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Alan Watts - The Tao of Philosophy

Alan Watts / audio 5:49:17 ~261 MB opus 105 kb/s

This merged item collects the nine distinct talks of Alan Watts's Tao of Philosophy lecture series, reconciled from a thirteen file archive in which four tracks turned out to be shorter or verbatim repeats of talks already present elsewhere in the set. The series opens with Limits, an inquiry into how language and grammar manufacture the illusion of a solid separate self and a world made of stuff, followed by Myth, which traces the skin encapsulated ego back to the biblical artifact myth and the mechanistic myth of blind matter, and Nature, contrasting Western, Hindu, and Chinese theories of the natural order in favor of the spontaneous, purposeless Tao. Seeing Through the Net, recorded aboard Watts's ferryboat for a group of IBM systems engineers, examines how technology and language reduce a continuous, wiggly world into discrete countable bits, before Relevance I and Relevance II turn to theology proper, contrasting belief with faith and arguing that Hindu and Buddhist practice exposes the separate self as a culturally inherited hallucination. Slices of Wisdom revisits the belief versus faith theme through Zen teaching stories and the prickly versus gooey temperaments, and Images of God, recorded in 1971 at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, argues that every picture of god, from the authoritarian father to the dark Hindu mother Kali, is an idol to be let go of in favor of an unconceivable ground of being. The set closes with Coincidence of Opposites, itself a compilation pairing Watts's 1960 KPFA radio talk The Sense of Nonsense with a later metaphysics lecture on vibration, opposites, and the ecological unity of organism and environment. Four near duplicate tracks from the original archive dump, shorter or verbatim rereadings of the see net, myth, nature, and limits talks, were dropped in favor of their fuller counterparts to avoid repeating the same audio twice.

transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 01 - Limits =====

Tonight, at any rate, we've got to go through some theoretical materials, so we're on a head trip.

I don't know where the trip will end up. It depends on you.

But in order to lay the foundation for this, we've got to examine ideas that are basic to our common sense.

Ideas are very powerful.

It's not only emotions that are powerful in human life.

And psychoanalysis has, of course, examined the emotional bases of human opinions and beliefs.

But one should also examine the intellectual bases of psychological principles, or theories, or therapies.

Because everybody who speaks a language at all has, underneath the surface of the language, or the figuring that he uses,

certain basic assumptions which are usually unexamined.

And these unexamined systems of belief are extremely powerful in their influence over our lives.

We'll begin with one very common idea that's built into our common sense,

which is that the world, the physical world, consists of two aspects, respectively, form and matter.

This was foisted on us by Aristotle, and also by the Bible,

because it is said that God created man out of the dust of the earth,

and as it were, made a figurine in his own image,

and then breathed the breath of life into its nostrils,

so that this form of clay became a living being.

And so, underneath that lies the notion that everything material is made of some sort of basic stuff,

like clay is the basis of pots.

And for centuries, scientists, philosophers, wanted to know what is that stuff.

Now look here, a carpenter makes tables out of wood,

and a potter makes pots out of clay.

But I ask you, is a tree made of wood?

Obviously not.

A tree is wood.

It's not made of it.

Is a mountain made of rock?

Obviously not.

It is rock.

See, our language contains innumerable ghosts.

Supposing I say, the lightning flashes.

Surely the flashing is the same as the lightning.

There is not one thing called lightning, and another called flashing.

The lightning is the flashing.

It is raining.

What is this it that is raining?

The raining.

I can make a noun out of a verb any time by turning it into a gerund.

So we populate the world with ghosts which arise out of the structure of our language and thus,

therefore, of the structure of our thinking.

Because we think in language or in figuring in numbers.

And so it's of intensely fascinating investigation to find out what are the hidden

assumptions that underlie language and figuring.

In other words, language and mathematics.

And here is this basic assumption, you see, that is almost with us all.

It comes again and again into our everyday speech.

That form, pattern, organization, organisms, are made of something.

As if there were some inert, primordial, and, of course, stupid stuff,

which had to be put into shape by an energy and an intelligence other than the stuff.

Like the intelligence of the potter shapes the clay.

So, therefore, we have a basic picture of the world in which everything is being pushed around.

There's a boss.

There's somebody in charge who is different from what that somebody is in charge of.

And puts everything into shape because our common sense does not allow that things shape themselves.

Very odd.

In Chinese, the word for nature is zirian, which is that which is so of itself, the spontaneous.

The Chinese have no difficulty in thinking about nature as self-shaping.

A Chinese child would not ask its mother, how was I made?

It would ask its mother, how did I grow?

Which would be quite different, you see.

So, to be made is to be commanded.

And, therefore, every good being obeys.

Whether you obey God or whether you obey the laws of nature, you obey.

And the analog, therefore, of the world that has been put into our common sense is one of military command.

Note that.

Because the image of God, I would go further and say the idolatrous image of God, which has been handed down to us,

is one of the beneficent tyrants, is one of the beneficent tyrants, the boss, big papa.

So then, when our physicists started to find out what stuff was,

they went into it and into it and examined it with ever more minute instruments.

They first started cutting up things with knives and cutting them smaller and smaller and smaller

until the particle that they wanted to dissect was exactly the same width as the edge of the knife.

And so they got an atom, and that word in Greek, atomos, means the non-cuttable.

A, non, tomos, cuttable.

That's the basic atom.

What you can't cut anymore because you got down to the end.

Well, they weren't satisfied with that.

So they got an atomos, in other words, a particle of something or other that was just the same width as the blade of the knife edge,

and they looked at it under a microscope.

And they saw that it seemed to be composed of more small particles.

So they found out means of working those out.

And then they found out extraordinary means of investigating the properties of matter.

Then they reached a point where they couldn't decide whether it was particles or whether it was waves.

So they called them wavicles.

They thought they had come to certain ultimate wavicles called electrons.

But then, unfortunately, everything fell apart,

and they found protons, mesons, and many other extraordinary things.

Because, of course, what they didn't realize

was that as you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments,

the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation.

Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful,

the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes.

Because what is happening in all these investigations

is, through us and through our eyes and senses,

the universe is looking at itself.

And when you try to turn around to see your own head,

what happens?

See?

It runs away.

You never get at it.

You can't bite your own teeth.

You can't touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger.

This is the principle.

Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad,

where he says that that which is the knower,

the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge.

Just as fire doesn't burn itself.

So, there's always that profound mystery

that you are never going to be in absolute control of what goes on,

because if you were to be like making love to a plastic woman,

who wants that?

There always is the mystery.

Uh-uh.

The thing we don't know.

As Vandeleu put it,

the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved,

but a reality to be experienced.

If there were not that,

you see,

there would be no life.

The reason why certain people turn to philosophy,

why I became a philosopher,

was that since I was a little boy,

I always felt that

existence as such

was weird.

I mean,

here we are.

Isn't that odd?

Of course it's odd.

What do you mean by odd?

Well,

it's what's different from even.

I mean,

what's odd stands out.

What's even lies flat.

But you can't see

the outstanding without the flat background.

Here's the thing standing out.

It's odd.

Each one of you is odd.

Strange.

Unique.

Particular.

Different.

How do we know what we mean by that?

Except against the background of something even.

That is not differentiated.

Like space.

And so,

you get this philosophical itch.

You begin to scratch your head and think about,

why is that so?

Well,

after a while you realize that's a meaningless question.

Then you ask,

how is it so?

Well,

that leads you into science

and other investigations.

So you want to know what is it?

I mean,

this happening,

this thing called existence.

What is it?

And you ask that question long enough

and it suddenly hits you

that if you could answer it,

you wouldn't know what terms to put the answer in.

I mean,

when we investigate the properties of nature

and we do get some answers,

all the answers are in terms of particular structures,

forms,

patterns.

And these can be measured

and their behavior can be predicted.

But when I want to ask the question,

what are the forms made of?

I mean,

what is it really?

We can't think of any way

in which we could answer the question.

Because we would have to have

a class of all classes.

When you ask the question,

what?

It's like saying,

is you is or is you ain't?

Is you animal?

Is you vegetable?

Is you mineral?

Are you a republican or a democrat?

Are you male or female?

Are you a Christian or a Jew

or a Hindu

or what have you?

We classify

always

to give an answer to the question,

what is it?

And when you classify,

you distinguish

an inside group

from an outside group.

Right.

So what we want to know

is what is the group of all groups?

Well, we can't imagine

what the outside would be.

So we can't answer the question.

What is it?

So the physicists

finally abandoned

the quest for stuff.

And they gave us

a description of the universe

entirely in terms of form.

The pattern,

not the stuff.

When people ask,

what's the work?

Yeah, but you can't do that.

What's the pattern made of?

Surely there mustn't be an answer to that.

See, what happens is

when you turn up the microscope,

all stuff

turns into form.

It becomes articulate.

You know,

the carpet

looks like some sort of stuff.

But

when you look at it

under a microscope,

you will see

the crystalline structure

of the nylon

or whatever it's made of.

See?

They want to know

what are those crystals made of.

All right?

Turn up the volume

and you'll find

molecules.

Turn up the volume.

You find wavicles.

But we think

the wavicles

must be of something.

But of course they're not.

We find

substance

or stuff

totally vanishes.

And we're left with form.

Sanskrit doesn't really

have a word for matter.

It has namarupa,

which means

named form.

It's the form that matters.

Or let's put it

in another way,

as a matter of form.

Now let's go into this.

It's fascinating.

We say,

does it matter?

What does that mean?

Does it matter?

Is it important?

In other words,

does it measure up to anything?

All right,

let's go back

to the Indo-European

roots of the language.

Matter

comes from

a Sanskrit root

matra,

which means

to measure,

to lay out

the foundation,

say,

for a building.

So from this root

matra,

we get going on

into Sanskrit,

we get the word

maya.

And maya

is generally

translated illusion,

although it also means

magic,

creative power.

the word illusion,

switch over,

we get that from Latin,

and that comes from the Latin

ludere,

to play.

Let's pretend

that we matter.

And so,

also from

the root matra,

see,

you get meter,

that is also to measure.

You get

mitir,

in Greek,

mater,

in Latin,

which means mama,

mother.

The mother of Buddha

was called maya.

Mary,

ma,

again,

is the mother of Jesus.

Ma,

ma,

ma.

But ma,

you see,

is a matter

of form,

pattern.

The Chinese

call the basic

principle of nature

li,

and the character

for li

means the markings

in jade,

the fiber

in mussel,

the grain

in wood.

So,

Joseph Needham

translates it

organic pattern.

And that's

what's going on.

And there isn't

any stuff involved.

What stuff is,

is a pattern

seen out of focus,

where it becomes

fuzzy.

Like kapok,

see?

We say kapok

is the stuffing

of a cushion.

And that's stuff.

It's, you know,

some kind of goop.

But when we examine

the kapok closely,

we find structure.

And that's what

you will find,

and there never

will be anything else.

Crazy.

Because it completely

flouts our common sense.

We say,

but surely,

philosophers beat

tables that are

in front of them.

And, you know,

they say,

it is there,

because,

bang,

you know,

there must be

something,

that is stuff,

that is substantial.

But the only reason

why you can't

pass your hand

through a table

is the table

is moving too fast.

It's like

trying to put

your finger

through an electric

fan.

Only it's going

much faster

than an electric

fan.

Anything solid

is going

so fast

that there's

no way

to get this

through it.

That's all.

so you say,

what is it

that is going

so fast?

Well,

that question

is based

on a

grammatical

illusion.

The grammatical

illusion is

that all verbs

have to have

subjects.

Can you imagine

anything more

weird

than the idea

that a verb

or an action

or event

must be set

into motion

by a noun?

that is to say

a non-event

or thing.

Now,

what's the difference

between a thing

and an event?

I can't

for the life

of me tell.

We say

this is a fist.

That's a noun.

What happens

to it

when I open

my hand?

This thing

has unaccountably

disappeared.

So I should

have called

this a fisting.

And this is

a handing.

It may also

be a pointing.

So we could

devise a language

such as that

of the Nutka Indians

where there are

no nouns

there are only verbs.

Chinese is

very close to that.

I think

the superimposition

of the idea

of noun

and verb

on the Chinese

language

is a Western

invention.

I can't think

of any Chinese

word for a noun.

But all those

languages

of Indo-European

origin

have nouns

and verbs

in them.

They have

agents

and operations.

And that's

one of the

basic snags.

When we divide

the world

into operations

and agents,

doers

and doings,

then we ask

such silly

questions as

who knows?

Who does it?

What does it?

When the what

that is supposed

to do it

is the same

as the doing.

And you can

very easily see

that the whole

process of the

universe

may be understood

as process.

Nobody is doing

it.

Because when you

go back to doing

it, you go back

to the military

analogy, the

chain of command.

The boss

who goes

bang

and the object

obeys.

It's a very

crude idea.

Very

unsophisticated.

if you can

bear it,

we have

suddenly

eliminated

a spook

and the spook

was called

stuff.

So we're

now

more at ease

with ourselves

in a world

of form.

Nama Rupa.

Named forms.

We can

of course

get rid

of the names.

We can

go further

and try

the experiment

of not

calling

the forms

by any

names.

Just

observing

the forms

although

when we've

got rid

of the names

we can't

even call

them forms

because that's

a name.

And there's

the bazaars

going on.

which

Buddhists

call

Tathata

and that

means

suchness

thusness.

Actually

Tathata

Dada

because

when a

baby first

talks

it says

Dada

and fathers

flatter themselves

that it's

saying

Dada

Daddy.

It isn't.

It's

saying

Dada

and so

the Upanishads

say

you're

it.

The

basic

but

doesn't

mean

anything.

is like

everything

else.

See

the world

is a

musical

phenomenon

good music

never refers

to anything

except

the music

itself.

You

don't

ask

Mr.

Bach

Mr.

Ravi

Shankar

what

you

mean

bad music

always

expresses

something

other

than

itself

the

overture

the

sunken

cathedral

good music

never

talks

about

anything

other

than

the

music

you

ask

Bach

what

your

meaning

you

say

listen

that's

the

meaning

giraffes

are

giraffing

trees

are

treeing

stars

are

starring

clouds

are

clouding

rain

raining

and

you

don't

understand

look

again

and

people

are

people

wow

notice

that

all

these

suchnesses

appear

and

disappear

they

keep

changing

they

come

and

they

but

you

get

hung

your

particular

form

I'll

have

alter

the

language

little

bit

because

you

see

your

form

makes

what

you

are

doing

now

you

think

for

some

strange

reason

must

make

that

long

possible

and

therefore

you

think

you

have

instinct

survive

and

the

only

thing

anybody

can

agree

about

today

far

the

discussion

ethical

and

moral

problems

are

concerned

that

ought

survive

and

but

when

you

say

yourself

you

must

living

you

put

yourself

double

bind

because

you

said

process

which

essentially

spontaneous

that

must

happen

and

the

basic

form

the

double

bind

which

imposed

upon

all

children

you

are

required

that

which

will

acceptable

only

you

voluntarily

when

say

ourselves

you

the

reason

you

see

that

are

not

living

the

eternal

now

where

reality

are

always

thinking

that

the

satisfaction

life

will

coming

later

there's

good

time

coming

be it

ever

far

away

that

one

far

off

divine

event

which

all

creation

moves

don't

kid

yourself

the

Hindus

have

taught

the

course

time

everything

gets

worse

eventually

falls

apart

comes

Kali

Yuga

and

Shiva

the

end

and

boom

which

say

only

suckers

put

hope

the

future

you

see

tell

you

there

are

three

classes

people

the

western

world

the

aristocrats

the

proletariat

and the

bourgeoisie

the

aristocrats

live on

the

past

because

they

come

noble

family

and

they

are

potatoes

because

the

best

part

them

underground

the

proletariat

live in

the

present

because

they

have

nothing

else

and

the

poor

bourgeoisie

live

for

the

future

they

are

the

eternal

suckers

they

can

always

open

con

game

when

they

find

out

that

really

there

isn't

much

of a

future

you're

going

die

they

transpose

the

future

into

spiritual

dimension

and

they

figure

this

material

world

is not

the

real

world

but

the

spiritual

world

is the

real

world

and

there

will

somewhere

somehow

eternal

life

for

charge

keep

have

god

glorify

and

never

dying

soul

save

and

fit

for

the

sky

well

and

they

say

them

what

are

you

going

there

well

they

have

the

faintest

idea

you

know

that

you

ask

theologians

about

what

they

think

going

could go into, but the average person's idea of heaven is an absolute bore. I mean, it's

like being in church forever. Children see this immediately. Children, when they hear

a hymn like, weary of earth and laden with my sin, I looked at heaven and longed to enter

in, they think, oh God. Heaven is to be in church for always. And they think hell is

preferable. There's at least some excitement going on. And you see it in medieval art.

You take, you go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and you see Jan van Eyck's painting

of the Last Judgement. Heaven on top, hell below. In heaven, everybody's looking like

the cat that swallowed the canary, sitting in rows, and very smug, God the Father as president,

and, oh dear. Beneath this, there's a winged skull, like a bat, and squirming bodies, all

nude, all being eaten by snakes, and I don't know, there's a fantastic thing going on.

But in that, you see, van Eyck had a ball painting that. Because in medieval way, it was the only

way you could get away with painting nudes. And sexy scenes, sadomasochistic. See? So that's

naturally why hell became much more interesting than heaven. So, therefore, this hope for the

future is a hoax. It's a perfect hoax. Maybe we will make spiritual progress. Everybody puts

it off. Maybe if I work at yoga for 10 years, 20 years, and do this thing, I will eventually make it

progress. To moksha, to nirvana, whatever. That's nothing more than a postponement. It's this business

of, because you're not fully alive now, you think maybe someday you will be. Look, supposing I ask you,

what did you do yesterday? No, what did I do yesterday? In fact, I've forgotten. So, but most people say,

well, let me see now. Let me get out my notebook. I got up at 7.30 and I brushed my teeth. And I read

the newspaper over a cup of coffee. And then I looked at the clock and dressed and got in the car and

drove downtown and did this and that in the office and so on. And you go on and on and on. And you

suddenly discover that what you've described has absolutely nothing to do with what happened.

You've described a scraggly, skeletal, fleshless list of abstractions. Whereas if you were actually

aware of what went on, you could never describe it. Because nature is multidimensional. Language

is linear. Language is scrawny. And therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the way the world

is described, it's as if you were trying to eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. Or eat numbers.

A lot of people eat numbers. People play the stock market. They're doing nothing but eating numbers.

And they're always unhappy. Absolutely miserable. Because they never get anything. So, therefore,

they always hope more is coming. Because they believe that if they eat enough dollar bills,

eventually, something satisfactory will happen. So, eating the abstractions all the time. We want more,

more, more time. Confucius very wisely said, a man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.

Because when you understand, you don't put your hope in time. Time won't solve a thing. So, when we enter into the practice of meditation,

of yoga, we are doing something radically unlike other human activities. Of course, the way yoga is sold in the United States,

like everything else, is that it's supposed to be good for you. It isn't. It has nothing to do with anything that's good for you.

It's the one activity which you do for its own sake. And not because it's good for you. Not because it will lead anywhere.

Because you cannot go to the place where you are now. Obviously. Yoga is to be completely here and now.

That's why the word yoga means join. Get with it. Be completely here and now. This is the real meaning of concentration. To be in your center.

And the Christian word for sinning, in Greek is amatanin, which means to miss the point. And the point is eternal life, which is here and now. Come to your senses.

So, yoga is defined in Sanskrit. In the Yoga Sutra, Yogas Citta Britti Nirodha.

Difficult to translate, but roughly, yoga is the stopping of... Britti is turning. See, like a wheel. And citta is consciousness.

Turning's in consciousness. In other words, the attempt of the mind to catch hold of itself. Which is what we call thinking. Worrying.

So, we could say loosely, yoga is the cessation of thinking. It's not the cessation of awareness. But of symbolizing, trying to catch, touch, reality in terms of thoughts, symbols, descriptions, definitions. Give it up.

It's not easy because we do it habitually. But until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand eternal life. That is to say, eternal now.

If you could come to the place where you suspend conceptions. Conceptions in Sanskrit are called vikalpa. And so the state is called nirvikalpa, not conceptual. And this will be basic to everything I'm going to talk to you about.

To understand non-verbal reality. Non-conceived reality. What I call suchness. Tathata. It's really very easy. It's too easy. That's why it's difficult.

