Zen & The Limits Of Explanation

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And tonight's program is entitled Zen and the Limits of Explanation.

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Right now though, Zen and the Limits of Explanation here on WFMU.

The subject which has most interested me for many, many years is the simple question, "Who

or what am I?"

What do we mean by the word "I"?

And I find as I investigate this question and talk with all kinds of people, that generally

speaking the word "I" refers to something that we sense or experience as a center of

consciousness and decision, living somewhere inside a bag of skin.

Common speech reflects this in many ways.

We say "face facts", we talk about being confronted with reality, and we talk about the difference

between the knower and the known, the subjective and the objective, the internal thinker and

feeler facing an external world.

We say "I came into this world."

I find there is therefore a general sense that I am something to which this external

world is a stranger.

That there is a feeling that there's deep hostility between the subject and the object.

And this again reflects itself in our common language, where we talk about the conquest

of nature, the conquest of space, and the conquest of great mountains like Everest.

And all that this adds up to is that the human being experiences himself to be very lonely,

and feels that death is a terrifying threat, because he's been brought up in our kind of

society and our kind of culture to experience himself as something isolated.

Let's review this historically, because we shall see that in Western civilization we

have been in the past two thousand years under the influence of two great myths.

When I use the word "myth" I don't mean a kind of false story.

The way I use the word "myth" is to signify an image, a great symbol.

Men use symbols to make sense of the world.

And there are—we keep changing our symbols, and different cultures have different symbols.

But a myth is an idea, or generally an image, which we use to explain the world and our

own lives.

So then, Western man has had two great images.

The first image is that the world is the handiwork of a creator king, the Lord God.

We are his creatures, and he has made us in rather the same way that a potter makes pots,

or a carpenter makes tables.

In the book of Genesis, the creation of Adam is described in terms of ceramics, because

the Lord God fashions a figurine out of the dust of the earth, that is to say, out of

clay, and then having made this little figure of a man, he breathes the breath of life into

its nostrils, and the man becomes alive.

And it's not insignificant in this line of tradition that Jesus is the son of a carpenter,

because the whole idea of the universe is that it's an artifact, it is something made.

It could have been different from that.

The universe could have been considered not as something made, like a table or a pot,

but something grown, like a plant.

And that children might say to their mothers, not "Mommy, how was I made?" but "Mommy, how

was I grown?"

But in our culture, it's natural for a child to ask the question "How was I made?"

Now then, this whole imagery of the human being as something made by a master craftsman

became too much for the Western world, because everybody constantly felt that they were under

the surveillance of the Lord, being watched and being judged at every moment.

I have a friend who is a very intelligent convert to Catholicism, and in her bathroom,

she has one of those old-fashioned toilet operations where there's a tank near the ceiling

and a chain which you pull, and then there's a pipe which goes down from the tank to the

seat.

And on this pipe, there is a little plaque with a big "I" on it, this kind of "I," and

underneath in Gothic lettering it says "Thou God seest me."

So in the most private apartment of the house, where one closes the door and locks it, there

is the all-seeing eye of the eternal judge of the universe.

This was a very, very awkward idea.

You know how you feel in school when you were a child, and you were doing some work, you

were writing, you may have been doing arithmetic or writing an essay, and if the teacher comes

and looks over your shoulder while you're writing, you somehow feel blocked.

You wish she would go away until you finished.

So in the same way, Western man has tended to feel blocked by the all-seeing judge of

the universe, and therefore invented another myth altogether, the universe considered as

an unintelligent mechanism.

What a relief.

No God to judge me, no hell to go to, no conscience that I need follow except my own sense of

taste.

A world, however, that is perfectly stupid.

A vast mechanical gadget in which I am trapped like a mouse in a cotton gin.

And very many people, very many intelligent people in the Western world have since the

beginning of the nineteenth century settled for this conception of the universe.

That it is an unintelligent mechanism, a display of blind forces, in which human intelligence

has arrived by the merest chance of natural selection and evolution.

So that we are confronted with a system of stupidity called life, in which we as intelligent

accidents are trapped, and which therefore we have to subjugate to our wills by every

conceivable technological device.

And we know that in the end it will beat us.

That each individual will die, and this kind of consciousness that we have that seems intelligent

and that is capable of loving and being loved, will simply become nothing.

That in the end life will be a brave gesture against futility.

Now I want you to understand that that idea, although it sounds very realistic and hard-boiled,

is also a myth.

And it has been for a long time among thinking people a plausible myth, after the myth of

the creator God had become implausible.

See the trouble is this, no kind of science ever proved that the Lord God on the throne

of heaven doesn't exist.

