

terms, if you

don't know that

you're God from

the beginning,

what happens

is that you

try to become

God by force.

Therefore, you

start being

violent and

obstreperous and

this and that

and the other.

All our

violence, all

our competitiveness,

all our

terrific anxiety

to survive,

is because we

didn't know from

the beginning that

we were it.

Well, then you

would say, if we

did know from

the beginning,

as in fact you

did, when you

were a baby,

then everybody

says, well,

nothing would

ever happen.

But it did

happen, didn't

it?

And it's

some of it's

pretty messy.

But what

people don't

realize is

they say,

well, take

take the

Hindus.

It's basic

to Hindu

religion that

we are all

God in

disguise and

that the

world is an

illusion.

All that

is a sort

of half

true.

But if that

is the case,

if Hindus

and really

awakened

Hindus, by

the knowledge

of their

union with

the Godhead,

would simply

become inert,

why then

Hindu music,

the most

incredibly

complex,

marvelous

technique?

think, when

they sit and

play, they

laugh at

each other.

They're

enjoying

themselves

enormously

with

very

complicated

musical

games.

But when we

come and the

symphony orchestra

gets up,

everybody dresses in

evening dress and a

serious expression and

all the audience is

down and it's like it's in a

kind of church and

there's none of that

terrific zest where

the drummer, the

tabla player, laughs at

the sarod player as

they compete with

each other in all

kinds of marvelous

improvisations.

So if you do find out

by any chance who you

really are, you

instead of becoming

merely lazy, you know,

you start laughing and

laughing leads to

dancing and dancing

needs music and we

can play with each

other for a change.

You've been

listening to

Intellectual Yoga

with Alan Watts

from the Alan Watts

radio series number

two, Eastern

Thought in the

Modern World.

The Love of Wisdom

with Alan Watts is

produced by the

Electronic University.

I'm Neil Harvey.

Thank you for

listening.

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 11 - Relevance Of Oriental Philosophy II =====

The point that I wish to make most strongly is that behind a vital religious life for the West,

there has to be faith which is not expressed in things to which you cling,

in ideas, opinions, to which you cling in a kind of desperation.

Faith is the act of letting go, and that must begin with letting go of God, let God go.

But you see, this is not atheism in the ordinary sense.

Atheism in the ordinary sense is fervently hoping that there isn't a God.

It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium is what there is to life.

And we still have, going into our common sense, the 19th century myth, which succeeded the ceramic myth in Western history.

I call it the myth of the fully automatic model of the universe.

Namely, that it's stupid, it's blind force, Haeckel's gyration or fortuitous congress of atoms,

is of the same vintage as Freud's libido, the blind surge of lust at the basis of human psychology.

But, when you consider this attitude, you know, what is the poetic counterpart of it?

Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about an insignificant star

on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies.

God, what a put-down that was.

But, on the other hand, if you think about that for a few minutes,

I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire.

It's a very odd situation.

And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

I know that.

See, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

And sensible people, existence is nothing at all.

I mean, it's just basic, and just go on and do something.

See, this is the current movement in philosophy.

Logical analysis says you mustn't think about existence.

It's a meaningless concept.

Therefore, philosophy has become the discussion of trivia.

And philosophical journals is now as satisfactorily dull as any other kind of purely technical inquiry.

No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of God and all that sort of thing.

Because a philosopher today is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five.

He does philosophy during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning,

and if so, what?

And then he would, as William Earle said in a very funny essay,

he would come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.

The problem is, he's lost his sense of wonder.

Wonder is like, in modern philosophy, something you mustn't have.

It's like enthusiasm in 18th century England.

It's a very bad form.

But you see, I don't know what question to ask when I wonder about the universe.

It isn't a question that I'm wondering about, it's a feeling that I have.

Imagine, if you had an interview with God,

everybody was going to have an interview with God,

and you were allowed to ask one question.

What would you ask?

And don't rush into it.

You will soon find that you have no idea what to ask.

Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder.

The moment my mouth opens to utter it, I suddenly find I'm talking nonsense.

But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy.

Of, well, as Aristotle said, wonder is the beginning of philosophy.

Because it strikes you that existence is very, very strange.

And then more so, when this so-called insignificant little creature

has inside his skull a neurological contraption

that is able to center itself in the midst of these incredible expansive galaxies

and start measuring the whole thing.

That is quite extraordinary.