But that when you are fully aware and not thinking, you will notice some amazing absences. There is no past. Can you hear anything past incidentally? Can you hear anything future?

They are just not there to the plain sense of one's ears. Ears are easiest to begin with. Can you hear anyone listening to something else other than,

other than sound, you know? Can you hear the listener? No? Well then presumably it's not there. When you become again as a child and simply forget all that you ever were told and contemplate what is, all these ghosts go away.

That's weird. But they just go. And then you enter into the eternal state. Well there's no problem.

William, you go back and you collect your opinions again. You think, well that won't do. How can I be practical and be in that sort of state?

Well, I remember in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus said a lot of things about this.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet, Suleiman in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

And if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you faithless ones?

Wow. So, do not worry about tomorrow saying what shall we eat, what shall we drink, or how shall we clothe ourselves?

Oh, the rabble seeks after these things. Sufficient to the day is the worry of it.

Nobody ever preaches a sermon on that text. Never. I've heard lots of sermons. And never one on that one. Because people say,

Look, that's all very well because Jesus was the boss's son. And he knew, you see, that he was really in charge of the universe.

And he had nothing to worry about. But we have to be practical. Oh? What do you suppose the gospel was? The good news?

Do you know it never got out? You too are the boss's son. That was the gospel.

If Jesus had lived in India, they wouldn't have put him to death. Because everybody in India knows that we are all God in disguise.

So if he had said, I and the Father are one, in India they would have said, Hooray!

Lots of people in India know that perfectly well. But here, that's a no-no. Who the hell do you think you are?

You own the place? You keep your position. You're just a creature. A critter.

It's in the family system. It's in everything. Because they have their own way of doing it in India.

Because they have a delayed action on it.

When you get to be a certain age, and after you've studied long enough with a certain guru,

then, and then only, may you realize this. But until then, uh-uh-uh. It's still a no-no.

But if you've put in the time, they finally let you in. Here you have to wait.

Until you're dead.

Well, the only place to begin is now. Because here's where we are.

So why put it off?

A lot of people say, Well, I'm not ready.

What do you mean you're not?

What do you have to be to be ready?

Well, I'm not good enough.

Because I'm neurotic.

I'm perhaps not old enough, not mature enough for such knowledge.

I, uh, still am frightened of pain.

And, of course, I'd have to overcome that.

I'm still, uh, dependent on material things.

I have to, you know, eat a lot, and drink a lot, and, uh, sex around, and all that kind of thing.

And, uh, I think that, uh, I'd better get all that under control first.

Oh?

You mean you've got a case of spiritual pride?

You, you, you want to be able to congratulate yourself for having gone through the discipline,

which is rewarded with realization.

That is trying to quench fire with fire.

In other words, the reason, you know, wouldn't it be great to be a mystic?

We'll get it this way.

I mean, crazy.

To have no fear.

No attachments.

No hang-ups.

To be as free as the air.

So that, uh, you know, you could just wander out in the streets, and, uh, give away all your clothes to the beggars,

and, uh, let go the whole thing, let it all hang out.

Wouldn't it be crazy to have that courage?

And you look into yourself honestly.

You find that inside you're actually a quaking mess of sensitivity.

No?

So that this desire to be the great mystic is nothing more than a symptom of your quaking mess.

It's self-defense.

So you think, wowee, we'll do that yoga bit, and we'll get real tough.

But that only means you're going to be increasingly insensitive.

Running away from the quaking mess.

Escaping.

You never can.

You're stuck with it.

There's nothing you can actually do to transform your own nature into unattached selflessness.

Because you have a selfish reason for wanting to do it.

Well, that's pretty depressing, isn't it?

You mean to tell me that the only people who get really enlightened and liberated are those whom the grace of God somehow hits in an arbitrary way?

And all you can do is sit around and wait?

Well, let's begin with that supposition.

Let's suppose there's nothing we can do to change ourselves.

You know, psychotherapy, religion, all this is absolutely in vain.

There's nothing, nothing, nothing you can do about it.

It's like trying, as I said, to bite your own teeth.

Or lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Incidentally, it struck me as funny, a lot of people are using that phrase in the wrong way.

They say when something very difficult has to be done, we have to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

You can't!

It's impossible.

It's terribly depressing.

You mean, Alan Watts, you'll come here simply to tell us that there's nothing we can do?

I mean, here we are all presumably assembled in a cultural milieu, spiritual milieu, psychotherapeutic milieu,

where we are supposed to get better.

And I tell you, there's nothing you can do about it.

Well, I say, give us our money back.

Go to somebody else, you'll be more encouraging.

But, but, what does it mean that you can't do anything about it?

You can't do anything about it.

Singing loud and clear.

The reason you can't do anything about it is that you don't exist.

That is, as an ego, as a soul, a separate will, just isn't there.

Well, when you understand that, you're liberated.

They say in Zen, you cannot take hold of it, nor can you get rid of it.

In not being able to get it, you get it.

When you are silent, it speaks.

When you speak, it is silent.

Now, don't misunderstand me.

This is not any kind of fatalism.

When I say, you, as you conceive yourself to be, that is, your ego, your image of yourself, isn't there.

It doesn't exist.

It's an abstraction.

It's like three.

Did you ever see three?

It's plain, ordinary, three.

No, nobody ever saw it.

It's a concept.

It's a vikalpa.

So, in the same way as oneself.

There is the happening, the suchness.

Yes, sure, you bet.

But it's not pushing you around because there's no you to be pushed around.

In other words, there's no billiard ball on the end of the queue.

There's the queue.

You know, it goes this way and goes that way.

They call a Buddha a tathagata.

One who comes or goes thus.

This way and that way.

See?

He went that-a-way.

So, this illusion of the persecuted ego who is pushed around by fate has altogether disappeared.

And so, in likewise, the illusion of the ego who pushes fate around has also disappeared.

There's a happening.

So, in this you see what has happened.

By dying to yourself.

By having become completely incompetent.

And found that you don't exist.

You're reborn.

You become everything.

In the words of Sir Edwin Arnold,

Forgoing self, the universe grows I.

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 02 - Myth =====

Now, maybe, two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at the solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, just a bunch of rocks, and they went away.

Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around, and they looked at it again, and they said, excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling, and it's alive. After all, it has done something intelligent.

Welcome to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.

As one of the century's most eloquent philosophers, Alan Watts introduced a generation in the West to the fascinating ideas of the Far East, the wisdoms of the Orient.

In the 1960s and early 70s, he lectured throughout the English-speaking world and was recorded in a variety of settings, from seminars aboard his ferryboat, the Falejo, in Sausalito, California, to keynote addresses at major universities.

The author of books on Christian theology, psychology, ecology, and Eastern religion, including his classic, The Way of Zen, Watts' scholarship is deep and timeless.

However, it is also his wit and playful approach to life that endears him to us today.

This program was recorded in 1965 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

In this talk, Alan Watts tackles the fundamental philosophical question, who am I?

Is the human being an island of consciousness, locked up in a bag of skin, isolated from an alien world?

Are there really insides and outsides?

As he unwinds these questions, Watts examines the two fundamental Western myths,

that human beings are either made by a celestial creator, or are the result of random collisions, flukes in a world without meaning.

Who am I?

Here's Alan Watts.

I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, that the most fascinating problem in the world is who am I?

What do you mean?

What do you feel when you say the word I?

I, myself.

I don't think there can be any more fascinating preoccupation than that, because it's so mysterious.

It's so elusive.

Because what you are in your inmost being escapes your examination in rather the same way that you can't look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror,

you can't bite your own teeth, you can't taste your own tongue, and you can't touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger.

And that's why there's always an element of profound mystery in the problem of who we are.

This problem has fascinated me for many years, and I've made many inquiries, what do you mean by the word I?

And there is a certain consensus about this, a certain agreement, especially among people who live in western civilization.

Most of us feel I, ego, myself, my source of consciousness, to be a center of awareness, and of a source of action,

that resides in the middle of a bag of skin.

And so, we have what I have called the conception of ourselves as a skin-encapsulated ego.

Now, it's very funny how we use the word I, if we just refer to common speech.

We are not accustomed to say, I am a body.

We rather say, I have a body.

We don't say, I beat my heart, in the same way as we say, I walk, I think, I talk.

We feel that our heart beats itself, and that has nothing very much to do with I.

In other words, we don't regard I, myself, as identical with our whole physical organism.

We regard it as something inside it.

And most western people locate their ego inside their heads.

You are somewhere between your eyes, and between your ears, and the rest of you dangles from that point of reference.

It is not so in other cultures.

When a Chinese or Japanese person wants to locate the center of himself, he points here, not here.

Here, to what Japanese call the kokoro, or the Chinese call shin, the heart, mind.

Some people also locate themselves in the solar plexus.

But, by and large, we locate ourselves between, behind the eyes, and somewhere between the ears.

As if, within the dome of the skull, there was some sort of arrangement, such as there is at the SAC headquarters in Denver,

where there are men in great rooms, surrounded with radar screens, and all sorts of things, and earphones on, watching all the movements of planes all over the world.

So, in the same way, we have really the idea of ourselves as a little man inside our heads,

who has earphones on, which bring messages from the ears, and who has a television set in front of him, which brings messages from the eyes,

and all sorts of electrode things are all over his body, giving him signals from the hands, and so on.

And he has a panel in front of him of buttons, and dials, and things.

And so, he more or less controls the body.

But he isn't the same as the body, because I am in charge of what are called the voluntary actions.

And what are called involuntary actions of the body, they happen to me.

I am pushed around by them, but to some extent also I can push my body around.

This, I have concluded, is the ordinary, average conception of what is oneself.

And look at the way children, influenced by our cultural environment, ask questions.

Mommy, who would I have been, if my father had been someone else?

You see, the child gets the idea, from our culture, that the father and mother gave him a body,

into which he was popped at some moment.

Whether it was conception, or whether it was parturition, is a little bit vague.

But there is, in our whole way of thinking, the idea that we are a soul, a spiritual essence of some kind,

imprisoned inside a body.

And that we look out upon a world that is foreign to us.

In the words of the poet Haussmann,

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.

And so, therefore, we speak of confronting reality, facing the facts.

We speak of coming into this world, and this whole sensation that we are brought up to have,

of being an island of consciousness, locked up in a bag of skin, facing outside us,

a world that is profoundly alien to us, in the sense that what is outside me is not me.

Therefore, this sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves and the so-called external world.

And therefore, we go on to talk about the conquest of nature, the conquest of space,

and view ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the world outside us.

I shall have much more to say about that in the second lecture.

But in the first now, I want to examine the strange feeling of being an isolated self.

Now, actually, it is absolutely absurd to say that we came into this world.

And we didn't. We came out of it.

What do you think you are?

Supposing this world is a tree. Are you leaves on its branches?

Or are you a bunch of birds that settled on a dead old tree from somewhere else?

Surely, everything that we know about living organisms, from the standpoint of the sciences,

shows us that we grow out of this world.

That we, each one of us, are what you might call symptoms of the state of the universe as a whole.

But you see, that is not part of our common sense.

Western man has for many centuries been under the influence of two great myths.

When I use the word myth, I don't necessarily mean falsehood.

To me, the word myth signifies a great idea in terms of which man tries to make sense of the world.

It may be an idea, it may be an image.

Now, the two images which have most profoundly influenced Western man are, number one,

the image of the world as an artifact, like a carpenter's table or a jar made by a potter.

Indeed, in the book of Genesis, there comes the idea that man was originally a clay figurine,

made out of the earth by the Lord God, who then breathed into this clay figurine and gave it life.

And the whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through and through

by the idea that all things, all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers,

all grasshoppers, all worms, everything, are artifacts.

They have been made.

And it is therefore natural for a Western child to say to its mother,

How was I made?

That would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child.

Because the Chinese do not think of nature as something made.

They look upon it as something that grows.

And the two processes are quite different.

When you make something, you put it together, you assemble parts,

or you carve an image out of wood or stone, working from the outside to the inside.

But when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way.

It doesn't assemble parts.

It expands from within and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming,

like a seed turning into a plant.

But behind our whole thought in the West is the idea that the world is an artifact,

that it is put together by a celestial architect, carpenter and artist,

who therefore knows how it was done.

When I was a little boy, and I asked many questions which my mother couldn't answer,

she used to resort in desperation to saying,

my dear, there are some things that we are not meant to know.

And I said, well, will we ever find out?

And she said, yes, when we die and we go to heaven, it will all be made clear.

And I used to think that on wet afternoons in heaven,

we would all sit around the throne of grace and say to the Lord God,

now just why did you do it this way and how did you manage it that?

And he would explain it and make it all very clear.

All questions would be answered.

Because as we have popularly, in popular theology, understood the Lord God,

he is the master mind who knows everything.

And if you ask the Lord God exactly how high is Mount Whitney to the nearest millimetre,

he would know exactly like that and would tell you any question.

The Cosmic Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Unfortunately, this particular image or myth became too much for Western man

because it was oppressive to feel that you are known through and through

and watched all the time by an infinitely just judge.

I have a friend, a very enlightened woman.

She's a Catholic convert, but a very enlightened Catholic.

And in her bathroom, she has on the pipe that connects the tank with the toilet seat,

a little framed picture of an eye.

And underneath in Gothic letters is written,

Thou, God, seest me.

Everywhere is this eye watching, watching, watching, watching, watching, watching,

and judging you,

so that you always feel you are never really by yourself.

But the old gentleman is observing you and writing notes in his black book.

And this became too much for the West.

It became oppressive.

They had to get rid of it.

And so instead we got another myth.

The myth of the purely mechanical universe.

This was invented at the end of the 18th century.

It became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the 19th century

and well into the 20th century so that it is today's common sense.

Very few people today really believe in God in the old sense.

They say they do.

But they really hope there is a God.

They don't really have faith in God.

They fervently wish that there was one

and feel that they ought to believe that there is.

But the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvellous old gentleman

is no longer plausible.

It isn't that anybody has disproved it.

But it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of galaxies

and the immense lightier distances between them and so on.

So instead it has become fashionable.

And it is nothing more than a fashion.

To believe that the universe is dumb.

Stupid.

That intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings

reside only within the bag of the human epidermis.

And that outside that, the thing is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces.

Courtesy of Dr. Freud, for example, biological life is based on something called libido,

which was a very, very loaded word, blind, ruthless, uncomprehending lust.

That's the foundation of the human unconscious.

And similarly to thinkers like of the 19th century, like Ernst Haeckel, even Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and so on,

there was this notion that at the root of being is an energy.

And this energy is blind.

This energy is just energy.

And it's utterly and totally stupid.

And our intelligence is an unfortunate accident.

By some weird freak of evolution,

we came to be these feeling and rational beings, more or less rational.

And this is a ghastly mistake, because here we are in a universe that has nothing in common with us,

that doesn't share our feelings, has no real interest in us.

We're just a sort of cosmic fluke.

And therefore, the only hope for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission,

and conquer it, master it.

Now, all this is perfectly idiotic.

If you would think that the idea of the universe as being the creation of a benevolent old gentleman,

although he's not so benevolent, he takes a sort of,

this hurts me more than it's going to hurt you sort of attitude to things,

you can have that on the one hand,

and if that becomes uncomfortable, you can exchange it for its opposite.

The idea that the ultimate reality doesn't have any intelligence at all.

At least that gets rid of the old bogey in the sky,

in exchange for a picture of the world that is completely stupid.

Now, these ideas don't make any sense, especially the last one,

because you cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being,

out of an unintelligent universe.

The saying in the New Testament, that figs do not grow on thistles nor grapes on thorns,

applies equally to the world.

You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment.

Look, here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples,

and we call it an apple tree, because the tree apples.

That's what it does.

All right, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy,

and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that,

at least on the planet Earth, the thing peoples.

In just the same way that an apple tree apples.

Now, maybe two million years ago,

somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer,

and had a look at this solar system,

and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said,

just a bunch of rocks, and they went away.

Later on, maybe two million years later,

they came around and they looked at it again,

and they said, excuse me,

we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling.

And it's alive, after all, it has done something intelligent.

Because, you see, we grow out of this world

in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.

If evolution means anything, it means that.

But, you see, we curiously twist it.

We say, well, first of all, in the beginning,

there was nothing but gas and rock.

And then intelligence happened to arise in it,

you know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.

But we're thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.

Where there are rocks, watch out.

Watch out.

Because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.

And they're going to have people crawling over them.

It's only a matter of time.

Just in the same way as the seed, the acorn, is eventually going to turn into the oak.

Because it has the potentiality of that within it.

Rocks are not dead.

You see, it depends on what kind of attitude you want to take to the world.

If you want to put the world down, you say,

Oh, well, fundamentally it's only just a lot of geology.

It's a stupidity.

And it so happens that there's a kind of a freak comes up in it,

which we call consciousness.

And that's an attitude that you take when you want to prove to people that you're a tough guy,

that you're realistic, that you face facts,

and that you don't indulge in wishful thinking.

It's just a matter of role-playing.

And you must be aware of these things.

There are fashions in the intellectual world.

On the other hand, if you feel warm-hearted towards the universe,

you put it up instead of putting it down.

And you say about rocks,

they're really conscious, but a very primitive form of consciousness.

Because after all, when I take even this crystal here, which is glass,

and go, well, it makes a noise.

And that response, that resonance,

is an extremely primitive form of consciousness.

Our consciousness is much more subtle than that.

But when you hit a bell and it rings, you touch a crystal and it responds,

inside itself, I mean, it has a very simple reaction.

It goes jangle inside,

whereas we go jangle with all sorts of colors and lights and intelligence, ideas and thoughts.

It's more complicated.

But both are equally conscious.

But conscious in different degrees.

That is a perfectly acceptable idea.

It's just the opposite of the idea.

See, all I'm saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness.

Whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.

You see?

And what they want to do is to say everything is kind of bleh.

Whereas what I want to say is hooray.

You know, life is a good show.

As we study man, or any other living organism,

and try and describe him accurately and scientifically,

we find that our normal sensation of ourselves,

as isolated egos inside a bag of skin,

is a hallucination.

It really is.

It's absolutely nutty.

Because when you describe human behavior,

or the behavior of a mouse, or a rat, or a chicken,

or anything you want to describe,

you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately,

you must also describe the behavior of its environment.

Supposing I walk,

and you want to describe the action of walking,

you can't talk about my walking without also describing the floor.

Because if you don't describe the floor,

and the space in which I am moving,

all you will be describing is somebody swinging his legs in empty space.

So as to describe my walking,

you must describe the space in which you find me.

You know, you couldn't see me

unless you could also see my background,

what stands behind me.

See, if I myself, if the boundaries of my skin,

were coterminous with your whole field of vision,

you wouldn't see me at all.

You would see my bright red vest instead.

That's why I put it on this evening,

to demonstrate this point.

And that would be the thing that filled your field of vision,

that was the thing standing there.

You wouldn't see me,

because in order to see me,

you have to see not only what is inside the boundary of my skin,

but you have to see what is outside it too.

Now that's terribly important.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery,

the only thing you need to know

to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets,

is this,

that for every outside there is an inside,

and for every inside there is an outside.

And although they are different,

they go together.

There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy,

between all insides and all outsides,

and the conspiracy is this,

to look as different as possible,

and yet underneath to be identical,

because you don't find one without the other.

Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle.

Note that, agreed.

So there is a secret.

What is esoteric,

what is profound and what is deep,

is what we will call the implicit.

What is obvious and on the open

is what we will call the explicit.

And I and my environment,

you and your environment,

are explicitly as different as different could be.

But implicitly...

you go together. And this is discovered by the scientist

when he tries, as the whole

art of science is to describe what happens exactly.

And when he describes exactly what you do

he finds out that you,

your behavior is not something

that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you.

He realizes then that you are something that the whole world is doing.

Just as when the sea has waves on it.

All right, the sea, the ocean is waving.

And so each one of us

is a waving of the whole cosmos,

the entire works, all there is.

And with each one of us it's waving and saying,

Yoo-hoo, here I am.

Only it does it differently each time.

Because variety is the spice of life.

But you see, the funny thing is,

we haven't been brought up to feel that way.

Instead of feeling that we, each one of us,

are something that the whole realm of being is doing,

we feel that we are something that has come into the whole realm of being,

as a stranger.

When we were born, we don't really know where we came from,

because we don't remember.