What happened was simply that we, through scientific investigation, we acquired a sense

of the universe, a conception of time and of space, which made the old-fashioned idea

of the Lord God simply implausible.

The universe was something much grander, much more spectacular, than could possibly have

been worked out by an old gentleman with a white beard on a golden throne, surrounded

with winged angels.

That was all.

Besides, he was a nosy parker, and we didn't want him.

But the new idea that man, that intelligence and consciousness and love and so on are flukes

in an utterly irrational universe, or rather mechanical universe, is simply to be understood

as a reaction against the first myth.

Because as a matter of fact, the idea that man is a fluke in a mechanical universe is

palpably absurd.

But it has an enormous influence on the way we think, and above all, on the way we feel.

I said we say normally, "I came into this world."

Why don't we say much more correctly, "I came out of it"?

Because you see, a human being is a symptom of the universe in exactly the same way that

an apple is a symptom of an apple tree.

When an apple tree produces apples, we might say, "This tree apples," using "apples" as

a verb.

And so in precisely the same way that an apple tree apples, we are living in a universe which

peoples.

We are symptoms of the kind of system in which we are living, and our appearance in the system

tells us about the system.

That is to say, just as in the words of Jesus, "Figs do not grow on thistles, nor grapes

on thorns."

So human beings do not grow on a tree which is merely mechanical, because human beings

are not merely mechanical.

What we have to realize is that a universe which peoples is an intelligent, thinking,

organic, living system.

And furthermore, we are not just separate little islands of life and consciousness existing

in this world, but rather we should say that my self, my consciousness, is something that

the whole universe is doing.

You know, in ancient times, when people wanted to draw a map of the human soul, what they

did draw was a picture of the universe as it was arranged at the moment when the individual

was born.

This was called his horoscope.

The whole arrangement of the planets and the stars, as they were then known, as they were

at the moment of your birth.

And this was supposed to be a picture of your character and of your destiny.

Now there was a lot of superstition in this, but one thoroughly valid idea, that the real

you is not just something inside your skin.

The real abiding you is all that there is.

The works as it is focused here and now.

At a particular place and in a particular time, and we call this particular place and

time my body, my organism.

So your soul is not something inside your body.

Your body is something inside your soul.

Because your soul is the total cosmos, all stars, all galaxies, the whole thing focused

here and now at this moment.

And just—I know you've had experience of this around here, that this may be an unfortunate

illustration—but just as a tornado dips down out of the sky here, then it withdraws,

and then here, and then here.

So in the same way, everything that there is dips down and becomes an individual, and

then withdraws, that's what we call death, and it dips down again, and it, shall I say,

incarnates again, and it's doing it all over the place, as all us people, all us rabbits,

dogs, cats, trees, mountains, stars, everything.

But why don't we feel that way?

Instead of having the feeling that I am a lonely little creature watching the world

almost from outside, and feeling that it's something with which I have to do battle.

Well the answer is, we've been brought up the wrong way.

We've been brought up to play the game of cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys.

That is to say, the game of pretending that each one of us is separate, each one of us

behaves on his own, and this gets us into the most amazing methods.

Think back to your own childhood.

Think back to how you came to find out that you were you, and to have this sensation of

being a separate and lonely individual.

For example, we are told by our parents that there are certain things that we must do.

You must go to sleep.

You must love your parents.

You must have a bowel movement every day after breakfast.

Now what is the meaning of this word "must"?

Is it a commandment?

Or is it simply stating a set of affairs, a set of conditions?

To be human you must have a head.

Did you ever see people going around trying to have heads?

No.

Well so in exactly the same way, you remember very well that when you tried to go to sleep

you stayed wide awake.

And supposing you try to love somebody.

Look, supposing you as a husband or a wife say to your spouse, "Darling, do you really

love me?"

What kind of answer do you want?

Do you want your spouse to say, "Darling, I'm trying my best to do so."

No.

What you want is an answer to the question, "Do you really love me?"

You want the person to say, "I can't help loving you.

I love you so much I could eat you."

But yet we can say to our children such a remark as, "Darling, all good children love

their mothers.

And you ought to love your mother, not because I say so, but because you really want to."

Do you see?

This is a request which says, "I command you to do something which will be acceptable to

me only if you do it voluntarily."

And that situation is called a double bind.

And it goes on all the time.

The most important double bind that we are put under in our upbringing is one which could

be expressed as, "You must survive."

We call it the instinct for survival.

But actually there is nothing of the kind.

But "You must survive" is something really pushed into us.

I remember talking some years ago to a woman who came to me and said, "I'm scared out of

my wits.

I have high blood pressure and I'm afraid I'm going to die."