And then furthermore, when you realize

that in a world where there are no eyes, the sun would not be light,

and that in a world where there were no soft skins, rocks would not be hard.

Nor in a world where there were no muscles, would they be heavy.

Existence is relationship, and you are smack in the middle of it.

So, there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude

in the sense of awe, astonishment, at existence.

And that is also a basis of respect for existence.

We don't have very much of it in this culture,

even though we call it materialistic.

A materialist is a person who loves material.

And I suppose in the Christian tradition, and in the Jewish,

one would say that the Lord God is the greatest materialist.

Because, you know, as William Temple once said,

God is interested in many other things than religion.

Were God only interested in religion,

the world would consist of nothing but church buildings and Bibles and clergymen.

And that would be pretty boring.

So, in the culture that we call materialistic today,

we are, of course, bent on the total destruction of material

and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible.

This is not a materialistic culture,

because it has no respect for material.

And respect is, in turn, based on wonder,

on feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers.

So, I'm afraid, you see, for the God is dead theology,

that it will sort of drift off into secular do-goodery

in the name of Jesus.

And this is, I think, where we can be strongly revivified

and stimulated by the introduction into our spiritual life

of certain things that are oriental.

Now, you see, it must be understood

that the crux of the Hindu and Buddhist disciplines

is an experience, not a theory,

not a belief.

If we say that a religion

is a combination of creed, code, and cult,

in other words, this is true of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

And if they are religions, Buddhism is not.

Because the creed is a revelation,

a revealed symbolism of what the universe is about

and you are commanded to believe in it on the divine authority.

The code is the revealed will of God for man,

which you are commanded to obey,

and the cult is the divinely revealed form of worship

which you must practice.

Commandment.

Because God is boss, he's ruler,

king of kings and lord of laws.

But the disciplines, say, of yoga in Hinduism

or of the various forms of Buddhist meditation

do not require you to believe anything.

And they have no commandments in them.

They do indeed have precepts,

but they are really vows

which you undertake on your own responsibility,

not in obedience to anybody.

They are experimental techniques

for changing consciousness.

And the thing they are mainly concerned with

is helping human beings

to get rid of the hallucination

that each one of us is a skin-encapsulated ego.

You know, a little source,

a little man inside your head

located between the ears and behind the eyes

who is the source of conscious attention

and voluntary behavior.

Most people, you know,

don't really think that they are anything but that

and that the body is a thing you have.

Mummy, who would I have been

if my father had been someone else?

See, the parents give you the body

and you pop the soul into it

at some period, conception or parturition,

nobody could ever decide.

And this attitude stays with us

that we are something in a body,

that we have a body.

And we are not it.

So we experience the beating of the heart

as something that happens to me

whereas talking or walking

is something that I do.

Don't you beat your heart?

Language won't allow you to think that.

It's not customary to say so.

How do you think?

How do you manage to be conscious?

You don't know.

How do you open and close your hand?

Do you know?

If you're a physiologist,

you may be able to say,

but that doesn't help you

to open and close your hand

any better than I do.

See, I know how to do it,

but I can't put it into words.

In the same way,

the Hindu god knows

how he creates this whole universe

because he does it.

But he wouldn't explain it.

That would be stupid.

You might as well try to drink

the Pacific Ocean with a fork.

So when a Hindu gets enlightened

and he recovers from the hallucination

of being a skin-encapsulated ego

and finds out that central to his own self

is the eternal self of the universe,

and you go up to him and say,

well, how do you do all this?

He says, well, just like you open

and close your hand.

And because we're all it.

Whenever a questioner

used to come to Sri Ramana,

the great Hindu sage

who died a few years ago,

they said to him,

Master, was I living before

in a previous incarnation?

And if so, who was I?

And he would say,

who is asking the question?

Who are you?

And a spiritual teacher

in both Hinduism and Buddhism

is a kind of...

Well, what he does to awaken you,

to get you over the hallucination

of being the skin-encapsulated ego,

he bugs you in a certain way.

He has a funny look in his eye,

as if to say,

come off it, Shiva,

I know what you're doing.

And you say, what, me?

And he looks at you in a funny way.

And finally,

you get a feeling

that he sees all the way through you.

And therefore,

that all your selfish and evil thoughts

and nastinesses

are transparent to this gaze.

And then you have to try and alter them.

He suggests, you see,

that you practice the control of the mind.