And we think when we die,

that's just going to be that.

Some people console themselves with the idea that they're going to heaven,

or that they're going to be reincarnated,

or they're going to summer land, or something, you know.

People don't really believe that.

For most people it's plausible.

The real thing that haunts them is that when they die,

they're going to sleep and never going to wake up.

They're going to be locked up in the safe deposit box of darkness forever.

But that all depends, you see,

upon a false notion of what is one's self.

Now, the reason why we have this false notion of ourselves

is as far as I can understand it,

that we have specialized in one particular kind of consciousness.

Being very general and rough,

we have two kinds of consciousness.

One I will call the spotlight,

and the other the floodlight.

The spotlight is what we call conscious attention.

And that is trained into us from childhood

as the most valuable form of consciousness.

When the teacher in class says,

pay attention,

everybody stares,

and looks fast at the teacher like that.

That's spotlight consciousness.

Fixing your mind on one thing at a time.

Concentrate.

And even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span,

nevertheless you concentrate.

You use your spotlight, one thing after another,

one thing after another, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, like that.

But we also have another kind of consciousness which I'll call the floodlight.

For example,

you can drive your car for several miles

with a friend sitting next to you,

and your spotlight consciousness will be completely absorbed in talking to your friend.

Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving of the car,

will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on,

and you'll get there safely,

without even thinking about it.

But our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight consciousness,

and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness alone.

I am my spotlight consciousness.

My conscious attention, that is my ego, that is me.

And very largely we ignore the floodlight.

Now the floodlight consciousness is working all the time.

Every nerve end that we have is its instrument.

You know you can go out to luncheon or something,

and you sit next to Mrs. So-and-so,

and you go home and your wife says to you,

was Mrs. So-and-so there?

Yes, I sat next to her.

Well, what was she wearing?

I haven't the faintest idea.

You saw, but you didn't notice.

Because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness,

and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued,

we have this sensation of ourselves as being just the spotlight.

Just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other.

And so we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our being.

People who, by various methods, become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness,

have what is called a mystical experience, or a cosmic consciousness,

or what the Buddhists call Bodhi, awakening.

What the Hindus call Moksha, liberation.

Because they discover that the real, deep, deep self,

that which you really are, fundamentally and forever,

is the whole of being.

All that there is, the works.

That is you, only, that universal self that is you,

has the capacity to focus itself at ever so many different here and nows.

So when you use the word I, this, as William James said,

that is really a word of position like this or here.

Just as a sun or star has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself

in you, in you, in you, in you, in you, in you, with all the different variations.

It plays games.

It plays the John Doe game, the Mary Smith game.

It plays the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the pigeon game,

the fish game, the star game.

Just like, these are games that differ from each other,

just like backgammon, whist, bridge, poker, pinochle,

or like waltz, mazurka, minuet, and so on.

It dances, with infinite variety.

But every single dance that it does, that is to say,

you is what the whole thing is doing, but you see, we forget it.

We don't know.

We've been brought up in a special way, so that we are unaware of the connection,

unaware that each one of us is the, is the works, playing it this way for a while.

And so, we have been taught to dread death, as if that were the end of the show.

It won't happen any more, and therefore, to be afraid of all the things that might bring

about death, pain, sickness, suffering.

And if you don't know, you see, if you're not really vividly aware of the fact that you

are basically the works, you have no real joy in life.

You're just a bundle of anxiety, mixed up with guilt.

Because you see, when we bring children into the world, we play awful games with them.

Instead of saying, how do you do?

We learn to the human race.

Now, my dear, we are playing some very complicated games.

And these are the rules of the game we're playing.

I want you to understand them, and then you learn them, and then when you get a little

bit older, you may be able to think up some better rules.

Instead of being quite direct with our children, instead, we say, you're here on probation,

you understand that.

And maybe, when you grow up a bit, you'll be acceptable.

But until then, you should be seen and not heard.

You're a mess.

And you've got to be educated and schooled and whipped until you're human.

So that these attitudes, which are inculcated into us in infancy, go on into old age.

The way you start out is liable to be the way you finish.

So people going around fundamentally feeling that they don't belong.

Because their parents said to them in the first place, look, you don't really belong here.

You're here on sufferance.

You're on probation.

You're not a human being yet.

And people feel this right on into old age.

And so they figure that the universe is presided over by this awful kind of God the Father

parent, who, yes, has our best interest at heart, is loving, but who spares the rod spoils

the child.

Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.

So everybody's sort of, when's it going to hit next?

So don't feel that they belong.

So we get this ghastly, what I call, Christian ego, a little bit Jewish too, really feels that

he doesn't, he's homeless, he's an orphan.

Even the Christians say we are sons of God by adoption and grace, not real sons, but by

adoption and grace and sufferance.

And so comes the sensation, you see.

So characteristic of Western man, and indeed of all highly civilized people, of being a stranger

in the earth, a momentary flash of consciousness between two eternal blackness.

And so, therefore, we speak of confronting reality, facing the facts.

We speak of coming into this world, and this whole sensation that we are brought up to have,

of being an island of consciousness, locked up in a bag of skin, facing outside us, a world

that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside me is not me.

This sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves and the

so-called external world.

So, my main point last night was then, that we need a new kind of consciousness, in which

every individual becomes aware that his real self is not just his conscious ego.

You know, let's take a headlight of a car.

The headlight shines on the road in front.

The headlight does not shine on the wire which connects it with its own battery.

So in a way, the headlight is unaware of how it shines.

And in the same way, we are unaware of the sources of our consciousness.

We don't know how we know.

There was a young man who said, though, it seems that I know that I know.

What I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

And so, we are ignorant of, we ignore, it doesn't come within the scope of our attention,

how it is that we manage to be conscious.

How it is that we manage to grow our hair, to shape our bones, to beat our heart and to

secrete all the necessary fluids that we need from our glands.

We do it, but we don't know how we do it.

Because you see underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that,

there is another self, more really us than I.

And if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you

realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is.

that you are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that, furthermore,

this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies.

And that vast thing that you see far off, far off, far off with telescopes, and you look

and look and look, one day you are going to wake up and say, why, that's me.

And in knowing that, know, you see, that you never die, that you are the eternal thing

that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown,

so it goes forever and ever and ever.

You've been listening to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.

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Our theme music is by Acoustic Alchemy.

I'm Neil Harvey.

Thank you for listening.

Most of us are brought up to feel that what we see out in front of us is something that

is, that lies beyond our eyes out here.

That the colors and the shapes that you see in this room are out there.

Now in fact that is not so.

In fact, all that you see is a state of affairs inside your head.

All these colors, all these lights are conditions of the optical nervous system.

There are outside the eyes quanta, electronic phenomena, vibrations.

But these things are not light.

They are not color until they are translated into states of the human nervous system.

So if you want to know how the inside of your head feels, open your eyes and look.

So if you want to know how the inside of your head feels.

But we are normally unaware of that and project it out.

But we don't have to know how the inside of your head feels, open your eyes and the inside of your head.

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 03 - Nature =====

In my talk last night, I was discussing the disparity between the way in which most human beings experience their own existence

and the way man's being and nature is described in the sciences.

I was pointing out that in such sciences as ecology and biology, ecology, for example, describes and studies the relationship between all organisms and their environments.

The way in which they describe human, animal and insect behavior is in flat contradiction with the way in which most of us experience our thinking and our action and our existence.

We have been brought up to experience ourselves as isolated centers of awareness and action placed in a world that is not us, that is foreign, alien, other, which we confront.

Whereas in fact, the way an ecologist describes human behavior is as an action.

What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now.

You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

This is not what you might call a fatalistic or deterministic idea.

You see, you might be a fatalist if you think that you are a sort of puppet which life pushes around.

You are separate from life, but life dominates you.

That's fatalism.

But in the point of view I am expressing the real you is not a puppet which life pushes around.

The real deep down you is the whole universe.

And it's doing your living organism and all its behavior.

It's expressing it as a singer sings a song.

We have been hoodwinked into the feeling that we exist only inside our skins.

And I was showing last night that that is a hallucination.

It's just as nutty as anybody could be like a fruitcake, you know, who thinks he is Napoleon or something or other.

Thinks he is a poached egg and goes around finding a piece of toast to sit on.

It's just like that, a hallucination.

And I was showing how we need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what's inside the skin, but our whole total external environment.

Because if we don't experience ourselves that way, we mistreat our environment.

We treat it as an enemy.

We try to beat it into submission.

And if we do that, comes disaster.

We exploit the world we live in.

We don't treat it with love and gentleness and respect.

We cut down millions of acres of forests to turn it into newspaper, of all things.

Lovely trees turned into information about nothing.

And we don't replace them properly.

We kick the world around in revenge for feeling that really we are puppets which the world kicks around.

So my main point last night was then that we need a new kind of consciousness in which every individual becomes aware that his real self is not just his conscious ego.

You know, let's take a headlight of a car.

The headlight shines on the road in front.

The headlight does not shine on the wire which connects it with its own battery.

So in a way, the headlight is unaware of how it shines.

And in the same way, we are unaware of the sources of our consciousness.

We don't know how we know.

There was a young man who said, though, it seems that I know that I know.

What I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

And so we are ignorant of.

We ignore.

It doesn't come within the scope of our attention how it is that we manage to be conscious.

How it is that we manage to grow our hair, to shape our bones, to beat our heart, and to secrete all the necessary fluids that we need from our glands.

We do it, but we don't know how we do it.

Because you see underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self.

More really us than I.

And if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is.

That you are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that furthermore this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies.

And that vast thing that you see far off, far off, far off with telescopes, and you look and look and look, one day you are going to wake up and say,

Why, that's me!

And in knowing that, know you see that you never die.

That you are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown, and so it goes forever and ever and ever.

Now then, why I've made this point as an introduction to what I want to say tonight, is the problem of the relationship of man and nature.

Do you know, in the history of philosophy, there are really three theories of nature.

Incidentally, what do you mean when you use the word nature?

What is nature study?

Natural history.

The museum of natural history.

What do you expect to find there?

Well, for many people, nature means the birds, the bees, and the flowers.

It means everything that is not artificial.

People think, for example, a building like this is not natural, it's artificial.

The natural state of the human being is to be naked.

But we wear clothes, and that's artificial.

We build houses.

Is there any difference between a human house and a wasp's nest?

Or a bird's nest?

Not really.

But we do have in our minds, you see, the idea that nature is somehow outside us.

We've got some nature in us.

We say there's a thing called human nature, and mostly bad.

Human nature, according to Dr. Freud, is motivated by the libido.

And you know what that is.

And you can't trust it.

In the old days, they used to beat it with whips.

But Freud said, don't do it that way, you have to treat it as a good horse trainer.

Trains a horse by giving it a lump of sugar.

Every now and then.

And get it controlled that way.

Be kind to it.

Respect it.

Even though it's really very, very disrespectful.

Well, now, there are, as I said, in the history of mankind, three theories of nature.

The first theory is the Western theory, which is that nature is a machine, or an artifact.

We inherit this from the Hebrews, who believed that nature was made by God in somewhat the same way as a potter makes a pot out of clay,

or a carpenter makes a table out of wood.

It is not insignificant that Jesus is the son of the carpenter.

Our tradition has been to look upon the world as a construct.

And somebody knows how it was put together.

Somebody understands.

And that is the constructor, the architect, the Lord God.

But it so happened that in the 18th century, Western thought began to change.

They became increasingly doubtful as to whether there was a maker, whether there was a God.

But they continued to look upon the creation as an artifact, as a machine.

And by the time of Newton, people were explaining the world in terms of mechanism.

And we are still under the influence of that idea because, after all, in things like Life magazine and so on,

when they give you an article on human physiology, they usually make drawings which show the human being as a kind of mechanism, as a sort of factory.

And they show how the peristaltic action carries the food in, and how it's processed by this organ and that organ,

as just as if a certain product is fed into a factory, cow at one end, and it comes out canned corned beef at the other.

Just in such a way, the human is illustrated, and so too in some kinds of rather degraded medicine that is now practiced.

When you go to the hospital for a medical examination, you are treated as a machine.

They process you. You are not a person. You are put in a wheelchair immediately, even if you are perfectly healthy and can walk.

Nevertheless, they have to have you in this wheelchair. And they put you through a process.

And the heart specialist looks only at your heart because he can't understand anything else.

The otorhinolaryngologist, which means an ear, nose and throat man, looks at that section of you,

and he doesn't know about anything else. And maybe a psychiatrist takes a look at you,

and goodness knows what happens there, and so on and so on.

Everybody looks at you from their specialized point of view as if they were a bunch of mechanics examining your automobile.

Because, as I said last night, we just asked for this.

Because most of us consider ourselves as chauffeurs inside our bodies, which we own in the same way as you own a car.

And when it goes wrong, you take it to the mechanic to fix it.

You don't really identify with your body just as you don't really identify with your car.

So here is this whole theory of nature, which has grown up in the West as an artifact, something made.

Now let me take a second theory of nature. This is an Indian theory, East Indian.

Nature not as an artifact, but as drama. Basic to all Hindu thought is the idea that the world is maya.

That is a Sanskrit word which means many things. It means magic, illusion, art, play. All the world is a stage.

And in the Hindu idea, there is the ultimate reality of the universe, is the self, which they call Brahman or Atman.

That's what there is. The self. Universal, eternal, boundless, indescribable.

And everything that happens, happens on the self. Like you say, it's on me. The drinks tonight are on me.

Or like we say, when you hear the radio, it's on the speaker. You see, everything you hear on the radio.

Flutes, drums, human voices, traffic noises, any imaginable sound, all those sounds are vibrations of the diaphragm in the speaker.

But the radio doesn't tell you that. The announcer doesn't come on and say every morning,

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is KQED. The following sounds that you are going to hear are vibrations of the diaphragm in your speaker.

And they're not really human voices or musical instruments, but just that. They never let you in on that.

And in exactly the same way, the universe doesn't let you in on the truth that all sense experiences are vibrations of the self.

Not just yourself, but the self. And all of us share this self in common, because it is pretending to be all of us.

Brahman, the ultimate principle, plays hide and seek eternally. And he does it for unspeakably long periods of time.

The Hindus measure time in what is called a Kalpa. K-A-L-P-A. That's 4,320,000 years.

Don't take this seriously. It's not meant to be taken literally. But just for an unspeakably long time,

the Brahman, the self, pretends that it's lost and is us. And all our adventures and all our troubles and all our agonies and tragedies,

it gets mixed up in them. Then after the period of 4,320,000 years has elapsed, there is a catastrophe.

The universe is destroyed in fire. And after that, the Brahman wakes up and says,

well, good, crazy, what an adventure that was. He wipes the sweat off his brow and says, whew, let's rest a while.

So for another 4,320,000 years, the divine self rests and knows who it is. It's me.

Then it says, well, this is rather boring. Let's get going again. Let's get mixed up.

And it does it in a very strange way because the way the Hindus time it,

the first period of getting mixed up, getting lost, is beautiful. That's the longest period.

Everything's right. It's just life is glorious. Then it has the next period in which things get a little wonky.

Something is vaguely out of order. That doesn't last so long. Then the next period, the third, is when good and evil are equally balanced.

And that's still not so long. Finally comes the shortest period when everything bad triumphs.

And the whole thing blows up and we begin all over again. We're supposed to be living in that now.

It's what's called the Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness. And it began on Friday, February the 23rd, 3123 BC.

And it has 5,000 years to run. But as it goes on, time gets faster, so don't worry.

So you see, that's a theory of nature as a drama. It's a play.

Now there's a third theory of nature, which is Chinese. And this is very interesting.

The Chinese word for nature, they call zi ran. And this expression means, of itself so.

What happens of itself. Or we might say, spontaneity. It almost means automatic. Because automatic is what is self-moving.

Only, we associate the word automatic with machinery. But zi ran, what is so of itself, is associated in the Chinese mind, not with machinery, but with biology.

Your hair grows by itself. You don't have to think how to grow it. Your heart beats by itself. You don't have to make up your mind how to beat it.

That's what they mean by nature. The poem says, sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and grass grows of itself.

So, their principle of nature is called the Tao. T-A-O, pronounced Tao in the Mandarin dialect, Tao in the Shanghai dialect, Tao in the Cantonese dialect. Take your choice. Tao means the course of nature.

Lao Tzu, who was a philosopher who lived a little later than 400 BC, wrote a book about the Tao. And he said, the Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. You can't describe it.

He said, the principle of the Tao is spontaneity. He said, 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. It accomplishes merits and lays no claim to them.

So, there is a very great difference between the Tao as the informing principle of nature and the Judeo-Christian idea of God as nature's lord and master. Because the Tao does not act as a boss.

In the Chinese philosophy of nature, nature has no boss. There is no principle that forces things to behave the way they do. It is a completely democratic theory of nature. Correspondingly, you see, most Westerners, whether they be Christians or non-Christians, don't trust nature.

Of all things, nature is the thing least to be trusted. You must manage it. You must watch out for it. It will always go wrong if you don't watch out. You know, the goblins will get you if you don't watch out.

So, we are always feeling that you can't trust it. See, we are absolutely instilled with the idea of original sin. You can't trust nature because it comes out with weeds and insects.

And above all, you can't trust human nature because if you don't hold a club over yourself, you will go out and rape your grandmother.

Now, the Chinese would say, if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anything. Because if you can't trust yourself, can you trust your mistrust of yourself? Is that well-founded? See?

See? If you can't trust yourself, you are totally mixed up. You haven't a leg to stand on. You haven't a point of departure for anything.

And in this respect, the Taoist philosophy and the Confucian philosophy are in agreement.

In Confucius philosophy, the fundamental virtue of a human being is called Ren, spelled J-E-N for reasons best known to Chinese scholars.

I don't know what they are, but it's pronounced Ren. And it's a character, Chinese character, that Confucius placed as the highest of all virtues, higher than righteousness, higher than benevolence,

and it means approximately human heartedness. Confucius once said that goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.

Virtue in Chinese is de. We romanize it as T-E-H, de. And it means virtue not in the sense of moral propriety, but virtue in the sense of magic,

as when we speak of the healing virtues of a certain plant. A man of true virtue is therefore a human hearted man.

The meaning of this is that one should, above all, trust human nature in the full recognition that it's both good and bad, that it's both loving and selfish.

Now, let me give an illustration of the wisdom of this. When people fight wars, I trust them if the reason for which they fight a war is to expropriate somebody else's possessions and women.

Because they will fight a merciful war. They will not destroy the possessions and the women that they want to capture. They want to enjoy them.

And that's a war based on simple, ordinary, everyday human greed. The most awful wars that are waged are the wars waged for moral principles.

You are a lousy communist. You have a philosophy that is destructive to religion and to everything that we love and value and reverence.

And therefore, we will exterminate you to the last man unless you surrender unconditionally.

Such wars are ruthless beyond belief. We can blow up whole cities, wipe people out, because we are not greedy. We are righteous.

That is why the goody goodies are the thieves of virtue. If you are going to do something evil, do it for a plain, honest, selfish motive.

Don't do it in the name of God, because if you do, it turns you into a monster who is no longer human, a sadist, a pure destroyer.

So an inflexibly righteous person is not human. And that is why, in Chinese ideas of justice, a good judge is not somebody who abides by the book.

Their idea of justice is, for God's sake, keep the case out of court. Let us have a consultation behind the scenes. And let's arrange a compromise.

Because we know our opponent is a rascal. I know I am a rascal. And therefore, there can be a mutual arrangement between thieves.

So we sum and haw, and we talk about it, and we call the judge in, in an unofficial capacity. And the judge hums and haws, and if he is a good judge, he has a sense of what is called Lee.

I am going to talk to you about another meaning of a word pronounced Lee later on, but it is quite a different word.

Lee is justice, but you can't write it down. There is another word for justice or law in Chinese, ze.

And this word represents, in its Chinese character form, a cauldron for cooking sacrifices and a knife.

In the high and far off times of Chinese history, there was an emperor who, when the people brought their sacrifices of meat and so on to be put in the cauldrons,

he also scratched with a knife on the side of the cauldrons the laws of the state, so that all the people could read them and understand what they were.

But the sages who advised this emperor said that was a very bad thing to do, because the moment people see the law written down, they develop a litigious spirit.

That is to say, they think out ways of wangling around it. And that's what we do all the time, don't we?

The moment Congress passes a law, tax law especially, all the lawyers get together and they think, they fill it full of holes.

