Strange Prayers
Strange Prayers moves from a fragment of Zen teaching into an original poem of the same name. Watts opens with the familiar parable of the Zen student who tries so hard to act naturally and sincerely before the master that he becomes trapped in an endless regress of self observation, watching himself watching himself watching himself, until he discovers that this scrutiny reveals him to be, like an onion, nothing but layer after layer of artifice with no fixed core underneath. He treats that discovery as liberating rather than defeating, since trying to be genuine only splits a person further from genuineness. The recording then shifts register entirely into the poem itself, a lyrical, almost chanted recitation about laughing children who gather amber, diamonds, frankincense, fingernail parings, old coals, rags, broken bottles, spectacles and tangled wire, and love it all indiscriminately, the way a child loves whatever is at hand. Its refrain of strangeness, laughter and delight in cast off, unimaginable junk echoes the Zen anecdote's point that unselfconscious naturalness, not effortful sincerity, is what makes an act or a life genuine. Only a few minutes of connected speech appear across the transcript despite the recording's roughly thirty nine minute, seven part runtime, suggesting long stretches of music or ambient sound that the machine transcript does not capture. The piece closes on an abrupt broadcast style aside, we'll be right back, hinting that it was originally issued as a segment within a longer program rather than as a standalone talk.
transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited
Me
oh
Be unselfconscious, be natural.
The student tries everything to act in the master's presence without guile, with total sincerity.
But he realizes the more he does it, that in trying to be genuine, he is split from himself.
He's standing aside from himself, looking at himself, criticizing himself, and then he
begins to stand aside from the one that looks and criticizes and criticizes that, and so
on and so on and so on.
Eventually, he reaches the point where he sees that he's absolutely incapable of doing
anything natural.
He is artifice, insincerity, through and through and through.
But that is a great discovery, because in discovering that you, in discovering that the more you know
about yourself, the more you're just a big act, you're something like an onion, and you peel
off skin after skin after skin without nothing left of it.
This is what all really is something like.
The first thing.
The second thing is, of course, dangerous a lot.
The third thing is, of course, they can make it easier.
They can make it easier for a good act.
Easy.
And after listening to learning, people Xi Rising is less about and then more
the last thing that she wants to do.
But the next thing is, again, a hard word, which he knows it,
does beror, but the only reason is, you should never do.
But you don't have any troubles with theн Apollo myself.
That's so good.
That's right.
It was skillful.
In representing магазиновium,
I will ruin that, you might bend.
Do you take your self at this?
Oh
A
Oh
And
Oh
This king
The wallowing womb
The love of my delight
I am so
Strange
In this
Long
And the marrow
And the skull and the fire
To gather and laugh around the ring
And we shall choose
To please ourselves
With amber
With diamonds
With frankincense
And
With fingernail pairings
Hung in the sky like the moon
And laugh
And we'll sit there and we'll laugh
And we're so silly
Silly
And those fingernail pairings
And those old coals
And rags
And bits of twigs
And broken bottles
And old spectacles
And rhomboid picture frames
And wire
All tangled up with some unimaginable goo
And we'll love it
And just like children, we'll love it
We'll love it
Oh
my
oh
We'll be right back.
THE TRUMP
NEARS
PLEA
Go ahead, go ahead!
a short reading from alan watts's book still the mind, warning that compulsive thinking confuses signs like money and photographs with tangible reality.
watts compares life to music and dance to illustrate the tai chi chuan principle that movement has no goal beyond itself.
a lecture on polar thinking in zen, tracing huineng's teaching method through iconoclasm, letting go of religion, and the space/solid balance in zen painting and haiku.
a lecture in which alan watts describes love as a spectrum before turning to the mystical unity revealed by psychedelic experience and the social and legal panic around lsd in the