That you become desireless.

You give up selfish desire

so as to cease to be a skin-encapsulated self.

And then you may have some success

in quieting your mind

and in concentrating.

But then after that,

he's throw a curve at you.

Which is,

but aren't you still desiring not to desire?

Why are you trying to be unselfish?

Well, the answer is,

I want to be on the side of the big battalions.

I think it's going to pay better

to be unselfish than to be selfish.

Well,

Luther saw that.

Augustine saw that.

But there it is.

Because what he's done, you see,

he's beginning to make you see

the unreality,

the hallucinatory quality

of a separate self.

This has merely conventional reality

in the same sense

as lines of latitude and longitude,

the measurements of the clock.

That's why one of the meanings of

maya, illusion,

is measurement.

Things, for example,

are measurements.

They are units of thought,

like inches are units of measurement.

There are no things in physical nature.

How many things is a thing?

It's any number you want.

Because a thing is a think.

A unit of thought.

It's as much of reality

as you can catch hold of

in one idea.

So,

when this

realization

of the hallucination

of the separate self

comes about,

it comes about

through discovering

that your alleged separate self

can't do anything.

It can't improve itself,

either by doing something about it

or by doing nothing about it.

Both ways

are based on illusion.

You see,

this is what you have to do

to get people

out of hallucinations.

You make them act consistently

on the suppositions

of the hallucination.

People who believe

that the earth is flat

cannot possibly be

talked into seeing

that it's round

because they know

it's flat.

Because can't you see?

So what you do is this.

You say,

let's go and look over the edge.

Wouldn't that be fun?

But you see,

to be sure

that we do get to the edge,

you'll be very careful

not to walk in circles.

So you perform a discipline.

You go steadily

and rigorously westwards

along latitude 40

or something.

And then when you get back

to the place

where you started,

he is convinced

that the world

is at least cylindrical

by experiment,

by reductio ad absurdum

of his premises.

And so in the same way

the guru,

whether hindu or buddhist,

performs a reductio ad absurdum

on the premise

of the skin-encapsulated ego.

Well, what happens then?

You might imagine

from garbled accounts

of eastern mysticism

that one thereupon

disappears forever

into an infinite sea

of faintly mauve jello

and become so lost

to the world

and entranced

that you forget

your name,

address,

telephone number

and function in life.

And nothing of the kind happens.

The state of mystical illumination,

although it may

in its sudden onset

be accompanied

by a sensation

of tremendous luminescence

and transparency,

as you get used to it,

it's just like everyday life.

Here are the things

that you formerly thought

were separate individuals

and here is you

who you formerly thought

was merely confronting

these other people.

When the great Dr. D.T. Suzuki

was asked

what is it like

to be enlightened,

he said

it's just like

ordinary everyday experience

except about

two inches off the ground

because what is altered

is not the way

your senses perceive.

What is altered

is what you think about it,

your definitions

of what you see,

your evaluation of it.

So when you don't cling to it,

when you have no longer

a hostile attitude

to the world

because you know

the world is you,

it is.

I mean,

let's take it

from the point of view

of biology.

If I describe

the behavior

of a living organism,

I cannot possibly

describe that behavior

without simultaneously

describing the behavior

of the environment

so that I discover

that I don't describe

organisms in environments,

I describe

a unified field

of behavior

called an organism

environment.

It's an awkward word.

But there it is.

The environment

doesn't push

the organism around.

The organism doesn't

push the environment

around.

They are two aspects

or poles

of the same process.

And so you have

to understand

that this attitude

towards nature,

seeing the fundamental

unity of the self

which manifests it all

is not an attitude

as missionaries

are apt to suppose

which denies

the value

of differentiation.

You must understand

the principle

of what are called

identical differences.

Take a coin.

The head side

is a different side

from the tail side.

And yet the two

are inseparable.

Take the operation

of buying and selling.

Selling is a different

operation from buying.

But you can't buy

unless somebody sells

at the same time

and vice versa.

This is what is meant

by the underlying

unity of opposites.

What is called

in Hinduism

Advaita

or non-duality.

Or when the Chinese

use the word

Tao

to designate

the way of operation

of the positive

and negative principles

the Yang

and the Yin.

It is not a unity

that annihilates

differences

but a unity

which is manifested

by the very

differentiations

that we perceive.

Just as

it's all polar.

It's like the two poles

of a magnet.