They say, well, it didn't define this and it didn't say that. And some of those Confucians wanted to put the language in order

and to make all the words mean just so. But the Daoists laughed at them and said, if you define the words,

with what words are you going to define the words that define the words? So they said, therefore, the emperor should not have written the laws down.

Because a sense of justice is not something you can put in words. It's what our lawyers call equity.

And you talk to any lawyer and he, in discussing various judges around town, he will say, well, judge so-and-so is pretty much a stickler for the letter of the law.

But on the other hand, judge so-and-so has a sense of equity. He knows when the law, the letter of the law just doesn't apply to this particular case.

And he just has an innate sense of fair play. That's the man to be trusted as a judge.

So this is what the child does.

Chinese mean by a judge who has the sense of Lee, of real justice. It can't be written

down, it can't be explained, because every case is individual. But what such a man has

fundamentally in his heart, he trusts the good and bad of human nature. Human beings

are complex. We don't know ourselves at all, really. Consider your nervous system. Neurologists

haven't even begun to figure it out. And yet all your conscious decisions are based on

this thing that you don't understand. You're unbelievably more wise in your nature than

you ever will be in your conscious thoughts. Because behind your conscious thoughts lies

your nervous system. And if you say, well, my nervous system is unreliable, it is just

a bunch of strange, weird biological chances that have got mixed up somehow. Then this

very opinion that you're expressing, you see, is a function of that nervous system. So you're

saying that you are a total hoax. You can't trust yourself at all. So that is a set of

game rules that don't lead anywhere. It's totally self-frustrating. So you see what the Chinese

have developed here is a theory of nature. I said there are three theories. The Western

mechanical theory, nature as an artifact. The Hindu dramatic theory. And the Chinese organic

theory. Nature, human nature included, is an organism. And an organism is a system of orderly anarchy.

There is no boss in it. But it gets along by being left alone and being allowed to do its stuff. That's

what the Chinese Taoist philosophy calls Wu Wei, which means not doing nothing but not interfering

with the course of events. Not acting against the grain. Now this is the time to introduce

the second word, Li, in Chinese. The first Li meant justice. The second Li is a character

which had the original meaning of the markings in jade, the grain in wood, and the fibre in

muscle. And it's usually translated reason or the principle of things. These are not very

good translations. The best translation of Li is organic pattern. Now look here. When you

look at the clouds, they aren't symmetrical. They don't form fours. They don't come along

in cubes. But you know at once that they're not a mess. A dirty old ash tray full of junk

may be a mess. But clouds don't look like that. When you look at the patterns of foam on water,

they never make an artistic mistake. And they're not mess. They are wiggly, but in a way orderly,

and it's difficult for us to describe that kind of order. Now take a look at yourselves.

You're all wiggly. We think, you know, we're pretty ordinary because there are a lot of us

that look approximately the same. So when we see a human being, we think, well that's pretty

much in order and kind of regular and it's okay. But we don't realize how wiggly we are.

We're just like clouds, rocks, and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you

criticize the way the stars are arranged? Would you like them to form fours? Would you like them

to be sort of set out like a needlepoint on the canvas of the skies? There was somebody

in the eighteenth century in the days when they built formal gardens of clipped hedges and made

all the tulips stand together like soldiers who criticized the stars for being irregularly arranged. But

today we don't feel that way. We love the way the stars are scattered and they never make

a mistake in their arrangement. What about mountain ranges? Do you criticize the valleys for being

low and praise the peaks for being high? You just say it's great. It's the way it is. Now

that kind of order, the artist pays a tribute to it by painting a landscape. People, you know,

in every national park, there's a place called Inspiration Point. And people go there and they

say, oh, it's just like a picture. And nobody knew this. Four hundred years ago, it took the

artists to paint landscape and then people realized how beautiful it is. Nowadays, artists

are painting pictures of damp, stained walls and floors where people have dropped a lot of paint. And one day

people will walk into a room where there's a lot of paint been scattered on the floor and a general

thing and they'll say, my goodness, it's just like a Jackson Pollock. Oh, ain't it just like a picture? See? It always takes the artist

to show us the vision. But, of course, in the meantime, it is difficult. You go to an exhibition of contemporary

non-objective painting and a kind of square fellow walks in there and he says, that's not what I call a picture.

Because he, it's against his prejudices. But I say to people now, excuse me, wait a minute. Take a look at that again. I'm going to tell you something.

That painting is a colored photograph of, guess what? And he looks at it in astonishment and

entirely new eyes. What could that be a photograph of? And he begins to see it might be a photograph

through a microscope of globules, of germs floating in liquid. It might be anything. But there it is.

It suddenly comes at him. Goodness knows whether that was what the artist intended. But that's a method

of giving people a shock. Of seeing things in a new way. You know, a GI visited Picasso in Paris during the war and said,

I can't understand your paintings. They're absurd. Life doesn't look like that. Picasso said, do you have a girlfriend?

He said, yes. Have you a picture? He said, yes. Show it to me. So he drew out his billfold and there was a little colored photograph of his girlfriend.

And Picasso looked at it and said, is she so small as that? Now then, the idea of Lee, the idea of natural order is like this, patterns on foam, patterns in jade,

the shapes of the clouds, the shapes of trees and mountains. They are orderly, but we cannot put our finger on the order. We know it's orderly, but we don't know why. And we know it's completely different from a mess.

The order of nature is in that way. When St. Augustine was asked, what is time? He said, I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don't. So in the same way, the Chinese would say, we know what the order of nature is, but if you ask us, we don't.

The poet says, picking chrysanthemums along the eastern fence, gazing in silence at the southern hills, the birds fly home through the soft mountain air of dusk.

In all these things, there is a deep meaning, but when we are about to express it, we suddenly forget the words. That's Lee. Nature has a self-ordering principle, but it doesn't really know how it does it.

Another poem says, if you want to know where the flowers come from, even the god of spring doesn't know. This is a very remarkable attitude to nature. Politically, you see, if you translate this into politics, it is high philosophical anarchy.

And there is a lot to be said for this as a political point of view. That, in other words, government is always a mess, because the state opposes itself to the people.

We live under a constitution where we are supposed to be governed by ourselves. As somebody once said, down with democracy when we get it.

Because the state always, the government always creates itself as a business in competition with all the other businesses. And it wins, because it's the biggest one of the bunch.

The Taoists said of the state that it should be as anonymous and as unobtrusive as possible. That is to say that the emperor, instead of going around in processions and being heralded and flags waved,

should be as unobtrusive as the head of the sanitation department. You know, he's a man, just a guy who goes around in a plain ordinary suit and really attends to his job.

And the head of the head of the sanitation of the city of Dallas goes around. You don't have a police escort and sirens blowing and flags waving. He simply does his job.

And the feeling of Lao Tzu is that the president or the emperor should have the same kind of attitude. That he should simply help the people and retire and not claim any merits for it.

Always withdraw himself. Always be behind the scenes. Not striving for power, but simply to help things along.

Govern a great state, he said, as he would cook a small fish. Now, you know, when you've got a small fish in the frying pan,

don't keep tossing it around and fidgeting with the spatula, otherwise it will fall apart. Do it gently. Softly, softly, catchy monkey.

So then, here is a conception of nature as something you must trust. Outside nature, the birds, the bees, the flowers, the mountains, the clouds.

And inside nature, human nature. Now, nature isn't trustworthy completely. It'll sometimes let you down with a wallop.

But that's the risk you take. That's the risk of life. What's the alternative? I do not trust nature at all. It's got to be watched.

Do you know what that leads to? It leads to 1984 and Big Brother. It leads to the totalitarian state where everybody is his brother's policeman.

And where everybody is watching everybody else to report them to the authorities. Where you can't trust your own motivation.

Where you have to have a psychoanalyst in charge of you all the time to think, to be sure that you don't think dangerous thoughts or peculiar thoughts.

And you report all peculiar thoughts to your analyst. And your analyst keeps a record of them and reports them to the government.

And everybody is busy keeping records of everything. It's much more important to record what happens than what happens.

This is already eating us up. It's much more important that you have your books right than that you conduct your business in a good way.

In universities, it's much more important that the registrar's records be in order than that the library be well stocked.

After all, do you know your grades are all locked up in safes and they're protected from thievery and pilfering?

And they're the most valuable property that the university has. The library can go hang.

Then furthermore, the main function of a university is what any sensible person would imagine, to teach students and to do research.

So the faculty should be the most important thing in the university. On the contrary, the administration is the most important thing.

The people who keep the records, who make the game rules up. And so the faculty are always being obstructed by the administration

and being forced to attend irrelevant meetings and to do everything but scholarship. Do you know what scholarship means?

What a school means, the original meaning of a scholar? Leisure. We talked of a scholar and a gentleman,

because a gentleman was a person who had a private income and he could afford to be a scholar.

He didn't have to earn a living, therefore he could study the classics and poetry and things like that.

Today, nothing is more busy than a school. They make you work, work, work, work, work, work,

because you get cut through on schedule. They have expedited courses and you go to school so as to get a union card,

a PhD or something so that you can earn a living. So that's a whole contradiction of scholarship.

Scholarship is to study everything that's unimportant, not necessary for survival.

All the charming irrelevances of life. But you see, the thing is this, if you don't have a room in your life for the playful,

life's not worth living. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if the only reason for which Jack plays

is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's playing because it's good for him.

He's not playing at all! You have to be able to be a true scholar, you have to cultivate an attitude to life

where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it. It's beautiful.

Don't try and get a sermon out of it. Sermons in stones and God in everything be damned. Just enjoy it.

Don't feel that you've got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding.

Enjoy the pebble. If you do that, you'll become healthy. You'll become able to be a loving, helpful human being.

But if you can't do that, if you can only do things because somehow you're going to get something out of it, you're a vulture.

So, we have to learn. We don't have to. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to go on living.

But it's a great idea. It's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call purposelessness.

They think nature is purposeless. When we say something's purposeless, that's put down.

There's no future in it. It's a washout. But when they hear the word purposeless, they think that's just great.

It's like the waves washing against the shore, going on and on and on forever, with no meaning.

The great Zen master said, as his death poem, just before he died,

From the bathtub to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense.

The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth. The bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial.

All this time, I have said many nonsenses. Like the birds in the trees go,

Thwee, thwee, thwee, thwee, thwee. What's it all about?

Everybody tries to say, ah, that's a mating call. It's purposeless. Trying to get their mate, you know.

Attract them with a song. That's why they have colors. Butterflies have eyes on them.

Self-protection. Engineering view of the universe.

Why do that? They say, well, it's because they need to survive.

Well, why survive? What's that for? Well, to survive.

See, human beings, really, a lot of tubes. And, ah, all living creatures, just tubes.

And the tubes have to put things in at one end and let it out at the other.

Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube, the eating end, called a head.

And that's, and it's got eyes in it, it's got ears in it, it's got little organs, antennae and things like this.

And that helps you to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out the other.

Well, while you're doing this, you see, the stuff going through, where's the tube out?

And so, that the show can go on, the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes, who'll go on doing the same thing.

In at one end, out the other. And they say, well, that's terribly serious.

That's awfully important. We've got to keep on doing this.

But when Chinese say nature is purposeless, this is a compliment.

It's like the idea of the Japanese have a word, yugen.

And they describe yugen as watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds.

As watching a ship vanish behind a distant island.

As wandering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return.

Haven't you done this? Haven't you gone on a walk?

With no particular purpose in mind?

Carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit at old stumps.

And wander along and sometimes twiddle your thumbs.

It's at that moment that you are a perfectly rational human being.

You've learned purposelessness.

All music is purposeless.

Is music getting somewhere?

If it were, I mean, if the aim of music, of a symphony, were to get to the final bar,

the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest.

See, dancing, when you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor?

Is that the idea of dancing?

The aim of dancing is to dance, is the present.

Well, it's exactly the same with our life.

We think life has a purpose.

I remember the preachers used to say, when I was a small boy, I'd always hear it.

We must follow God's purpose.

His purpose for you and his purpose for me.

When I asked these cats what the purpose was, they never knew.

They didn't know what it was.

They had a hymn.

God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year.

God is working his purpose out and the time is drawing near.

The time when the earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

What's the glory of God?

Well, they weren't quite sure.

I'll tell you what it is.

In heaven, all those angels are gathered around the glory of God.

That is to say, the witch than which there is no witcher.

Catholics call it the beatific vision.

The Jews call it the Shekinah.

They're all those angels.

And they're standing around it and they're saying,

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

It means nothing.

They're just having a ball.

See, that's what happened in the beginning.

When God created the universe, it was created like all stars, all planets, all galaxies.

They're vaguely spherical.

He created this and he said, have a ball.

But before he said that, he said, you must draw the line somewhere.

That was the real thing he said first.

Before, let there be light.

That came later.

First thing was, you must draw the line somewhere.

Otherwise, nothing will happen.

You know, you've got to have the good guys, the bad guys.

You've got to have this.

You've got to have that.

The black and white, light and darkness.

You must draw the line somewhere.

Now, here's the choice then.

Are you going to trust it or not?

If you do trust it, you may get let down.

And this it is yourself, your own nature and all nature around you.

There are going to be mistakes.

But if you don't trust it at all, you're going to strangle yourself.

You're going to fence yourself round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions

and policemen and guards and who's going to guard the guards

and who's going to look after Big Brother to be sure that he doesn't do something stupid.

No go.

Supposing I get annoyed with somebody in the audience

and I'm going to throw this ashtray at them.

But I don't want to hit my friend sitting next to that person.

I want to be absolutely sure this ashtray hits that individual.

And so I don't trust myself to throw it.

I have to carry it along and be sure I hit that person on the head.

See, I don't throw it because I can't let go of it.

To throw it, I must let go of it.

To live, I must have faith.

I must trust myself to the totally unknown.

I must trust myself to a nature which doesn't have a boss

because a boss is a system of mistrust.

That is why Lao Tzu's Tao loves and nourishes all things

but does not lord it over them.

See.

But he's only followed according to this.

So all my general issues are yes it can't be another Christmas tree.

Yeah.

You.

10 sets of Phase two Bob.

I must trust him.

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 10 - Seeing Through The Net =====

One moment you feel like you're a puppet.

You're just on the end of strings.

The next minute, you suddenly realize that everything that you are aware of is inside your brain.

So it's all you.

And you get the two feelings go together.

That I'm doing it all, but it's doing me.

And this worries people when they get this feeling,

because they don't know which to decide for,

and they don't see how to put the two together.

Welcome to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.

As one of the century's most eloquent philosophers,

Alan Watts introduced a generation in the West

to the fascinating ideas of the Far East, the wisdoms of the Orient.

In the 1960s and early 70s, he lectured throughout the English-speaking world

and was recorded in a variety of settings,

from seminars aboard his ferry boat, the Vallejo, in Sausalito, California,

to keynote addresses at major universities.

The author of some of the most influential books on philosophy in the 1950s and 60s,

Watts is cited by artists, poets, and musicians

as being at the epicenter of some of the deepest cultural changes in this century.

As these programs demonstrate, his scholarship is timeless.

We find his insights into the nature of reality are as compelling as they are entertaining.

In 1969, Alan Watts was commissioned by IBM to work with their systems group of engineers.

In an eloquent yet intellectually intense session on board the Vallejo,

Watts shows how the universe comes at us and wiggles,

and discusses how philosophical analysis is a game between the prickly people,

who want definition, straight lines, and the gooey people.

We're living in an age when there's been an enormous proliferation of techniques

for subjecting every kind of natural process outside the human skin

and now increasingly inside the human skin to some form of rational control.

And as we succeed in doing this,

it also becomes apparent that we're failing.

That the process becomes of such a high degree of complexity

that we begin to feel that we're standing in our own way.

That everybody complains.

The state of affairs in the modern world,

in the technological world, is so complicated

that nobody can understand it.

Nobody really knows what to do.

The Western model of the universe

is political and engineering or architectural.

And therefore,

as one understands the operations of a machine

by analysis of its parts,

by separating them

into their original bits,

we have bitted the cosmos

and see everything going on

in terms of bits,

bits of information.

And I've found that this is extremely fruitful

in enabling us to control what's happening.

After all,

the whole of Western technology

is the result of bitting.

And so we thing the world,

that is to say,

in order to measure a curve,

you have to reduce it to point instance.

And apply the calculus,

so in exactly the same way,

in order to discuss or talk about

the universe,

you have to reduce it to things.

But each thing,

or think,

is, as it were,

one grasp of that spotlight.

Going,

chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur.

Like this, you see?

So we reduce

the infinite wiggliness

of the world

to grasps or bits.

We're getting back to biting,

you see,

the idea of the teeth.

To grasps of thought.

And so we

thereby describe the world

in terms

of things,

just as that fisherman

could describe his view

by the number of net hole

over,

through which the view

was showing.

But the problem

that arises

is this.

First of all,

very obviously,

everybody knows,

I hardly need to mention it,

go to the science

of medicine.

You get a specialist

who really understands

the function

of the gallbladder.

And he studied

gallbladders,

ad infinitum,

and he really thinks

he knows all about it.

But whenever he looks

at a human being,

he sees him

in terms of gallbladder.

And so if he operates

on the gallbladder,

he may do so

very knowledgeably

about that particular

area of the organism.

But he does not foresee

the unpredictable effects

of this operation.

In other connected areas

because the human being's

gallbladder

is not a thing

in the same way

as the, um,

a spark plug in a car

can be extracted

and a new one replaced.

Because the system

isn't the same.

There is a fundamental

difference

between a mechanism

and an organism

which can be described

operationally.

Mechanism

is assembled.

You add this bit

to that bit

but an organism

grows.

That is to say,

when you watch

in a microscope

a solution

in which crystals

are forming,

you don't see

this shape.

It's like when you

watch a photographic

plate developing.

But suddenly

all,

the whole area

which you're watching

seems to organize

itself,

to develop,

to make sense,

moving from

the relatively

simple and gooey

to the relatively

structured and prickly,

but not by addition.

So then,

if we are

trying to control

and understand

the world

through conscious attention,

which is a scanning system,

which takes in everything

bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit,

what we are going to run into

is that if that's the only

method we rely on,

everything is going to appear

increasingly

too complicated

to manage.

So that you get,

for example,

let's take the problem

of the electronic industry.

The catalogs of products

that are being

produced over the world

by the electronic industry.

Who has read

all the catalogs?

How do you know

where you've got

something you're working on whether it's patented or not who else has taken out a patent has

anybody had time to read all the catalogs well nobody has they're just voluminous and it's

exactly the same in almost any other field there's an information explosion like a population explosion

how on earth are you going to scan all that information yes of course you can get computers

to help you in this direction but by parkinson's law uh the sooner sooner you become more efficient

in doing this uh the more the thing is going to develop so that you will have to have more

efficient computers still to assimilate all the information you'll be ahead but only for a short

time so you see there's this problem of uh the the sort of competition of consciousness of its

how fast can you go duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty and keep

track of it you see and say i'm a i've got a good memory i can keep track of that and you say to you

i bet you you can't i'll go more complicated than you see that musicians do this my drummers you know

and they get things going and they start and they and so long as they count and lots of musicians do

count it is crazy but they do and they count count count and they out complicate each other to the point

where you can't retain it any longer in memory so you say okay if i if i can't retain it we've got this

gadget here that can and we've got these um marvelous mechanical memories and they will retain it

and they'll go much more fancy they'll go this duty duty duty at a colossal speed like that you see

but it's the same old problem because you've got something that can outdo that so we end up asking

uh yeah but supposing there were some other way of understanding things let's go back from the

spotlight to the floodlight to the extraordinary capacity of the human nervous system to comprehend

situations instantaneously without analysis that is to say without verbal or numerical symbolism of the

situation in order to understand it i hope you understand what i mean by that it's clear we we do do

that we have this curious ability of pattern recognition which uh the mechanical systems have only in a very

primitive way xerox have put out a machine which recognizes figures uh written in almost anyone's

handwriting provided their handwriting is fairly uh grade school and normal but a computer has a terrible

time trying to recognize the letter a when it's printed in say sans serif gothic uh longhand

or whatever kind of a you may write the human recognizes instantly this pattern

but the computer is still at a disadvantage here it seems to lack a kind of uh capacity i would call

field organization because it's all punctive it's digital it uh is like a newspaper photograph you know

which when you look at it under a microscope is all dots now so the problem the problem is this

in developing technology are we leaving out of consideration our strongest suit which is the brain itself see we are at a situation where

the brain is still uh not really worked out by even the most competent neurologists it puzzles them they can't

uh give a model of the brain in numerical or verbal language now you are that you see you are this thing

you yourself are this thing which you yourself can't figure out in the same way that i cannot touch the

tip of this finger with the tip of this finger i can't bite my own teeth but i who is attempting to touch

the tip of this finger with this finger am by the sheer complexity of my structure far more evolved

than any system which i can imagine this is in a way uh slightly akin to the girdle theorem

that um you can't have a a system of uh say a logic which defines its own axioms the axioms of any

given system must always be defined in terms of a higher system all right so you are the most complex

thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos and you can't figure you out now you suppose we're

going to try to do that and become as it were completely transparent to ourselves so that we entirely

understand the organization or the mechanics of our own brains what happens when we do that well you're

in the we you you're back in the situation of god when you're god what are you going to do when you're

god you know what you're going to do you're going to say to yourself man get lost because what you'll

want is a surprise and when you figure everything out there won't be any surprises you'll be completely

bored but on the other hand a person i would say who is um really functioning completely

is basically a person who trusts his own brains and permits his brain to operate at a more optimal level

in other words he knows how to think things out but he makes his best discoveries without thinking

in other words you all know very well the processes of um creative invention you've got a problem you think

it over and you can't find out any answer to it because the digital system of thinking is too simple

too clumsy to deal with it it's more complex there are more variables than can be kept in in mind at one

time so you say i'll sleep on it or you go to the institute of advanced studies at princeton

uh behavioral sciences at stanford where they pay you to goof off which is highly excellent idea

and you moon around and you've got a blackboard and you look out the window and pick your nose and so

on and your brain eventually hands you the solution to the problem you immediately because you have

technical knowledge you recognize that's a solution but then naturally you go back and check it

and you work the bit by bit form of thinking on it and see now does it come out in those terms

and if it does everybody will agree with you yes that's the answer but if it doesn't come out in those

terms they won't agree with you because you haven't subjected it to the socially acceptable

traditional form of an analyzing knowledge but here's the problem it takes an awful long time to

check these things out it takes an awful long time to arrive at the solution which you've got like

that by a purely calculated process most of the situations of life are such that they don't wait for

us to make up our minds so that an enormous amount of carefully worked out scientific knowledge is

trivial it's all very well very finely worked out but much too late because life presents you

life comes at you from all sides all over everywhere at once and the only thing you've got to deal with

that is the thing inside here in the skull now i'm not saying this to put down all this marvelous work

of calculation brought to immense sophistication electronically and so on not at all because actually

you people are the first people to understand the limitations of your own kind of knowledge

and you're going to have to tell the politicians about this they don't understand they they think

that this kind of knowledge is the answer to everything and i think most of you know it isn't

which is not something i repeat against technology it's only saying that when you walk you put your right

foot forward and that's fine but then you must put your left foot forward so let's say that the great

technological enterprise has been putting the right foot forward but you must bring up the left foot

that is to say bring up re-evaluation and new respect for the organic type of organization

which is incomprehensible to technological thinking but which always underlies it that by itself doesn't

work because after you bring the left foot up you begin got to bring up the right foot the analytic

after goo comes prickles after prickles comes good you have to keep this thing up and i think our

danger at the present time is that um we are so petty so delighted with the results of prickles that we've

got to let back a little bit of goo into the system well now what we've got to try and do is i think to

work out a way of making the brain itself more efficient and this is the thing that civilized education

has neglected lynn white to quote him again used to say that um the academic world today only values three

kinds of intelligence verbal intelligence mnemonic intelligence in other words good at remembering

and computational intelligence he said it entirely neglects kinesthetic intelligence social intelligence

and he had at least seven kinds of intelligence i forget what they all were but it is this extraordinary

capacity of the the the neural organization say to engage in pattern recognition and in solving

instantly certain complex problems without knowing how it does it the trouble is when you do something

you don't know how to do you've got a non-repeatable experiment in a certain sense in other words you

can't explain to someone else uh how to put it together but you can do it like you can open and close

your hand without any knowledge of physiology do it every time whoops i don't know how i do it i just do

it you see so we have an enormous potential of intelligence of knowing how to do all sorts of things

which to the extent that we are academically minded people we won't allow ourselves to do

because we can't explain for example there's a way of um cooling a brazing furnace it's very simple

but engineers say it's theoretically impossible it can't happen it's like bees can't fly by the laws of

aerodynamics but they do so the rather practical issue i come to is this that um technology if it relies

exclusively on linear thinking is going to destroy the environment it's going to become too complicated

to handle man is going to be like the dinosaur which had to have a brain in its head and a brain in

its rump because it was so big you know the caveman kept a dinosaur and when he went to bed at night he'd

clump it on the tail with a club and it'd scream at eight o'clock in the morning wake him up

and it seems to me we're getting into that kind of saurian situation with our technology which is going

to lead us to extinction so the question is are we going to foul things up by insisting on using linear

input information and controlling it as the dominant tool of controlling the world or can we master all

that as we have done and still use the linear input and analysis but with a fundamental trust

in our power to assimilate multiple input although we we really don't know how we do it

and my point is that uh you can't find an absolute which you can pin down you see so there always

remains in any human operation uh the the basic central thing which you can't pin down because it's you

just as the teeth can't bite themselves now the assumption of judeo-christian culture is that man

in his nature is sinful and therefore can't be trusted the assumption of at least ancient chinese

culture is that man in his essential nature is good and therefore has to be trusted because they say to us

if you can't trust your own basic nature you can't really rely on the idea that you're untrustworthy

therefore you're hopelessly fouled up so uh this has an amazing political and other consequences

there's a different assumption if we say

no we human beings are fallible and uh basically selfish and really really fundamentally evil

and therefore we need law and order we need a control system to put us in order

we thereby project these control systems into the church or into the police or into somebody

who are really ourselves disguised see it's like daylight saving time um we everybody could simply

get up an hour earlier but uh instead of doing that we alter the clock because the clock is a kind

of authority and uh we say well the clock says it's time for you to get up and they the indian amerindians

laugh at the pale faces because they say pale face he doesn't know when he's hungry until he looks at his watch

and so in this way we become clock dominated

and the abstract system

takes over from the physical

organic situation

and and and this is my big pitch if i'm going to make a big pitch

is that um we've run into a cultural situation where we've confused the symbol

with the physical reality the money with the wealth

and the menu with the dinner

and we're starving on eating menus

well now

what i want to do is have a mutual brain picking session

and i'm going to start the ball rolling by saying why i as a philosopher

am interested in many things that you are all probably interested in professionally

basically what we're going to talk about i suppose is the problem of control as exemplified in the

ancient latin question quis custodia custodia ipsos who guards the guards we we know that we're living

in an age when uh there's been an enormous proliferation of techniques before subjecting

every kind of natural process outside the human skin and now increasingly inside the human skin

to some form of rational control and as we succeed in doing this it also becomes apparent that we've

we're failing that the process becomes of such a high degree of complexity

that we begin to feel that we're standing in our own way

that uh everybody complains

the state of affairs in the modern world in the technological world is so complicated

that nobody can understand it

nobody really knows what to do

that for example

you want to run a small business

and you find you run into such enormous legal hassles

that you need so many secretaries to do the paperwork

that you can hardly do the business

that you're trying to run a hospital

but that you have to spend so much time making records and writing things down on paper

that you don't have much time to practice medicine

that you're trying to run a university

and the requirements

the recording

the in endless red tape of the registrar's office and the administration building is such

that the actual work of research and teaching is seriously hampered

and so the individual increasingly feels himself

obstructed

by his own cautiousness

this is basically what it is

now

uh to explain myself first of all because most of you are strangers to me

i am a philosopher who has for many years been interested

in the mutual fructification

of eastern cultures and western cultures

studying oriental ideas

not in the spirit of saying to the west

you ought to be converted to oriental ideas

but in the spirit of saying

you don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture

if your own culture is the only culture you know

everybody operates on certain basic assumptions

but very few people know what they are

You can say, I very often encounter the sort of character who's an American businessman,

and he says, well, I'm a practical businessman. I believe in getting results and things done.

All this thinking and highfalutin logic and nonsense is of no concern to me.

Now, I know that the practical basic assumptions, the metaphysics of that man,

can be defined as pragmatism,

as a school of philosophy.

But it's bad pragmatism, because he's never thought it through.

And so, it's very difficult, you see, to get down to what are your basic assumptions.

What do you mean by the good life?

What do you mean by consistency?

What do you mean by rationality?

The only way of finding out what you mean by these things,

is by contrasting the way you look at something

by the way it's looked at in another culture.

And therefore, we have to find cultures which are, in some ways, as sophisticated as our own,

but as different from our own as possible.

And, of course, for this purpose, I always thought that the Chinese were optimal,

and the Indians, the East Indians.

And that by studying the ideas of these people, by studying their life goals,

we could become more aware of our own.

It's the old principle of triangulation.

You don't establish the situation of a particular object

unless you observe it from two different points of view,

and thereby calculate its actual distance from you.

So, by looking at what we are pleased to call reality,

the physical world,

from the basic standpoints of different cultures,

I think we're in a better position to know where we are

than if we only have one single line of sight.

And therefore, this has been my interest and my background.

And arising out of this, there has come a further question,

which I would call the problems of human ecology.

How is man to be best related to his environment,

especially in circumstances where we are in possession of an extremely powerful technology,

and have therefore the capacity to change our environment

far more than anyone else has ever been able to do so?

Are we going to end up not by civilizing the world,

but by Los Angelizing it?

In other words, are we going to foul our own nest as a result of technology?

But all this gets down to the basic question is,

really, what are you going to do if you're God?

If, in other words, you find yourself in charge of the world

through technological powers and instead of leaving evolution

to what we used to call in the 19th century the blind processes of nature,

that was begging the question to call them blind.

But at any rate, we say we're not going to leave evolution anymore

to the blind forces of nature, but now we're going to direct it ourselves.

Because we are increasingly developing, say, control over genetic systems,

control over the nervous system, control over all kinds of systems,

then, simply, what do you want to do with it?

But most people don't know what they want,

and have never even seriously confronted the question of what they want.

You ask a group of students to sit down and write a solid paper of 20 pages

on what is your idea of heaven.

What would you really like to happen if you could make it happen?

And that's the first thing that starts people really thinking,

because you soon realize that a lot of the things you think you would want

are not things you want at all.

Supposing, just for the sake of illustration, you had the power to dream every night

any dream you wanted to dream.

And you could, of course, arrange for one night of dreams

to be 75 years of subjective time,

or any number of years of subjective time.

What would you do?

Well, of course, you'd start out by fulfilling every wish.

You would have routes, and orgies, and all the most magnificent food,

and sexual partners, and everything you could possibly imagine in that direction.

When you got tired of that, after several nights, you would switch a bit,

and you'd soon find yourself involved in adventures, and contemplating great works of art,

fantastic mathematical conceptions.

You would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons, and all sorts of things like that.

And then one night you'd say,

Now look, tonight what we're going to do is we're going to forget this dream is a dream.

And we're going to be really shocked.

And when you woke up from that one, you'd say,

Ooh, wasn't that an adventure?

Then you'd think more and more far out ways to get involved,

and let go of control,

knowing that you'd always come back to center in the end.

But while you were involved in the dream,

you wouldn't know you were going to come back to center, be in control.

And so eventually you'd be dreaming a dream,

in which you found yourselves all sitting around in this room,

listening to me talking,

all involved with the particular life problems which you have.

And maybe that's what you're doing.

But here's the difficulty, you see.

The difficulty is control.

Are you wise enough to play at being God?

And to understand what that question means,

we've got to go back to metaphysical assumptions

underlying Western common sense.

And whether you are a Jew or a Christian or an agnostic or an atheist,

you are not uninfluenced by the whole tradition of Western culture,

the models of the universe which it has employed,

which influence our very language,

the structure of our thought,

the very constitution of logic,

which are going into, say, computers.

The Western model of the universe is political and engineering or architectural.

It is natural for a child to ask its mother,

how was I made?

It would be inconceivable for a Chinese child to ask,

how was I made?

It might ask, how was I grown?

Or how did I grow?

But not how was I made?

As if I were an artifact,

something put together,

something which is a construct.

But all Western thought is based on the idea

that the universe is a construct.

And even when we got rid of the idea of the constructor,

the personal god,

we continued to think of the world in terms of the machine,

in terms, say, of Newtonian mechanics,

and later in terms of what we call quantum mechanics,

although I find it rather difficult

to understand how quantum theory

is in any sense mechanics.

It is much more like organics,

which is to me a different concept.

However, that may be.

It has percolated, you see,

into the roots of our common sense

that the world is a construct, is an artifact.

And therefore,

as one understands the operations of the machine,

by analysis of its parts,

by separating them

into their original bits,

we have bitted the cosmos

and see everything going on in terms of bits,

bits of information,

and have found that this is extremely fruitful

in enabling us to control what's happening.

After all, the whole of Western technology

is the result of bitting.

Let's suppose, you know,

you want to eat a chicken.

You can't eat the whole chicken at once.

You have to bite it.

You have to reduce it to bits.

But you don't get a cut-up fryer out of an egg.

It doesn't come that way.

So what has happened is this.

We don't know the origins of all this.

It may go back thousands of years.

The way we develop the art of thinking,

which is essentially calculus,

is this.

The universe as it comes in nature,

the physical universe,

is something like a Rorschach plot.

It's all wiggles.

We, who live in cities,

are not really used to this

because we build everything in straight lines

and rectangles and so on.

Wherever you see this sort of thing,

you know human beings have been around

because they're always trying to straighten things out.

But nature itself is clouds,

is water,

is the outlines of continents,

is mountains,

is biological existences,

and all of them wiggle.

And wiggly things

are to human consciousness

a little bit of a nuisance

because we want to figure it out.

And it is as if, therefore,

some ancient fisherman

one day held up his net

and looked at the world through the net.

And he said,

My, just think of that.

There I can see the view.

And it's one,

and that peak of that mountain

is one, two, three, four, five, six holes across.

And the base is one, two, three, four, five holes down.

Now I've got its number.

See?

And so the lines of latitude and longitude,

the lines of celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude,

the whole idea of a matrix,

of a looking at things through graph paper printed on cellophane,

is the basic idea of measurement.

This is the way we calculate.

We break down the wiggliness of the world

into comprehensible, countable geometrical units,

and thereby figure it

and construct it in those terms.

And this is so successful, up to a point,

that we can, of course, come to imagine

that this is the way the physical world really is.

Discrete, discontinuous,

full of points.

In fact, a mechanism.

But I want to just put into your mind

the notion that this may be

the prejudice of a certain personality type.

You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art,

we always find the interchange of two personality types,

which I call prickles and goo.

The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism.

They want rigour.

They want precise statistics.

And they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices.

And you know this very well in academic circles.

And they accuse other people

of being disgustingly vague,

and miasmic, and mystical.

But the vague, miasmic, and mystical people

accuse the prickly people

of being mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones.

And they say to you,

you just rattle.

You're not really a human being.

You know the words, but you don't know the music.

And so therefore,

if you belong to the prickly type,

you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles.

If you belong to the gooey type,

you hope it's waves.

If you are prickly, you're a classicist.

And if you're gooey, you're a romanticist.

And going back into medieval philosophy,

if you're prickly, you're a nominalist.

If you're gooey, you're a realist.

And so it goes.

But we know very well that this natural universe

is neither prickles nor goo exclusively.

It's gooey prickles and prickly goo.

And you see,

it all depends on your level of magnification.

If you've got your magnification on something

so that the focus is clear,

you've got a prickly point of view.

You've got structure.

Shape.

Clearly outlined.

Sharply defined.

You look a lot of focus,

it's going to go,

and you've got goo.

But we're always playing with the two.

Because it's like the question is,

is the world basically stuff, like matter,

or is it basically structure?

Well, we find out of course today that in science

we don't consider the idea of matter,

of just there being some sort of stuff.

Because supposing you wanted to describe stuff,

in what terms would you describe it?

You always have to describe it in terms of structure.

Something countable,

something that can be designated as a pattern.

So we never get to any basic stuff.

It seems to me that this way of thinking

is based on a form of consciousness

which we could best call scanning.

The capacity to divide experiences into bits

is somehow related to a physical facility

which corresponds to sweeping a radar beam

or a spotlight over the environment.

The advantage of the spotlight

is it gives you intensely concentrated light

on restricted areas.

A floodlight, by comparison, has less intensity.

But if you examine, say this room

we're in total darkness,

and you use the spotlight,

very thin beam,

and you scan the room with it,

you would have to retain in memory

all the areas over which it passed,

and then by an additive process

you would make out the contours of the room.

And it seems to me that this is something

in which civilized man,

both in the East and in the West,

has specialized.

In a method of paying attention to things

which we call noticing.

and therefore it's highly selective,

it picks out, it's punctive,

it picks out features in the environment

which we say are noteworthy

and which we therefore register

with a notation.

Be it the notation of words,

the notation of numbers,

or such a notation, say, as algebra or music.

So that we notice those things,

only those things,

for which we have notation.

When a child,

very often a child will point at something

and say to its parents,

what's that?

And they're not clear what the child is pointing to.

The child is pointed to something

which we consider is not a thing.

The child is pointed to an area, say,

of funny pattern on a dirty wall

and has noticed a figure on it.

But the child doesn't have a word for it

and says, what's that?

And the adult says,

oh, that's just a mess.

Because that doesn't count for us as a thing.

So you come through this to the understanding,

what do you mean by a thing?

It's very fascinating to ask children.

What do you mean by a thing?

And they don't know.

Because it's one of the unexamined suppositions

of the culture.

What do you mean by an event?

Well, everybody knows what an event is,

but nobody can say.

Because a thing is a think.

It's a unit of thought.

Like an inch is a unit of measurement.

And so we thing the world.

That is to say,

in order to measure a curve,

you have to reduce it to point instance.

And apply the calculus,

so in exactly the same way,

in order to discuss or talk about the universe,

you have to reduce it to things.

But each thing, or think,

is, as it were,

one grasp of that spotlight.

Going chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur, chur,

like this, you see.

So we reduce the infinite wiggliness of the world

to grasps, or bits.

We're getting back to biting, you see,

the idea of the teeth.

To grasps of thought.

And so we thereby describe the world in terms of things,

just as that fisherman could describe his view

by the number of net hole through which the view was showing.

And this has been the immensely and apparently successful enterprise

of all technological culture,

superbly emphasized by ourselves.

Thank you.

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 05 - Relevance I =====

Theology has not, as a matter of fact, had a very distinguished record

in promoting the study of other than the Christian religion.

And this is rather puzzling.

Most study of comparative religions that goes on in theological schools

has historically been missionary-oriented

to find out the weird ideas of the prospects

so as to be able to undermine them.

Because, you see, if you know in the first place that you have the true religion,

there really is no point in studying any other one.

And you can very quickly find reasons for showing them to be inferior

because that was a foregone conclusion.

They had to be.

And therefore, all arguments about the respective merits of various religions,

especially where Christianity is involved and often where Judaism is involved

and sometimes Islam too, all of which are essentially imperialistic religions,

in all such discussions, the judge and the advocate are usually the same person.

Because if, for example, you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound

and spiritual character than Jesus Christ,

you arrive at your decision on the basis of a scale of values which is, of course, Christian.

And in this sense, the judge and the advocate are the same.

And I really do marvel at this Christian imperialism because it prevails even among theological liberals.

And it reaches its final absurdity in religionless Christianity,

the doctrine that there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only son.

Because, you see, there's some anxiety here that even though we don't believe in God anymore,

somehow we've still got to be Christians.

And obviously because we have a very curious organization which must be understood.

The inner meaning of the church, as it works in fact,

a society of the saved, you see,

necessarily requires outside it a society of the not saved.

Because if there is not that contrast, you don't know that you belong to the in-group.

And in this way, all social groups with claims to some kind of special status

must necessarily create aliens and foreigners.

And St. Thomas Aquinas let the cat out of the bag one day

when he said that the saints in heaven would occasionally peer over the battlements into hell

and praise God for the just punishment visited upon evildoers.

Now, as you know, I'm not being very fair and very kind to modern theology.

But there is this strange persistence of insisting that our group is the best group.