Different

but yet one magnet.

So when we say

oriental monism

is a point of view

towards life

which merges

everything

into a kind

of sickening goo.

This is terribly unfair.

It just isn't so.

If you argue

that the sort of doctrine

that everybody

is really the Godhead

destroys the possibility

of real love

between individuals

because you have

to be definitely

other than I

if I'm to love you

otherwise it's all self-love.

Well that argument

collapses in view

of the doctrine

of the Trinity.

If the three persons

are one God

then they can't

love each other

by the same argument.

Hinduism simply

uses the idea

which is in the

Christian Trinity

only it makes it

a multi-Trinity

instead of the

three one.

That's all.

Of course

the thorn in the flesh

is always

in approaching

a doctrine

which seems

to be monistic

or pantheistic

what about evil?

Are we to make

the ground of being

responsible for evil?

And we don't want

to do that

because we want

to keep God's skirts clean

in spite of the fact

that our own

Hebrew Bible

says

I am the Lord

there is none else

I form the light

and create darkness

I make peace

and create evil

I the Lord

do all these things

and haven't you

heard the story

about the Yetzir Hara

that according

to Jewish theology

the Lord God

implanted in Adam

at the beginning

of time

a thing called

the Yetzir Hara

it means the

wayward spirit

I call it the

element of

irreducible

rascality

and it's very

necessary to have

this in order

to be human

you see

how it was done

was this prohibition

not to eat

of the fruit

of the tree

of knowledge

that was the

one sure way

of getting

of getting it

eaten

but of course

when the Lord God

accused Adam

and said

you've been eating

of that tree

I told you

not to eat

and he passed

the buck to Eve

and said

this woman

that thou gavest me

she tempted me

and I did eat

he looked at Eve

now what about it

he said

well it was the serpent

he looked at the serpent

the serpent

didn't say anything

because he knew

too much

and he wasn't going

to give away

the show

who is it

that sits

at the left

hand of God

we know

who sits

at the right

hand

it's hushed up

because that's

the side

where the district

attorney sits

and in the book

of Job

of course

you know

Satan

is the district

attorney

at the court

of heaven

he's the prosecutor

he's a faithful

servant

of the court

because you see

the whole problem

is

it would be

very bad

indeed

if God

were the author

of evil

and we

were his

victims

that is to say

if we keep

the model

of the king

of the universe

and the creatures

are all subjects

of the king

then

a God

who is responsible

for evil

is being very

unkind

to other people

but in this theory

God is not

another person

there are no

victims of God

he's never

anything but

his own victim

you are responsible

and if you want

to stay

in the state

of illusion

stay in it

but you can

always wake up

===== Philosophies Of Asia - 12 - Mythology Of Hinduism II =====

I want to start out by explaining quite carefully what I mean by mythology.

The word is very largely used today to mean fantasy or something that is definitely not

fact.

And it's used, therefore, in a pejorative or put-down sense, so that when you call something

a mythology or a myth, it means you don't think much of it.

But the word is used by philosophers and scholars in quite another sense, where to speak in

the language of myth is to speak in images rather than to speak in what you might call

plain language or the language of fact, descriptive language.

You can sometimes say more things with images than you can say with concepts.

As a matter of fact, images are really at the root of thinking.

One of the basic ways in which we think is by analogy.

We say a certain thing is, say, we think of the life of human beings might be compared to

the seasons of the year.

Now there are many important differences between a human life and the cycle of the seasons.

But nevertheless, one talks about the winter of life or the spring of life, and so the image

becomes something that is powerful in our thinking.

Furthermore, when we try to think philosophically and think in abstract concepts about the nature

of the universe, we often do some very weird things.

You see, it's considered nowadays naïve to think of God as an old gentleman with a long

white beard who sits on a golden throne and is surrounded with winged angels.

And we say now no sensible person could possibly believe that God is just like that.

Therefore, if you get more sophisticated, you believe that God is, say, if you follow St.

Thomas Aquinas, you think of God as necessary being.

Or if you think with Buddhists, you think of God as the undifferentiated void or as the infinite

essence.

But actually, however rarefied those concepts sound, they are just as anthropomorphic, that

is to say, just as human and in the form of the human mind as the picture of God as the

old gentleman with a white beard or de Lorde in green pastures wearing a top hat and smoking

a cigar.

Because all ideas about the world, whether they be religious, philosophical or scientific,

are translations of the physical world and of worlds beyond the physical into the terms

and shapes of the human mind.

So there is no such thing as a non-anthropomorphic idea.

The advantage of de Lorde in talking about these things is that nobody takes it quite seriously.

Whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be taken seriously.

And that would be a great mistake.

Because you would think you understood what the ultimate reality is.

So I'm going to use very largely naive mythological terms to discuss these matters.

And if you are a devout Christian, you mustn't be offended by this because you will naturally

think that you have risen now to a more superior idea of these things than these very simple

terms derived from the imagery of the Bible and of the medieval church.

But I shall discuss Hinduism in the same way.

And I'm going to begin with Hinduism to give you a sort of fundamental account of what it's

all about.

I imagine some of you were present at the lecture I gave in the university on religion and art.

And I discussed the view of the world as drama.

Now I want to go more thoroughly into this because the Hindu view of the universe is fundamentally

based on the idea of drama.

That is to say, of an actor playing parts.

The basic actor in this drama is called Brahma.

And this word comes from the Sanskrit root brh, which means to swell or expand.

And the Hindu idea of Brahma, the supreme being, is linked with the idea of the self.

In you, deep down, you feel that there is what you call I.

And this word, when you say I am, that in Sanskrit is aham, A-H-A-M.

And everybody, when asked what his name is, replies, I am I, I am I myself.

And so there is the thought that in all life the self is the fundamental thing.

It means the center.

And so the Brahma is looked upon as the self and center of the whole universe.

And the idea, fundamentally, is that there is only one self.

And each one of us is that self.

Only it radiates like a sun or a star.

And just as the sun has innumerable rays, or just as you can focus the whole sun through

a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one point, or as an octopus has many tentacles,

or as a sow has many tits.

So in this way, Brahma is wearing all faces that exist.

And they are all the masks of Brahma.

Not only human faces, but animal faces, insect faces, vegetable faces, and mineral faces.

Everything that there is, is the supreme self playing at being that.

Because the fundamental process of reality is, according to the Hindu myth, hide and seek.

That or lost and found, that is the basis of all games.

And it's true, isn't it, that when you start to play with a baby, and you take up a book,

and you hide your face behind it, and then you peek out at the baby, and then you peek

out this way, the baby begins to giggle.

Because a baby, being near to the origins of things, knows intuitively that hide and seek

is the basis of it all.

And children like to sit in a high chair, or they have something on the tray, and make

it gone.

And then somebody picks it up and puts it back, and they make it gone again, you see?

Now then, that's a very sensible arrangement.

It is called, in Sanskrit, it is called lila.

And that means sport or play, but the play is hide and seek.

Now let's go a little bit into the nature of hide and seek, because don't let me insult

your intelligence by telling you some of the most elementary things that exist.

Really everything is a question of appearing and disappearing.

For example, if I sit next to a beautiful girl, and I put my hand on her knee, and leave it

there, after a while she'll cease to notice it.

But if I gently pat her on the knee, because now I'm there and now I'm not, it will be

more noticeable.

So all reality is a matter of coming and going.

It is vibration.

It is the waves of positive and negative electricity.

It's up and down.

And things like wood appear to be solid, because in much the same way that the blade of a fast-moving

electric fan appears to be solid.

So the vast agitation that is going on in the electrical structure of solid things is

a terrific agitation which will not allow the agitation called my hand to go through it.

Other kinds of agitation, like x-rays, are so constructed that they can get through.

So everything is basically coming and going.

For example, sound.

If you listen to sound and slow sound down in the same way as you can slow sound down

in the same way as you can use a magnifying glass to look at the structure of something

visible.

And as when you look at the magnifying glass you find that solid things are full of holes,

so when you magnify sound you find it's full of silences.

Sound is sound hyphen silence.

There is no such thing as pure sound, just as there is no such thing as pure something.

Something always goes together with nothing.

Solids are always found in spaces, and no spaces are found except where there are solids.

You might imagine there being a space without any solid in it, but you will never, never

encounter one, because you will be there in the form of a solid to find out about it.

You see, they go together, these things.

The solid in the space, the positive in the negative, the here we are and here we aren't,

go together in the same way as the back and front of a coin.

And you can't have a coin that has a back and no front.

The only thing that gets anywhere near that is a Mobius strip, which is a mathematical conceit

which, uh, in which the back and the front are the same.