And I feel that there is in this something peculiarly irreligious.

And furthermore, it exhibits a very strange lack of faith.

Because I believe that there is a strong distinction

between faith on the one hand and belief on the other.

That belief is, as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith.

Because belief is really wishing.

It's from the Anglo-Saxon root leaf to wish.

And belief, stated, say, in the creed, is a fervent hope

that the universe will turn out to be thus and so.

And in this sense, therefore, belief precludes the possibility of faith

because faith is openness to truth, to reality, whatever it may turn out to be.

I want to know the truth.

That is the attitude of faith.

And therefore, to use ideas about the universe and about God

as something to hang on to

in the spirit of Rock of Ages cleft for me.

You know, hymnal imagery is full of rocks.

A mighty fortress is our God.

In vain the surges, angry shock.

In vain the drifting sand.

Unharmed upon the eternal rock, the eternal city stands.

And there's something very rigid about a rock.

And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age

where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating world.

It's a world floating in space

where all positions are relative

and any point may be regarded as the center.

A world which doesn't float on anything

and therefore the religious attitude appropriate to our time

is not one of clinging to rocks but of learning to swim.

And you know that if you get in the water

and you have nothing to hold on to

and you try to behave as you would on dry land,

you will drown.

But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water

and let go, you will float.

And this is exactly the situation of faith.

This is surely all implied in the New Testament.

When, for example, Jesus began to foretell his own death,

his disciples were very disturbed

because it is written in our law

that the Messiah does not die.

And he replied,

Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die,

it remains isolated and brings forth no fruit.

Or rather, but if it die, it brings forth much fruit.

And on another occasion, he said to the disciples,

It is expedient for you that I go away.

For if I go not away,

the paraclete, the Holy Spirit, cannot come to you.

But we have reversed all this.

Jesus, to me, was one of those rare and remarkable individuals

who had a particular kind of spiritual experience,

which in terms of Hebrew theology,

he found most difficult to express without blasphemy.

I and the Father are one.

In other words, I am God.

And that is something, of course, if you are a Hindu,

that is a rather natural statement to make.

You see, in our culture,

which has Hebrew theology in its background,

anyone who says,

I am God,

is either blasphemous or insane.

Because our image of God,

and the image, don't forget,

has far more emotional power

than any amount of theology and abstraction.

It is our Father

which really influences us as a conception of God,

not Necessary Being,

or Tillich's decontaminated name for God,

the Ground of Being,

or Professor Northrup's

Undifferentiated Aesthetic Continuum.

These aren't very moving,

even though subtle theologians prefer this kind of thing,

and will tell us that when we call God the Father,

we don't have to believe, literally,

that there is a cosmic male parent,

and still less that he has a white beard,

and sits on a golden throne above the stars.

No serious theologian ever believed in such a God.

But nevertheless, the imagery affects us,

because the image of the monotheistic God of the West

is political.

The title King of Kings and Lord of Lords

is the title of the emperors of ancient Persia.

The image of God is based on the pharaohs,

the great rulers of the Chaldeans,

and the kings of Persia.

And so this is the political governor

and lord of the universe

who keeps order and who rules it

from, metaphorically speaking, above.

So anyone who would say,

I am God,

is therefore implying

that he's in charge of everything,

that he knows all about it,

and therefore everybody else

sought to bow down and worship him.

But in India,

if you say,

I am God,

they say,

congratulations,

at last you found out.

Because the image is quite different.

See,

our image of the world

is that the world is a construct,

and it's very natural

for a child to say to its mother,

how was I made?

As if, you know,

you were somehow put together.

But that goes back

to the imagery of Genesis,

where God creates Adam

and makes a clay figurine,

and then he breathes the breath of life

into the nostrils of this figurine,

and it comes to life.

So there is the fundamental supposition

which even underlies

the development of Western science,

that everything has been made,

and then someone knows how it was made.

And you can find out,

because behind the universe,

there is an architect.

This could be called

the ceramic model of the universe,

because there's a basic feeling

that there are two things in existence.

One is stuff,

material,

and the other is form.

Now, material,

like clay by itself,

is stupid.

It has no life in it,

has no intelligence.

And therefore,

for matter to assume orderly forms,

it requires that an external intelligence

be introduced

to shape it.

And therefore,

with that deeply embedded

in our common sense,

it's very difficult

for people to realize

that this image

is not necessarily

for description

of the world at all.

Indeed,

the whole idea of stuff

is completely absent

from modern physics,

which studies

the physical universe

purely in terms of pattern

and structure.

But the Hindu model

of the world,

and I'm speaking

of Hindu mythology,

the popular imagery.

I'm talking about

the popular imagery

on both sides.

I'm not,

at the moment,

getting into theological technicalities.

The Hindu model

of the universe

is a drama.

The world is not made,

it is acted.

And so,

behind every face,

human,

animal,

plant,

mineral,

there is the face

or non-face

of the central self,

the Atman,

which is Bratman,

the final reality,

which is not defined

because,

obviously,

that which is the center

cannot be made

an object of knowledge

any more than

you bite your own teeth

or lift yourself up

by your own bootstraps.

It's what there is,

it's the basis,

and you are it,

which is

a colloquial translation

of the Sanskrit adage

Tatvam Asi,

that art thou.

The idea being,

you see,

that the nature of reality

is a game

of hide and seek

because that's really

the only game there is.

Now you see it,

now you don't.

All nature

is vibrating,

it's a wave-like motion

of crest and trough,

pulse and interval,

pulse and interval.

Only,

we don't always notice that

because our senses

respond slowly,

say, to light,

and light appears

to be a continuous energy

without interval.

So there's the idea

that goes like this,

that for endless cycles

of time,

the supreme reality,

the self,

plays hide and seek

with itself.

That for a period

of a kalpa,

which is four million

three hundred and twenty

thousand years,

the self is awake

to itself

and knows

that it's it.

But for another kalpa,

it gets lost.

It says to itself,

man, get lost

and pretends

that it is

a vast multiplicity.

That's exactly

what you would do

if you had the privilege

of dreaming

any dream you wanted

when you went to bed

at night.

This would enable you,

of course,

in one night

to dream

seventy-five years

of clock time.

And what you would do,

first of all,

you would have

marvelous adventures.

You would have

every conceivable delight

and satisfy every wish.

And then,

as time went on,

that would get

a little boring

and you would get

more daring.

You would have

adventures.

You would rescue

princesses from dragons.

And then you would get

even more daring

and you would dream

that you weren't dreaming.

And then you'd get

into really serious messes

because wouldn't it be

a surprise when you woke up?

And eventually,

you would be dreaming

that you were sitting here

in this auditorium

listening to me.

You would eventually

get around to that

for your sins.

So,

well,

maybe that's

what's happening

anyhow,

you see.

And in Sanskrit,

this dream

is called maya,

but it's a word

that means more

than dream

or illusion.

It means creative power,

magic,

skill,

art,

and measurement.

Laying down

the foundations

as making a maya.

So,

then,

the world

is a big act.

It's play.

Not in the sense

of something trivial,

but in the sense

of a stage play.

Hamlet is a play.

You play the organ

in church.

That's not trivial.

And so,

the actor of this play,

being the best

of all possible actors,

takes himself in

totally.

Almost.

Because everybody knows

in the back of their mind

that there's something

funny about being

a self.

So,

you see,

when you go to the theater,

you know,

of course,

that the proscenium arch

tells you

that what's going on

behind this arch

is not for real.

But somehow,

the actor

almost persuades you

that it is real.

He wants to get you

sitting on the edge

of your chair.

He wants you laughing,

crying.

He wants you

in a state of anxiety.

so that he almost

persuades you.

But you see,

if the actor

is as good

as the supreme self,

the audience

is taken in

thoroughly,

and they believe

the play is real.

What skill!

How marvelous!

But you see,

in all acting,

there is behind the stage

a green room.

Out on the stage,

the Lord does not

come on as the Lord.

He comes on

as you and I,

heroes and villains.

But off scene,

he assumes

his true nature

and doffs his mask,

which in Latin

is his persona.

In classical drama,

the persona

was the megaphone

mouth mask

worn for the

open-air theater.

And by a curious

degradation of words,

the word person

has come to mean

the real individual.

And when Harry

Emerson Fosdick

wrote How to Be

a Real Person,

the real title

of his book

should have been

How to Be

a Genuine Fake.

Well, now,

this image,

this model

of the universe,

is disturbing

to Christians.

What is

particularly disturbing

is the element

in it of

what's a very

special theological

cuss word

called pantheism.

The feeling

that if

every part

is being played

by the Supreme Lord,

then all the

real distinctions

between good and evil

are obliterated.

Now, that is

the biggest nonsense

ever uttered.

Distinctions

between good and evil

do not have to be

eternal distinctions

to be real distinctions.

It is really

to say that

a distinction

which is not eternal

is not real

is a highly

unchristian thing

to say

and certainly

a very un-Jewish thing.

because

one of the

fundamental principles

of the Hebrew attitude

is that

all finite things

that have been

created by God

are good.

And therefore,

a thing

that doesn't have

to be infinite

to be good,

all finite things

come to an end.

Furthermore,

to invoke

the authority

of heaven

in matters

of moral

regulation

is like

putting

two million

current

through your

electric shaver.

It ended

in the final

asininity

of the notion

that if you

went against

the will of God,

since evil

is eternal,

you would

fry in hell

forever and ever

and ever.

And as the

Chinese say,

do not

swat a fly

on a friend's

head with a

hatchet.

all kinds

of judicial

torture

and harsh

justice,

such ideas

bring law

into disrespect

and such

a fierce

God

and such

an unbending

attitude

resulted in

the fact

of people

disbelieving

in God

altogether

and shall

we say

throwing out

the baby

with the

bathwater.

So this

is among

many reasons

why people

are saying

God is

dead.

It's very

inconvenient

to have

the kind

of God

who is

this

authoritarian

boss

of the

world

prying

down

over your

shoulder

all the

time

knowing

your

inmost

thoughts

and judging

you.

It's a

very

uncomfortable

feeling

and everybody

is happy

to be

rid of

it.

It has

never

significantly

improved

anybody's

behavior.

In the

so-called

ages of

faith

people

were just

immoral

if not

more so

than

they

are

today.

Because

you see

all

this

fixed

notion

God

idolatry.

thou

shalt

not

make

thyself

any

graven

image

anything

that

the

heaven

above

etc.

The

most

dangerous

and

pernicious

images

are not

those

made

wood

stone

nobody

takes

those

seriously

they're

the

images

made

imagination

and

conception

and

thought

and that

is why

in the

fundamental

approach

the

Godhead

both

the

Christian

God

necessary

the

way

remotion

saying

what

God

not

since

God

his

immensity

exceeds

every

conception

which

our

intellect

can

attain

then

when

the

Godhead

the

Hindu

says

all

that

can

truly

said

neti

not

this

not

this

and

when

the

buddhist

uses

such

comparative

religion

that

I've

read

various

theologians

say

this

terrible

negativism

this

nihilism

but

doesn't

realize

that

it's

nothing

the

kind

for

example

you

have

window

which

there's

fine

painting

the

sun

your

act

faith

the

real

sun

will

scrape

that

off

that

you

window

the

mind

need

scraping

off

because

otherwise

they

become

idolatrous

they

become

substitutes

for the

reality

now

I'm

hoping

that

this

sort

understanding

will

issue

from

god

dead

theology

I'm

not

quite

sure

whether

it's

going

because

matter

fact

there

are

precedents

within

the

christian

tradition

for

intelligent

god

dead

theology

for

what

would

call

atheism

the

name

god

agnosticism

the

name

god

the

word

agnostic

has

curious

history

based

the

greek

word

agnosia

which

used

translate

into

english

unknowing

and

there's

very

interesting

mystical

treatise

the

fourteenth

century

called

the

cloud

unknowing

showing

how

the

highest

form

been

left

behind

where

other

words

one

completely

let

clinging

god

and

this

was

the

supreme

act

faith

that

you

don't

any

longer

need

image

because

this

gets

the

way

the

reality

but

the

moment

you

insist

image

then

you

have

the

church

life

given

the

world

but

the

church

doesn't

want

broken

joven

now

goes

around

canvassing

for

new

members

see

the

difference

between

a physician

and a

clergyman

is this

the

physician

wants

to get

rid

his

patients

and

gives

them

medicine

and

hopes

they

won't

get

hooked

the

medicine

whereas

the

clergyman

usually

forced

make

his

patients

become

addicts

that

sick

people

and

the

clergy

also

need

faith

turnover

get

rid

your

congregations

say

now

you've

heard

all

I've

got

tell

you

away

you

want

get

together

for

making

celestial

whoopee

which

worship

all

right

but

don't

used

when

was

chaplain

the

university

used

tell

the

students

that

they

came

church

out

sense

duty

they

weren't

wanted

they

would

skeletons

the

feast

would

much

better

they

went

swimming

stayed

bed

because

were

going

celebrate

the

Holy

Communion

and

meant

celebrate

but

somehow

other

you

see

take

religion

kind

dead

earnest

remember

when

was

boy

school

how

wicked

was

laugh

church

don't

realize

and

Dante

said

the

paradiso

when

heard

the

song

the

angels

sounded

the

laughter

the

universe

what

are

those

angels

doing

they're

saying

hallelujah

which

doesn't

really

mean

anything

it's

sublime

nonsense

and so

in the

same

way

there

are

buddhist

texts

and

hindu

texts

which

they

are

just

glorious

laline

glossolalia

the

point

that

wish

make

most

strongly

that

behind

vital

religious

life

for the

West

there

has

faith

which

not

expressed

things

which

you

cling

ideas

opinions

cling

kind

desperation

faith

the

act

letting

and

that

must

begin

with

letting

God

let

God

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 06 - Relevance 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

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

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 07 - Slices Of Wisdom =====

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.

Now, 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.

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.

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 Earl 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.

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.

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.

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.

Here is a tree in the garden.

And every summer it produces apples.

And we call it an apple tree.

Because the tree apples.

That's what it does.

All right.

Now, here is a solar system inside a galaxy.

And one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that, at least on the planet Earth, the thing peoples.

In just the same way that an apple tree apples.

Now, maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer

and had a look at this solar system.

And they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, just a bunch of rocks.

And they went away.

Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again.

And they said, excuse me.

We thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling.

And it's alive.

After all, it has done something intelligent.

Because, you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.

If evolution means anything, it means that.

But, you see, we curiously twist it.

We say, well, first of all, in the beginning, there was nothing but gas and rock.

And then intelligence happened to arise in it.

You know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.

But we're thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.

Where there are rocks, watch out.

Watch out.

Because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.

Theology has not, as a matter of fact, had a very distinguished record

in promoting the study of other than the Christian religion.

Because, you see, if you know in the first place that you have the true religion,

there really is no point in studying any other one.

And you can very quickly find reasons for showing them to be inferior.

Because that was a foregone conclusion.

They had to be.

Because if, for example, you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound and spiritual character than Jesus Christ,

you arrive at your decision on the basis of a scale of values, which is, of course, Christian.

And in this sense, the judge and the advocate are the same.

Now, as you know, I'm not being very fair and very kind to modern theology.

But there is this strange persistence of insisting that our group is the best group.

And I feel that there is in this something peculiarly irreligious.

And furthermore, it exhibits a very strange lack of faith.

Because I believe that there is a strong distinction between faith on the one hand and belief on the other.

That belief is, as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith.

Because belief is really wishing.

It's from the Anglo-Saxon root leaf to wish.

And belief, stated, say, in the creed, is a fervent hope that the universe will turn out to be thus and so.

And in this sense, therefore, belief precludes the possibility of faith.

Because faith is openness to truth, to reality, whatever it may turn out to be.

I want to know the truth.

That is the attitude of faith.

And therefore, to use ideas about the universe and about God as something to hang on to.

In the spirit of rock of ages cleft for me.

And there's something very rigid about a rock.

And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating world.

It's a world floating in space where all positions are relative and any point may be regarded as the center.

A world which doesn't float on anything.

And therefore, the religious attitude appropriate to our time is not one of clinging to rocks, but of learning to swim.

And you know that if you get in the water and you have nothing to hold on to, and you try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown.

But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float.

And this is exactly the situation of faith.

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 in to 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.

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.

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

There is no problem.

Everything's perfectly clear.

And you think that one over.

And you say, he's probably being cagey.

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, my, 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 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, 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.

The Christian proverb is that man's extremity is God's opportunity.

And so people, in other words, have to get desperate.

Imagine the idea that the moment you were born, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice.

And you're falling.

As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you.

And it's traveling alongside you.

And you're clinging to it for dear life.

And thinking, gee, I've got to hold on to this, you see.

Well, it doesn't do a thing for you.

And you'll only, it's only making you anxious.

And it's only when you understand that it doesn't do a thing for you, that you let go and relax.

So everybody's in this situation.

We're all completely insecure.

We're all headed straight for death, as if we had been condemned by a judge.

And yet here we are all clinging on to things.

And we, we have all sorts of alibis for doing this.

We say, well, I have responsibilities for my dependence and I've got to cling on.

But all you're doing is you're teaching your dependence to cling in the same way as you are.

And making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively.

So the thing is, same way, if you're caught in a torrent.

And you try to get out of it by swimming against it.

You'll just wear yourself out and you're still carried along with it.

So the sensible thing to do is to turn around and swim with it.

And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge.

But go with it.

Same way when you're sailing.

Always keep the wind in your sails.

If you want to go against the wind, tack.

But use the wind.

So it's this way, you know.

We're all in this great stream of change, which we call life.

We are the stream.

If you imagine you're separate from it and you're being carried along by it as if you were a cork, that's a delusion.

You're a wave of the stream itself.

So get with it.

So you perform a discipline 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 mauved 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.

You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art, we always find the interchange of two personality types, which I call prickles and goo.

The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism.

They want a rigour.

They want precise statistics.

And they have a sudden clipped attitude in their voices.

And you know this very well in academic circles, where there are people who are always edgy like that.

And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical.

But the vague, miasmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones.

And they say to you, you just rattle.

You're not really a human being.

You know the words, but you don't know the music.

And so, therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles.

If you belong to the gooey type, you hope it's waves.

If you are prickly, you're a classicist.

And if you're gooey, you're a romanticist.

And going back into medieval philosophy, if you're prickly, you're a nominalist.

If you're gooey, you're a realist.

And so it goes.

But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively.

It's gooey prickles and prickly goo.

And, uh, you see, it all depends on your level of magnification.

If you've got your magnification on something so that the focus is clear, you've got a prickly point of view.

You've got structure, shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined.

We look out of focus, it's going to go bleh, and you've got goo.

But we're always playing with the two.

Because it's like the question is, um, is the world basically stuff, like matter, or is it basically structure?

Well, we find out, of course, today that in science we don't consider the idea of matter, of just, of there being some sort of stuff.

Because supposing you wanted to describe stuff, in what terms would you describe it?

You always have to describe it in terms of structure, something countable, something that can be designated as a pattern.

So we never get to any basic stuff.

There is a sense in which the universe is purely game, but not in the sense of a one-upmanship game, but in the sense of music.

Which is lallying with sound, is dancing delightfully with sound, you see.

And nobody was ever able to give a better account of what it's all about.

I mean, let's take the traditional Christian account of what the angels do in heaven.

Why, they sit around the throne of God and sing, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, and they're going, you know.

It's not just alleluia in a sort of formal way, but they're going,

No, they're really swinging.

And by the time you know where they are, the swinging has reached such fantastic proportions.

And they've thought out the most amazing little goody-doody-doody-doody-doos that you've got the whole physical universe happening.

See, that's the way it starts.

And so, I mean, this game is great.

In music, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition.

If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest.

And there would be composers who wrote only finales.

People go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord, because that's the end.

Same way in dancing.

You don't aim at a particular spot in the room.

That's where you should arrive.

The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.

We've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression.

It's all graded.

And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system.

With a kind of, come on, kitty, kitty, kitty.

And, yeah, you go to kindergarten, you know.

And that's a great thing, because when you finish that, you'll get into first grade.

And then, come on, first grade leads to second grade, and so on.

And then you get out of grade school, and you've got high school.

And it's revving up, the thing is coming.

Then you're going to go to college.

And by Jove, then you get into graduate school.

And when you're through with graduate school, you go out to join the world.

And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance.

And they've got that quota to make.

And you're going to make that.

And all the time, the thing is coming.

It's coming.

That great thing, the success you're working for.

Then when you wake up one day about 40 years old, you say,

My God, I've arrived.

I'm there.

And you don't feel very different from what you always felt.

And there's a slight letdown, because you feel there's a hoax.

And there was a hoax.

A dreadful hoax.

They made you miss everything.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey.

With a pilgrimage.

Which had a serious purpose at the end.

And the thing was to get to that end.

Success, or whatever it is.

Or maybe heaven after you're dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along.

It was a musical thing.

And you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Why do we love nonsense?

Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his

T'was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wave.

All mimsy were the borough groves and the mumraths outgrabe.

Why is it that all those old English songs are full of

Fal de Riddle Ido and Hey Nonny Nonny and all those babbling choruses.

Why is it that when we get hep with jazz

we just go boo-dee-boo-dee-boop-dee-boo and so on

and enjoy ourselves swinging it.

But it is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense

that is at the heart of the world

that isn't going anywhere, that is a dance.

But it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination

that we get the point of this.

And find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning

that its purpose is no purpose and that its sense is nonsense.

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 08 - Images Of God =====

Behind the father image, behind the mother image, behind the image of light inaccessible,

and behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness, beyond all conception whatsoever.

There's something else which we can't conceive at all.

Welcome to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.

As one of the century's most eloquent philosophers, Alan Watts introduced a generation in the West

to the fascinating ideas of the Far East, the Wisdoms of the Orient.

In the 1960s and early 70s, he lectured throughout the English-speaking world

and was recorded in a variety of settings,

from seminars aboard his ferry boat, the Vallejo, in Sausalito, California,

to keynote addresses at major universities.

Recorded at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco in 1971,

this program is called Images of God.

Here's Alan Watts.

Now, I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut

who went far out into space and was asked on his return

whether he had been to heaven and seen God.

And he said yes.

And so they said to him, well, what about God?

And he said, she is black.

And although this is a very well-known and well-worn story,

it is very profound.

Because, I tell you, I knew a monk

who started out in life as pretty much of an agnostic or an atheist.

And then he began to read Henri Bergson,

the French philosopher who proclaimed the vital force,

the élan vital, and so on.

And the more he read into this kind of philosophy,

the more he saw that these people were really talking about God.

And I've read a great deal of theological reasoning

about the existence of God.

And they all start out on this line.

If you are intelligent and reasonable,

you cannot be the product of a mechanical and meaningless universe.

Figs do not grow on thistles.

Grapes do not grow on thorns.

And therefore, you, as an expression of the universe,

as an aperture through which the universe is observing itself,

cannot be a mere fluke.

Because if this world peoples,

as a tree, brings forth fruit,

then the universe itself,

the energy which underlies it,

what it's all about,

the ground of being, as Paul Tillich called it,

must be intelligent.

Now, when you come to that conclusion,

you must be very careful.

Because you may make an unwarranted jump.

Namely, the jump to the conclusion

that that intelligence,

that marvelous designing power

which produces all this,

is the biblical God.

Be careful.

Because that God,

contrary to his own commands,

is fashioned in the graven image

of a paternal, authoritarian,

beneficent tyrant

of the ancient Near East.

And it's very easy to fall into that trap.

Because it's all prepared,

institutionalized,

in the Roman Catholic Church,

in the synagogue,

in the Protestant churches,

all there ready for you to accept.

And by the pressure of social consensus,

and so on,

it is very natural to assume

that when somebody uses the word God,

it is that father figure

which is intended.

Because even Jesus

used the analogy,

the father,

for his experience of God.

He had to.

There was no other one available to him

in his culture.

But nowadays,

we are in rebellion

against the image

of the authoritarian father.

Especially this should happen

in the United States,

where it happens

that we are a republic

and not a monarchy.

And if you,

as a loyal citizen of this country,

think that a republic

is the best form of government,

you can hardly believe

that the universe is a monarchy.

But to reject

the paternalistic image

of God

as an idol

is not necessarily

to be an atheist.

Although,

I have advocated

something called

atheism

in the name of God.

That is to say,

an experience,

a contact,

a relationship

with God,

that is to say,

with the ground

of your being

that does not have to be

embodied

or expressed

in any specific image.

Now,

theologians on the whole

don't like that idea.

Because I find

in my discourse with them

that they want to be

a little bit hard-nosed

about the nature of God.

They want to say

that God has indeed

a very specific nature.

Ethical monotheism

means

that the governing power

of this universe

has some extremely

definite opinions

and rules

to which

our minds

and acts

must be conformed.

And if you don't

watch out,

you'll go

against the fundamental

grain of the universe

and be punished.

In some way,

old-fashionedly,

you will burn

in the fires of hell

forever.

More modern-fashionedly,

you will fail

to be an authentic person.

That's another way

of talking about it.

But there is

this feeling,

you see,

that there is

authority

behind the world

and it's not you.

It's something else.

Like we say,

that's something else

that's far out.

And

therefore,

this Jewish,

Christian

and indeed

Muslim approach

makes a lot of people

feel rather strange,

estranged

from the root

and ground

of being.

There are a lot

of people

who never grow up

and are always

in awe

of an image

of grandfather.

Now,

I'm a grandfather.

I have five grandchildren.

and so I'm no longer

in awe of grandfathers.

I know I'm just as stupid

as my own grandfathers were

and therefore,

I'm not about

to bow down

to an image of God

with a long white beard.

Now,

naturally,

of course,

we intelligent people

don't believe

in that kind of a God,

not really.

I mean,

we think that God

is spirit,

that God

is very undefinable

and infinite

and all that kind

of thing.

But nevertheless,

the images of God

are far more,

have a far more

powerful effect

upon our emotions

than our ideas.

And when

people read the Bible

and sing hymns,

ancient of days

who sittest

thrown in glory,

immortal,

invisible,

God only wise,

in light,

inaccessible,

hid from our eyes.

They still got

that fellow up there

with a beard on.

It's way in the back

of the emotions.

And so,

we should think,

first of all,

in contrary imagery.

And the contrary imagery

is,

she's black.

Imagine instead

of God the Father,

God the Mother.

And imagine

that this is not

a luminous being

blazing with light,

but an infathomable

darkness,

such as is portrayed

in Hindu mythology

by Kali,

K-A-L-I,

the Great Mother,

who is represented

in the most

terrible imagery.

Kali

has a tongue

hanging out long,

drooling with blood.

She has fanged teeth.

She has a scimitar

in one hand

and a severed head

in the other.

And she is trampling

on the body

of her husband,

who is Shiva.

Shiva represents

also,

furthermore,

the destructive

aspect of the deity,

wherein all things

are dissolved

so that they

be reborn again.

and here is this

blood-sucking,

terrible mother

as the image

of the supreme reality

behind this universe.

Imagine,

it's the representative

of the octopus,

the spider,

the awful,

awful,

the creepy crawlies

at the end of the line,

which we are all terrified of.

Now that's a very

important image

because,

let us suppose,

just for the sake

of argument,

that all of you

sitting here right now

are feeling

fairly all right.

I mean,

you're not in hospital.

You don't have

the screaming memes.

You have a sense

you've probably had dinner

and are feeling

pretty good.

But you know

that you feel

that you're fairly good

because in the background

of your minds,

very far off

in the background

of your minds,

you've got the sensation

of something

absolutely ghastly

that simply mustn't happen.

And so against that,

which is not happening,

and which doesn't

necessarily have to happen,

but by comparison

with that,

you feel pretty all right.

And that absolutely

ghastly thing

that mustn't happen

at all

is Kali.

And therefore,

at once,

we begin to wonder

whether

the presence of this Kali

is not in a way

very beneficent.

I mean,

how would you know

that things were good

unless there was something

that wasn't good at all?

Now this is,

I'm not putting this forward

as a final position.

I'm only putting it forward

as a variation,

as a way of beginning

to look at a problem

and getting our minds

out of their normal ruts.

She's black.

Well, she,

first of all feminine,

represents

what is called

philosophically

the negative principle.

Now, of course,

people who are women

in our culture today

and believe in women's lib

don't like to be associated

with the negative

because the negative

has acquired

very bad connotations.

We say accentuate

the positive.

Well, that's a purely

male chauvinistic attitude.

How would you know

that you were outstanding

unless, by contrast,

there was something

in standing?

You cannot appreciate

the convex

without the concave.

You cannot appreciate

the firm

without the yielding.

And therefore,

the so-called negativity

of the feminine principle

is obviously life-giving

and very important.

But we live in a culture

which doesn't notice it.

You see a painting

a drawing

of a bird

and you don't notice

the white paper

underneath it.

You see a printed book

and you think

that what is important

is the printing

and the page

doesn't matter.

And yet,

if you reconsider

the whole thing,

how could there be

visible printing

without the page

underlying it?

What is called

substance,

that which

stands underneath

sub

underneath,

stands,

stands.

To be substantial

is to be underlying,

to be the support,

to be the foundation

of the world.

And of course,

this is

the great function

of the feminine,

to be the substance.

And therefore,

the feminine

is represented

by space,

which is,

of course,

black

at night.

But were it not

for black

and empty space,

there would be

no possibility

whatsoever

of seeing the stars.

Stars shine

out of space

and astronomers,

very high-powered

astronomers,

are beginning

to realize

that stars

are a function

of space.

Now,

that's difficult

for our common sense

because we think

that space

is simply

inert nothingness.

But we don't realize

that space

is completely

basic to everything.

It's like

your consciousness.

Nobody can imagine

what consciousness

is.

It's the most

delusive,

whatever it is,

that there is at all

because it's the background

of everything else

that we know.

Therefore,

we don't really

pay much attention

to it.

We pay attention

to the things

within the field

of consciousness,

to the outlines,

to the objects,

to the so-called

things that are

in the field

of vision,

the sounds

that are in the field

of hearing,

and so forth.

But what it is

that ever it is

that embraces

all that,

we don't pay

much attention

to it.

We can't even

think about it.

It's like trying

to look at your head.

You know,

you try to look

at your head

and what do you find?

You don't even find

a black blob

in the middle of things.

You just don't

find anything.

And yet,

that is that

out of which you see,

just as space

is that

out of which

the stars shine.

So there's something

very queer

about all this.

That,

that which you

can't put your finger on,

that which always

escapes you,

that which is

completely elusive,

the blank,

seems to be

absolutely necessary

for there to be

anything whatsoever.

Now let's take

this further.

Kali also

is the principle

of death

because she carries

a scimitar

in one hand

and a severed

head in the other.

Death.

This is tremendously

important to think

about.

We put it off.

Death is swept

under the carpet

in our culture.

In the hospital,

they try to keep

you alive as long

as possible

in utter desperation.

They won't tell you

that you're going

to die.

They,

when their relatives

have to be informed

that it's a hopeless

case,

they say,

don't tell this

to the patient.

And all the relatives

come around

with hollow grins

and say,

well,

you'll be all right

in about a month

and then we'll go

and have a holiday

somewhere and

sit by the sea

and listen to the

birds and whatnot.

And the dying person

knows that this

is mockery.

Well,

of course,

we've made death

howl with all

kinds of ghouls.

We've invented

dreadful afterlives.

I mean,

the Christian version

of heaven

is as abominable

as the Christian version

of hell.

I mean,

nobody wants

to be in church

forever.

Children are

absolutely horrified

when they hear

these hymns

which say,

prostrate before

thy throne

to lie

and gaze

on thee.

They can't imagine

what this imagery

means.

I mean,

in a very subtle

theological way,

I could wangle

that statement

around to make

it extremely

profound.

I mean,

to be prostrate

at once

and to gaze

on the other

hand,

see,

is a coincidentia

oppositorum,

a coincidence

of opposites

which is very

deep.

neck

and

that's the sort

of imagery

we're brought up

with.

So the idea

of what might

happen after death,

well,

you're going to be

faced with your

judge,

the one who knows

all about you.

This is Big Papa

who knows

you were a naughty

boy and a very

naughty girl,

especially girl,

from the beginning

of things.

He's going to look

right through

to the core

of your

inauthentic

existence

and what kind

of heebie-jeebies

may come up.

Or you may

believe in

reincarnation

and you think

that your next

life will be

the rewards

and the punishments

for what you've

done in this life

and you know

you've got away

with murder

in this life

and the most

awful things

are going to

happen next time

around.

So you look

upon death

as a catastrophe.

Then there are

other people

who say,

well,

when you're

dead,

you're dead.

nothing's

going to

happen at

all.

So what

you ought to

worry about?

Well,

we don't quite

like that

idea

because it

spooks us.

You know,

what's it

be like

to die,

to go to

sleep and

never,

never wake

up?

Well,

a lot of

things it's

not going

to be

like.

It's not

going to

be like

being buried

alive.

It's not

going to

be like

being in

the

darkness

forever.

I'll tell

you what,

it's going

to be

like as

if you

never had

existed at

all.

Not only

you,

but everything

else as

well.

That just

there was

never

anything and

there's no

one to

regret it.

And there's

no problem.

Well,

think about

that for a

while.

It's kind

of a weird

feeling you

get when

you really

think about

that,

you really

imagine

it.

just to

stop

altogether.

And you

can't even

call it

stop,

because you

can't have

stop without

start.

And there

wasn't any

start.

There's just

no thing.

Well,

when you come

to think of

it,

that's the

way it was

before you

were born.

I mean,

if you go

back in

memory,

as far as

you can

go,

you get

to the

same

place.

As you

go forward

in your

anticipation of

the future

as to what

it's going

to be like

to be

dead,

then you

get these

funny ideas.

That this

blankness is

the necessary

counterpart of

what we

call being.

Now,

we all think

we're alive,

don't we?

I mean,

we're really

here?

That there

is something

called

existence?

You know,

the existentialist,

Dasein,

Throneness,

you know,

here we

are.

But how

could you

be experiencing

that as a

reality,

unless you

had once been

dead?

What gives

us any

ghost of

a notion

that we

are here,

except by

contrast with

the fact that

we once

weren't,

and later

on won't

we?

But this

thing is a

cycle,

like positive

and negative

poles in

electricity.

So this

then is the

value of the

symbolism of

she is

black.

She,

the womb

principle,

the receptive,

the in-standing,

and the

dark.

And so that

is to come

into the

presence of

the God

who has

no image.

Behind the

father image,

behind the

mother image,

behind the

image of

light

inaccessible,

and behind

the image

of profound

and abysmal

darkness,

there's

something else

which we

can't conceive

at all.

Dionysus,

the Areopagite,

called it

the luminous

darkness.

Nagarjuna

called it

Shunyata,

the void.

Shankara

called it

Brahman,

that which

can only,

of which

nothing at

all can

be said,

neti neti,

beyond all

conception

whatsoever.

And you

see,

that is not

atheism in

the formal

sense of

the word.

This is a

profoundly

religious

attitude.

because what

it corresponds

to,

practically,

is an

attitude to

life of

total trust,

of letting

go.

When we

form images

of God,

they are

all really

exhibitions of

our lack

of faith,

something to

hold on to,

something to

grasp,

how firm a

foundation,

what lies

underneath us,

the rock of

ages, or

whatever.

Ein Festerburg.

But when we

don't grasp,

we have the

attitude of

faith.

If you let

go of all

the idols,

you will,

of course,

discover that

what this

unknown is,

which is the

foundation of

the universe,

is precisely

you.

It's not

the you

you think

you are.

No, it's

not your

opinion of

yourself.

It's not

your idea

or image

of yourself.

It's not

the chronic

sense of

muscular strain,

which we

usually call

You can't

grasp it.

Of course

not.

Why would

you need

to?

Supposedly

you could.

What would

you do

with it?

And who

would do

what with

it?

You can

never get

at it.

So there's

that profound

central mystery.

And the

attitude of

faith is

to stop

chasing it,

stop grabbing

it.

because if

that happens

the most

amazing things

follow.

But all

these ideas

of the

spiritual,

the godly,

as this

attitude of

must.

We have

been laid

down the

laws which

we are

bound to

follow.

All this

jazz is

not the

only way

of being

religious

and of

relating

to the

ineffable

mystery

that

underlies

ourselves

and the

world.

===== Tao Of Philosophy - 09 - Coincidence Of Opposites =====

This is the third selection from the Alan Watts lecture series, The Tao of Philosophy.

It's entitled Coincidence of Opposites.

For this selection, we've combined two contrasting talks from different periods in Alan Watts' life.

The first was done live on public radio in 1960 for KPFA in Berkeley, California.

It was called The Sense of Nonsense.

It's an academic discussion of the feeling of meaninglessness and how we make sense of things.

Side B was recorded late in Alan Watts' life and reveals him as a master philosopher able to take on any subject.

These selections are produced as a joint effort between the Electronic University and the Philosophy Store.

At the end of this program, we will give you an address to write for further program information.

And now, here's Alan Watts.

It's very commonly said that the root of most human unhappiness is the sense that one's life has no meaning.

This is, I suppose, most frequently said in circles interested in psychotherapy,

because the feeling of meaninglessness is often equated with the existence of neurosis.

And so many activities into which one is encouraged to enter philosophies, one is encouraged to believe,

and religions, one is encouraged to join,

are commended on the basis of the fact that they give life a meaning.

And I think it's very fascinating to think of what this idea itself means,

or what it is intended when it's said that life has to have a purpose.

I remember so well as a child listening to sermons in church,

in which the preacher would constantly refer to God's purpose for you and for me.

And I could never make out what it was,

because when questioned about this, the reverend gentleman seemed to be evasive.

What is the purpose of God for the world?

We used to sing a hymn, too.

God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year.

And the nearest clue one got to it was in the sort of refrain of the hymn.

Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,

when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

And, of course, that raises the question, what is the glory of God?

Well, now, it's pretty obvious, I think,

that when we talk about life having or not having a meaning,

we're not using quite the ordinary sense of the word meaning

as the attribute of a sign.

We're not saying, are we, that we expect this natural universe

to behave as if it were a collection of words

signifying something other than themselves.

It isn't a point of view which would reduce our lives and the world

merely to the status of signs.

And it's obviously in some different sense than that

that Goethe wrote his famous lines at the end of Faust,

Allas vergänglicher ist nur ein Gleichnis.

Forgive my pronunciation of German.

All that is mortal or all that is perishable

is but a symbol.

And so, a symbol of what?

What do we want to feel?

What would satisfy us as being

the meaning behind this world?

Well, it's so often, you know,

that we don't follow our ideas and our desires through.

Most of the things that we want very fervently

are things that we've only half-glimpsed.

Our ideals are very often suggestions, hints,

and we don't know really exactly what we mean when we think about it.

But there is this obscure sense

in which we feel that life ought to have significance

and be a symbol in at least that sense,

if not just so arid a symbol as a mere sign.

Or it also may mean that life is meaningful.

An individual feels that his life amounts to something

when he belongs and fits in with the execution

of some group enterprise.

He feels he belongs in a plan.

And this, too, seems to give people a sense of great satisfaction.

But we have to pursue that question further, too.

Why is it that a plan,

why is it that fellowship with other people

gives the sense of meaning?

Does it come down, perhaps, to another sense of meaning,

that life is felt to be meaningful

when one is fully satisfying one's biological urges,

including the sense of hunger,

the sense of love,

the sense of self-expression in activity, and so on?

But then again, we have to push that inquiry further.

What do our biological urges really point towards?

Are they just, however,

things always projected towards the future?

Is biology and its processes

nothing but going on towards going on towards going on?

Or there's a fourth and more theological sense

of the meaning of life.

In all theistic religions, at any rate,

the meaning of life is God himself.

In other words, all this world means a person.

It means a heart.

It means an intelligence.

And the relationship of love between God and man

is the meaning of the world.

The sight of God is the glory of God.

And so on.

But again here, there's something to be further pursued.

What is it that we want

in love with a person

and even a person in the sense of the Lord God?

What is the content of it?

What is it that we are really yearning after?

Well now, if we go back to the first point.

Taking Goethe's words that all that is transitory

is but a symbol.

And that we want to feel that all things have significance.

It does seem to me that there's a sense

in which we often use the word significance.

Where the word seems to be chosen quite naturally

and yet at the same time it's not quite the right word.

We say, for example, often of music

that we feel it to be significant.

When just at the same time we don't mean

that it expresses some particular kind of

concretely realizable emotion

and certainly it's not imitating the noises of nature.