But that only shows, in a more vivid way, how backs and fronts go together.

Now, so, the whole thing is based on that, you see.

Now, once we've got this game, that there are two different things, but they're really the

same.

See?

The Brahma is what is basic, but the Brahma manifests itself in what are called the Dvanva, and that

means the pairs of opposites.

Duality.

Dvanva, you see, is the root of the Sanskrit word for two, which becomes duo in Latin and

dual in English.

Two is the basis.

You can't go behind two because one has an opposite.

The opposite of one is none.

Now what is in common between one and none?

No one can say.

Shh.

You can't mention it.

It's called Brahma, and it's sometimes called Om, O-M.

And, uh, but you can't really think of what is in common between black and white.

There is obviously a conspiracy between black and white, because they're always found together.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle.

See, there's always an agreement underlying this difference.

But that is what we call implicit.

The difference is explicit.

So the first step in what you might call the hide phase of the game of hide-and-seek is

to lose sight of the implicit unity between black and white, between yes and no, between

existence and non-existence.

And that losing sight of the fundamental unity is called Maya.

Maya, a word that means many things, but primarily it means creative power or magic and also illusion.

The illusion that the opposites are really separate from each other.

And once you could think that they are really separated from each other, you can have a very thrilling game.

The game is, oh dear, black might win.

Or, we must be quite sure that white wins.

Now, which one ought to win?

Sometimes when you look at this, you would say, or this, the reality here is the writing.

That is what is significant.

And yet there are many patterns that one can have when you're undecided in your mind as

to what is the figure and what is the background.

It could be a black design on a white sheet, or it could be a white design on a black sheet.

And the universe is very much like that.

Space or the background of things isn't nothing.

But people tend to be deceived about this.

If I draw that, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say that I have drawn a circle, or a disc, or a ball.

Very few people will ever suggest that I've drawn a hole in a wall.

Because people think inside first, rather than thinking out here.

But actually, the two sides go together.

You can't have what's in here unless you have what's out there.

So all artists, all architects, all people concerned with the organization of space,

think quite as much about the background behind things and containing things as they do about

the things so contained.

It's all significant and it's all important.

But the game is, let's pretend that this doesn't exist.

So that's the pretending, oh, black might win.

Or oh, white might win.

And so, you see, that is the foundation of all the great games that human beings play.

Of checkers, of chess, and of the simple children's games of hide-and-seek.

And it's, of course, you see, the tradition of chess that white gets the first move because black is the side of the devil.

So all complications and all possibilities of life lie in this game of black and white.

You can put it in another way.

In the beginning of the game, when the two pairs are divided, that is to dismember, to cut, to separate.

In the end of the game, when everything comes together, they are remembered.

To dismember is to hide or to lose.

To dismember is to seek and to find.

To remember is to seek and to find.

And so, the Hindu mythology is this.

That the Brahma plays this game through periods of time called a Kalpa.

And every Kalpa is 4,320,000 years long.

And for a Kalpa, he forgets who he is and manifests himself or pretends he acts the part of, as the great actor, of all of us.

And then, for another Kalpa, he wakes up, remembers who he is and is at peace.

So, the period in which he manifests the worlds is called a Manvantara.

And the period in which he withdraws the game is called the Pralaya.

And these go on and on and on forever and ever and ever.

And the whole thing is that it never becomes boring.

Because the forgetting period makes you forget everything that's happened before.

So that each time, for example, a baby comes to birth,

a baby is, although inheriting genes from the most distant past,

the baby always confronts the world anew and is astonished and surprised at everything.

But as you get old, you get heavy with memories.

You get like a book that people have written on and written on and written on,

as if I was to go on writing on this, and eventually the whole thing would become black.

And then I'd have to take out a white chalk and start doing it that way.

Well, that would be like the change, you see, between life and death.

Now, in popular Hinduism, it is believed that each one of us contains not only the Supreme Self,

the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks out from all eyes and hears through all ears.

But there's also an individualized self.

And this self reincarnates from life to life in a sort of progressive way or a regressive way,

according to your karma, the Sanskrit word which means your doing.

Karma from the root, kri, to do.

And so there is a time then, you see, in which we become involved and get more and more tied up in the toils of the world,

more and more subject to desire and to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb.

Then there follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man,

what is called a mukti.

A mukti is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or liberation.

He has found himself. He knows who he is.