A program music, you know,

which simply imitates something else

and it deliberately sets out to express sadness or joy

or whatever

is not the kind of thing I mean.

So often when one listens to the beautiful arabesque character

of the baroque composers

Bach or Vivaldi

it is felt to be significant

not because it means something other than itself

but because it is so satisfying as it is

and we use then this word significance

so often in those moments

when our impetuous seeking for fulfillment cools down

and we give ourselves a little space to watch things

as if they were worth watching

ordinary things

and in those moments

when our inner turmoil has really quietened

we find significance

in things that we wouldn't expect to find significant at all.

I mean, this is after all

the art of those photographers

who have such genius

in turning the camera

towards such things

as peeling paint on an old door

or mud and sand and stones

on a dirt road

and showing us there

that if we look at it in a certain way

those things are significant

but we can't say significant of what

so much as significant of themselves

or perhaps

significance then is the quality of a state of mind

in which we notice

that we're overlooking

the significance of the world

by our constant quest for it later

all this language is of course

quite naturally vague and imprecise

because I think the wrong word is used

and yet not entirely the wrong word

because as I said

it comes so naturally to us

it was Clive Bell

the great aesthetician

who wanted to say

that all the characteristic of art

especially the characteristic of

aesthetic success in painting

was the creation of significant form

again a very vague

imprecise expression

but it certainly is an attribute

not only of those moments

in which we are tranquil inside

but also of moments

of deep spiritual experience

of what would be called

moksha or release in Hinduism

or satori in Zen

that in those moments

the significance of the world

seems to be the world

seems to be what is going on now

and we don't look any further

the scheme of things

seems to justify itself

at every moment of its unfoldment

I pointed out that this was particularly

a characteristic of music

it's also a characteristic of dancing

and in the sensation of belonging

with one's fellow man

in the carrying out of some significant pattern of life

which I mentioned as a second sense

of the world being meaningful

again the character of this feeling

is again something that is fulfilled in itself

to dance is not to be going anywhere

when we dance in the ballroom

we don't have a destination

we're just going round the room

and it's in doing this

it's in executing the pattern

in singing the music

with other people

that even though this doesn't point

to anything outside itself

we again get the sense of meaning

and this is also obviously the case so often

in the satisfaction of the biological urges

does one live to eat or eat to live

I'm not at all sure about this

I'm sure I very often live to eat

because sitting around a table

with people

I don't like eating alone

and enjoying food

is absolutely delightful

and we're not thinking when we do this

at least certainly I'm not

that we have to eat

because it's good for us

and that we've got to throw something down the hatch

as Henry Miller said

and swallow a dozen vitamins

just because our system needs nourishment

I remember quite recently

there was an article

in the Consumer Reports

about bread

and there had been some correspondence

and protests

saying that the bread one bought

white bread one buys in the stores

is perfectly inedible

and lacking in nutrition

and that it was much better to eat

peasant type breads

rough pumpernickel

and things of that kind

and the experts replied

that our white bread

is perfectly full of good nutrients

and there's nothing really

the matter with it at all

well I felt like saying

it isn't a matter perhaps

of the bread being deficient

in the essential vitamins

bread isn't medicine

it's food

and one's complaint against it

is that it's bad cookery

it tastes of nothing

and we do tend

don't we

to look upon

food so often

for what it will do for us

rather than the delight

of eating it

but if

the satisfaction

of biological urges

is to mean anything

surely

the point of these urges

is not the fatuous one

of mere survival

we might say

the point of the individual

is simply

that he contributes

to the welfare of the race

and the point of the race

is that it reproduces itself

to reproduce itself

and keep going

and that isn't really

a point at all

that's just fatuous

surely

the race

keeps going

because going

is great

because it's fun

and if it isn't

and never will be

then there's no point

obviously

in going

I mean looking at it

from the most hedonistic

standpoint

but then when we come

to the question

what is fun

what is the joy

of it

again we come down

to something

that can't very well

be explained

in the ordinary language

of meaning

of leading

to something else

and this I think

becomes preeminently true

if we think of it

in theological language

that the meaning

of life is God

in any of the

theistic religions

what is God doing

what is the meaning

of God

why does he create

the universe

what is the content

of the love of God

for his creation

well there's the frank answer

of the Hindus

that the Godhead

manifests the world

because of lila

which is the Sanskrit

word for play

and this is likewise

said in the

in the Hebrew

scriptures

or the Christian

Old Testament

in the book of Proverbs

where

there is a marvelous

speech by the

divine wisdom

Sophia

which in describing

the function

of the divine wisdom

in the creation

of the world

the world

in other words

is a manifestation

of the wisdom

of God

wisdom uses the phrase

that in

producing men

and animals

and all the creatures

of the earth

wisdom is playing

and it was

the delight

of wisdom

to play

before the presence

of God

and when it is

likewise said

in the scriptures

that the

Lord God

created the world

for his pleasure

this again means

in a sense

for play

and certainly

this seems to be

what the

angels in heaven

are doing

according to the

traditional

symbolic descriptions

of heaven

they are

ringed around

the presence

of the almighty

calling out

alleluia

through all eternity

well alleluia

may have meant

something originally

but as it's used

now it doesn't

mean anything

except

well in our own

slang

whoopee

it's

an exclamation

of nonsensical

delight

and it was

Dante in the

Paradiso

who described

the song

of the angels

the laughter

of the universe

and this sense

of nonsense

the

theme

of the divine

activity

comes out

also very strongly

in the book

of Job

I always think

that the book

of Job

is the most

profound book

in the whole

Bible

Old Testament

and New Testament

because

here is the

problem

of the man

the righteous

man

who has

suffered

and all

his friends

try to

rationalize it

and say

well you

must have

suffered

because

you really

had a secret

sin after all

and deserve

the punishment

of God

or because

rationalize it

somehow

and when

they've had

their say

the Lord

God

appears

on the

scene

and says

who is

this

that

darkeneth

counsel

with words

without

knowledge

and then

proceeds

to ask

Job

and his

friends

a series

absolutely

unanswerable

conundrums

pointing out

all the

apparent

irrationality

and nonsense

of his

creation

why

for example

he said

do I send

rain upon

the desert

where no

man is

most

commentators

on the

book of

Job

end with

the remark

that well

this poses

the problem

of suffering

and the

problem

of evil

but doesn't

really

answer it

and yet

in the

end

himself

Job

seems

to be

satisfied

he somehow

surrenders

to the

apparent

unreasonableness

of the

Lord God

and this

is not

I think

because

Job

authority

of the

deity

and doesn't

dare

to answer

back

he realizes

that somehow

these very

questions

are the

answer

I think

of all

the

commentators

on the

book

Job

the

person

who

came

closest

to this

point

was

old

G.K.

Chesterton

he once

made the

glorious remark

that it is

one thing

to look

with amazement

at a

gorgon

or a

griffin

a creature

who doesn't

exist

but quite

another thing

to look

at a hippopotamus

a creature

who does

exist

and looks

as if

he doesn't

in other

words

that all

these

this strange

world

with its

weird forms

hippopotami

and when

you look

at them

from a

certain

point

of view

stones

and trees

and water

and clouds

and stars

when you

look at them

from a

certain point

of view

and don't

take them

for granted

they're as

weird as

any hippopotamus

or any

imagination

of fabulous

beasts

of gorgons

and griffins

and things

like that

they are

just plain

improbable

and it is

in this sense

I think

that

they are

the

alleluia

as it were

the nonsense

song

why do we love

nonsense

why do we love

Lewis Carroll

with his

twas brillig

and the slithy

toves

did gyre

and gimble

in the wave

all mimsy

with the

borough groves

and the

mumraths

outgrabe

why is it

that

all those

old english

songs

are full

falde riddle

iddo

and hey

nonny

and all

those

babbling

choruses

why is it

that when

we get

hep

with jazz

just go

boo dee

boo and so

and enjoy

ourselves

swinging it

it is this

participation

in the

essential

glorious

nonsense

that is at

the heart

of the world

that isn't

going anywhere

that is a

dance

but it

seems that

only in

moments of

unusual insight

and illumination

that we get

the point of

this

and find

that thus

the true

meaning of

life

is no

meaning

that its

purpose is

no purpose

and that its

sense is

nonsense

but still

we want to

use about it

the word

significant

nonsense

yes

nonsense

that is not

just chaos

that is not

just

blathering

balderdash

but that has

in it

rhythm

fascinating

complexity

a kind

of artistry

it is in

this kind

of meaninglessness

that we get

the profoundest

meaning

you've been

listening to a

talk by

alan watts

to continue

listening to

this program

please turn the

tape over

it's really a

very unorthodox

and unacademic

thing to do

to start

a discussion

with a group

of psychologists

on the subject

of metaphysics

but we have to

do that

because

a lot of

people say

that their

approach

to life

is scientific

as distinct

from metaphysical

and that

metaphysics

is bosch

anyway

but everybody

by virtue

of being

a human

being

is willy

nilly

a metaphysician

that is to

say

everybody

starts

from certain

fundamental

assumptions

as to

what is

the good

life

what he

wants

what are

his

shall we

say

axioms

for living

and I

find that

psychologists

tend to be

blind

to these

fundamental

assumptions

maybe it's

truer of

psychiatrists

than it is

of psychologists

but

they tend

to feel

that they

are

scientists

they're rather

bending over

backwards

to have a

scientific

status

because that

of course

is fashionable

in our

age

but you

know

it's so

amusing

that

when

say

let's

take

psychoanalysis

for example

has pointed

out to

many

philosophers

that their

philosophical

ideas

are capable

of being

shown to

have a

psychoanalytic

reference

for example

John Wisdom

wrote a book

about the

philosophy of

Berkeley

in which

he attributed

a great

deal of

his point

of view

to his

experiences

in toilet

training

as a

child

the

philosopher

is very

grateful

the

psychoanalyst

for

revealing

to him

his

unconscious

and

its

emotional

contents

but

the

psychoanalyst

must

in turn

await a

revelation

from the

philosopher

as to

his

philosophical

unconscious

and the

unexamined

assumptions

which lie

in it

so if

i may

start

insulting

your

intelligence

with

what

called

the

most

elementary

lesson

the

thing

that

should

have

learned

before

learned

one

two

three

and

ABC

but

somehow

was

overlooked

now

this

lesson

quite

simply

this

that

any

experience

that we

have

through

our

senses

whether

sound

light

touch

vibration

and

vibration

has

two

aspects

one

called

and

the

other

called

off

vibration

seems

to be

propagated

waves

and

every

wave

system

has

crests

and

has

troughs

and

life

system

now

you

see

now

you

don't

and

these

two

aspects

always

together

for

example

sound

not

pure

sound

rapid

alternation

sound

and

silence

and

that's

simply

the

way

things

are

only

you

must

remember

that

the

crest

and

the

trough

wave

are

inseparable

nobody

ever

saw

crests

without

troughs

without

crests

just

you

don't

encounter

life

people

with

fronts

but

backs

just

you

don't

encounter

coin

that

has

heads

but

tails

and

although

the

heads

and

the

tails

the

fronts

and

the

notion

that

different

things

can

inseparable

that

what

explicitly

two

can

the

same

time

implicitly

one

you

forget

that

very

funny

things

happen

therefore

forget

you

see

that

black

and

white

are

inseparable

and

that

existence

constituted

equivalently

and

have

play

game

called

uh-oh

black

might

win

and

once

get

into

the

fear

that

black

the

negative

side

might

win

are

compelled

play

the

game

but

white

must

win

and

from

that

start

all

our

troubles

because

you

see

the

human

awareness

have

species

specialized

in a

certain

kind

awareness

which

call

conscious

attention

and

this

have

the

faculty

examining

the

details

life

very

closely

can

restrict

our

gaze

and

corresponds

somewhat

the

peripheral

field

mean

the

central

field

vision

the

eyes

have

central

vision

have

peripheral

vision

central

vision

that

which

use

for

reading

for

all

sorts

work

and

it's

using

spotlight

whereas

peripheral

vision

is more

using

flood

light

now

civilization

and

civilized

human

beings

for

maybe

years

maybe

much

longer

have

learned

specialize

concentrated

attention

even

if a

person's

attention

span

short

were

wavering

his

spotlight

over

many

fields

the

price

which

pay

for

specialization

conscious

attention

ignorance

everything

outside

its

field

would

rather

say

ignorance

than

ignorance

because

if you

concentrate

on a

figure

you

tend

ignore

the

background

you

tend

therefore

see

the

world

in a

disintegrated

aspect

you

take

separate

things

and

events

seriously

imagining

that

these

really

exist

when

actually

they

have

the

same

kind

existence

individual's

interpretation

of a

Rorschach

plot

they're

what you

make

out

of it

fact

our

physical

world

is a

system

inseparable

differences

everything

exists

with

everything

else

but we

contrive

not to

notice

that

because

what we

notice

is what

is noteworthy

and we

notice it

in terms

notation

numbers

words

images

what is

notable

noteworthy

notated

noticed

is what

appears to

us to be

significant

and the

rest is

ignored

insignificant

and as

a result

of that

select

from the

total

input

that goes

to our

senses

only a

very small

fraction

and this

causes us

to believe

that we

are

separate

beings

isolated

the

boundary

of the

epidermis

from the

rest of

the world

and you

see this

is also

the mechanism

involved

in not

noticing that

black and

white go

together

not noticing

that every

inside has

an outside

and that the

inside

what goes on

inside your

skin

is inseparable

from what

goes on

outside your

skin

do you

see that

for example

in the

is not

an organism

in an

environment

but is

an organism

hyphen

environment

that is

to say

a unified

field of

behavior

if you

describe

carefully

the behavior

of any

organism

you cannot

do so

without at

the same

time describing

the behavior

of the

environment

and by

that you

know that

you've got

a new

entity

of study

you are

describing

the behavior

of a

unified

field

but you

must be

very careful

indeed

not to

fall into

old

newtonian

assumptions

about the

billiard ball

nature of

the universe

the organism

is not the

puppet of

the environment

being pushed

around by it

nor on the

other hand

is the

environment

the puppet

of the

organism

being pushed

around by the

organism

the relationship

between them

is to use

John Dewey's

word

transactional

the transaction

being a

situation

like buying

and selling

in which

there is no

buying unless

somebody sells

and no selling

unless somebody

buys

so that

fundamental

relationship

between

ourselves

and the

world

which is

in an

old-fashioned

way by

people such

as Skinner

who have

not updated

his philosophy

interpreted

in terms

newtonian

mechanics

he interprets

the organism

as something

determined

by the

total

environment

he doesn't

see

that in

a more

modern way

of talking

about it

we're simply

describing a

unified field

of behavior

which is

nothing more

than what

any mystic

ever said

that's a

dirty word

in the

modern academic

scientific

environment

but

if a mystic

is one

who is

sensibly

or even

sensuously

aware

of his

inseparability

as an

individual

from the

total

existing

universe

he's

simply a

person

who has

become

sensible

aware

through

his senses

of the

way

ecologists

see the

world

so when

I'm in

academic

circles

I don't

talk about

mystical

experience

I talk

about

ecological

awareness

same thing

and so

the next

aspect of

our

metaphysical

introduction

must be

about

games

you know

I think

there are

really

four

questions

that

all

philosophers

have

discussed

from the

beginning

recorded

time

first

who

started

the

second

are

going

make

the

third

where

are

going

put

and

the

fourth

who's

going

clean

when

you

think

these

over

poses

fifth

question

serious

and

that's

the

one

x-ray

picture

serious

what

does

that

mean

means

danger

not

continuing

survive

but

the

basis

all

this

then

say

you

must

survive

must

survive

life

earnest

and

I've

got

then

your

life

drag

and

not

way

that

existence

the

physical

universe

basically

playful

there

necessity

for

whatsoever

isn't

going

anywhere

that

say

doesn't

have

some

destination

that

ought

arrive

but

best

understood

analogy

with

music

because

music

art

form

essentially

playful

say

you

play

the

piano

you

don't

work

the

piano

why

music

differs

from

say

travel

when

you

travel

you

are

trying

get

somewhere

and

course

because

being

very

compulsive

and

purposive

culture

are

busy

getting

everywhere

faster

and

faster

and

faster

till

eliminate

the

distance

between

places

mean

with

the

modern

jet

travel

you

can

arrive

almost

instantaneously

what

happens

as a

result

of that

that

the

two

ends

your

journey

become

the

same

place

you

eliminate

the

distance

and

you

eliminate

the

journey

because

the fun

of the

journey

is to

travel

not

obliterate

traveling

then

music

though

one

doesn't

make

the

end

composition

the

point

the

composition

that

were

the

best

conductors

would

those

who

played

fastest

and

there

would

composers

who

wrote

only

finales

people

go to

concerts

just to hear

one

crashing

chord

because

that's

the

end

same

way in

dancing

you don't

aim at a

particular spot

in the

room

that's

where

you

should

arrive

the

whole

point

the

dancing

the

dance

now

but

don't

see

that

something

brought

by our

education

into

our

everyday

conduct

we've

got a

system

schooling

which

gives

completely

different

impression

it's

all

graded

and

what

put

the

child

into

the

corridor

kindergarten

you

know

and

that's

great

thing

because

when

you

finish

that

you

get

into

first

grade

and

then

come

first

grade

leads

second

grade

and

then

you

get

out

grade

school

and

high

school

and

it's

revving

the

thing

coming

then

you're

going to

go to

college

and

joke

then

you

get

into

graduate

school

and

when

you're

through

with

graduate

school

you

it's

coming

it's

coming

that

great

thing

the

success

you're

working

for

then

when

you

wake

one

day

about

forty

years

old

you

say

god

I've

arrived

I'm

there

and

you

don't

feel

very

different

from

what

you

always

felt

and

there's

slight

letdown

because

you

feel

there's

hoax

and

there

was

hoax

dreadful

hoax

they

made

you

miss

everything

expectation

look

the

people

who

live

retire

and

put

those

savings

away

and

then

when

they

are

they

don't

have

any

energy

left

they're

more or

less

impotent

and

they

and

rot

old

people

senior

citizens

community

because

simply

cheated

ourselves

the

whole

way

down

the

line

thought

life

analogy

with

journey

with

pilgrimage

which

had

serious

purpose

the

end

the

thing

was

get

that

end

success

whatever

maybe

heaven

after

you're

dead

but

missed

the

point

the

whole

way

along

was

musical

thing

and

you

were

supposed

sing

dance

while

the

music

was

being

played

but

you

had

that

thing

you

didn't

let

called

man

time

binder

that

means

that

he's

the

animal

peculiarly

aware

the

time

sequence

and

result

this

able

some

very

remarkable

things

can

predict

studies

what's

happened

the

past

and

says

the

chances

are

and

that

happening

again

and

predicts

also

it's

very

useful

able

predict

because

that

has

survival

value

but

the

same

time

creates

anxiety

you

pay

for

this

increased

survival

ability

involved

prediction

knowing

that

the

end

you

won't

succeed

you're

all

going

fall

apart

one

way

another

you

see

the

other

hand

that

existence

this

said

basic

metaphysical

assumption

which

won't

conceal

from

you

that

existence

musical

nature

that

say

that

not

serious

play

all

kinds

patterns

can

look

upon

different

creatures

look

different

games

look

chess

checkers

back

gammon

tennis

the

tree

game

the

beetle

game

the

grass

game

you

can

look

them

you

look

different

styles

music

mazurkas

waltzes

sonata

etc

all down

the

line

they're

all

these

different

things

doing

their

stuff

and

they're

going

you

know

different

rivers

and

we're

doing

that

you

were

in a

flying

saucer

from

Mars

somewhere

and

came

and

looked

trying

make

out

what

was

living

this

world

from

about

10,000

feet

night

early

morning

you

would

see

these

great

ganglia

with

tentacles

going

out

all

over

the

place

and

early

the

morning

you

see

little

blobs

luminous

particles

going

into

the

middle

them

see

and

then

the

late

afternoon

early

evening

would

spit

them

all

out

and

out

and

out

once

every

hours

but

then

rests

day

and

doesn't

spit

much

spits

different

way

that's

when

you

think

a bit

what

people

really

want

with

their

time

what

they

when

they're

not

being

pushed

around

and

somebody

telling

them

what

they like

to make

rhythms

they

listen

music

they

dance

they

sing

that's

the

nature

this

whole

thing

we're

you

see

likes

swing

that's

why

does

files 2

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