He knows that he, deep down in himself, and that you, deep down in yourselves, are all the one central self,

and that this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion.

Now, you see, I said at the beginning that this is a dramatic idea.

In drama, we have a convention of the proscenium arch and the stage,

and we have a convention of on-scene and off-scene.

There is the curtain or backdrop in front of which the actors appear,

and behind that there's a dressing room called the green room.

And in the green room they put on and take off their masks.

And in Latin, the word for the masks worn by the players in classical drama was persona.

That, the Latin word per means through, sona, sound, that through which the sound comes,

because the mask was, had a megaphone-shaped mouth which would throw the sound in an open-air theatre.

So dramatis personae, the list of the players in front of a play, means the list of masks that are going to be worn.

And insofar as we now talk about the real self in any human being as the person,

are you a real person?

We have inverted the meaning of the word, and we have made the mask word mean the real player underneath.

That shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion.

Because, you see, the whole point of a play, the skill of the actor,

is to persuade the audience, despite the fact that the audience knows it's at the play,

is to have them sitting on the edge of their chairs, or weeping, or in terror because they think it's real.

And so, of course, the Hindu idea is that the greatest of all players,

the master player behind the whole shebang, who's putting on the big act called existence,

is so good an actor that he takes himself into it.

He is at once the actor and the audience, and he is enchanted by his playing.

So the word maya, illusion, also means to be enchanted.

You know what to be enchanted is?

Is to be listening to a chant, and to be completely involved in it.

Or he is amazed.

What is to be amazed?

It is to be caught in a maze.

Or spellbound.

How do you get spellbound?

What do you spell?

You spell words.

And so, by the ideas we have about the world, and through our belief in the reality of different things and events,

we get completely carried away, and altogether forget who we are.

There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu.

Vishnu is one of the aspects of the Godhead, Brahma.

Mah is usually the word given to the creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive aspect.

But when the Narada came to Vishnu and said,

What is the secret of your maya?

Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool.

And the moment he fell under the pool, he was born as a princess in a very great family,

and went through all the experiences of childhood and being a little girl,

finally married to a prince from another kingdom, and she went to live with him in his kingdom.

And they were in tremendous prosperity and palaces and peacocks and all that kind of thing.

Then suddenly there was a war, and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed,

and the prince himself was killed in battle, and so he was cremated, and she, as a dutiful wife,

was about to throw herself weeping on the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of sati, or self-sacrifice.

When suddenly, Narada awoke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by his hair, and Vishnu said,

For whom were you weeping?

So, that idea of the whole world being a magical illusion,

but done so skillfully, by whom? By you!

Basically. Not you, the empirical ego. Not you who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention,

with memories that are strung together into what you call my everyday self.

But the you that is responsible for growing your hair, for colouring your eyes,

for arranging the shape of your bones, the deeply responsible you is what is responsible for all this.

So, then, this in sum, then, is this Hindu dramatic idea of the cosmos,

as an endless hide-and-seek game. Now you see it, now you don't.

And, er, so it's saying to everybody, really,

of course you worry, and you're afraid of disease, and death, and pain, and all that sort of thing, of course.

But it's all an illusion. There's nothing to be afraid of.

And you think, well, er, but my goodness, supposing when I die, there just won't be anything.

Be like you're going to sleep and never waking up.

Isn't that awful? I mean, that's just terrible. Nothing forever.

It doesn't matter.

You know, when you go into that period called death or forgetting,

that's just so that you won't remember.

Because if you did always remember, it'd be a bore.

But you are wiser than you know because you arrange to forget.

You arrange to die and keep going in and out of the light.

But underneath, at the basis of all this, between black and white, between life and death,

is something unmentionable that's really you. That's the secret.

And you don't give the show away, see?

All of you are now privy to a secret. You're initiates, you see?

You know this little thing, but you may not have experienced it.

But you know about it.

But you mustn't give the show away.

Don't run out in the street suddenly and say to everybody, I'm God, see?

Because they won't understand you.

You know this little thing, but he challenged.

It doesn't mean you were MARTINA, the same thing.

You know that.

You know, the same thing.

The same thing.

But the same thing.

But there are also wiser in the street.

That's a certain thing.

You know, the same thing.

That's up to you.

But even then, a lot of stuff does not have to do.

But you know what the hell.

It's a beautiful thing.

That's a beautiful thing.

So that's a beautiful thing, and I can tell you.