And this terrifies me.

So we had a long conversation.

I wanted to try and find out what she was really afraid of in death.

And we found out that it wasn't pain, it wasn't the idea of annihilation, of just endless

not being.

She said, "Do you know what I'm really afraid of is what people are going to say.

They're going to be at my funeral and they're going to say, 'Poor old girl, she couldn't

make it with you.'

Because you see, there's something disgraceful about dying.

Your will to live gave out.

You didn't have the guts to go on.

You succumbed."

Oh, too bad.

In other words, it's an injury to one's pride because you must go on living.

Now this is the double bind again because living is a spontaneous process.

Just like sleeping, breathing, growing hair, shaping your bones and so on, you don't have

to think how this is done.

It happens.

Marvelous.

But it does.

And to let it happen optimally, you mustn't get in the way of it.

If you try to colour your eyes blue, what a ridiculous thing if they're brown.

So living, you see, is something that happens of itself.

The Chinese term for nature, when translated into English, means "that which is of itself

so," which happens by itself automatically, though not in the sense of a machine that's

automatic.

So if you tell the process of nature, the process of life, "You must happen," it's exactly

the same sort of thing as telling another person, "You must love me."

And if they try to obey that commandment, they put themselves into a state of contradiction.

"I am trying to love you" means "I don't love you."

"I am trying to go on living" is also an approach to life which turns life into a drag.

Know that a lot of people would really like not to go on living and to commit suicide,

but they feel it's their duty to go on living because they have dependents.

They also feel afraid to die because the social injunction "Thou shalt live" is so powerful.

See suicide is a crime in many countries and states.

You must do this.

So you see, you go on living desperately.

So desperate that if you have terminal cancer, the doctors have to keep you alive.

They keep you on the end of tapes and tubes and wires, a ghastly, tortured organism that

must go on living because a doctor is out of role when he is faced with an incurable

disease.

He doesn't know what to do with it without breaking his code of ethics.

Now when we are in the state of mind in which we must go on living, our children, who are

the alibis for this, that is to say, we feel we must go on living because we are responsible

for bringing up the succeeding generations.

But all we do by this is that they catch the same attitude from us.

And they are going to drag on for the sake of their children, who are going to learn

to drag on for the sake of their children.

Well isn't that great?

This is simply a system of hereditary stupidity.

Because you see, children learn more from the adults' attitudes than they do from anything

that adults say.

We try to say the right things, but the way we actually live is what counts.

So if we go on living under a sense of compulsion, must live, must get on, must earn that living,

must make that grade, whatever it is, must look after the family, must be faithful to

your wife, husband, or whatever, that's a mockery.

And everybody knows it, but won't admit it.

And that you see, that double bind, "you must love me" is the trap in which we live and

constitutes the main cause for our feeling isolated from the rest of the world.

I do not live, I do not feel that I live as an expression of the whole cosmos, just as

a leaf or an apple is an expression of a tree.

But I am taught to feel that I live in spite of the cosmos, only to the degree that I struggle

against it to wrest my life from the soil and the waters.

And we return in just a moment with part two of Zen and Limits of Explanation.

You're listening to WFMU, the Alan Watts Lecture Series.

Stay tuned.

We breed a race of human beings, a culture which is, in technical psychological jargon,

a race of human beings, and which feels that it has a sacred duty to beat the physical

world into submission.

And the symbol today in Western culture, especially in the United States, of this state of mind

is the bulldozer.

I don't know how it is here in Michigan, but where I live in California, the bulldozer

is ubiquitous.

And this great, blunt, powerful, shoving thing it has on the front of it is knocking down

hills, is putting flat track lots in the middle of mountains, and is the most aggressive,

domineering symbol of man flattening the earth.

I sometimes wonder whether that passage in Isaiah, "Every valley shall be exalted, and

the hills laid low and the rough places plain," is that a prophecy of something nice, or a

forecast of doom?

The flat and out earth.

No mountains, no valleys.

How boring can you get?

And the funny thing is this, that when people want to live in the hills, they want to live

in the hills because the hills are great.

They like the hills.

But if by going and living there they destroy them, is that sensible?

What eventually happens, of course, to all these track lots in the hills, is that the

rains come and the houses fall down the slope, because they've upset the natural balances

of the area, they've torn off all the topsoil, scrubbed up all the brush and the vegetation,

because that's tidy and neat, according to these people's notions.

But all this sort of thing is a symbol of man at war with his environment, because he

does not realize that his own physical existence includes the external world.

Let me put it in another way.

Your body is not just what is inside your skin.

Your body includes what you call the external world.

The skin doesn't divide you from nature, it joins you to it, because the skin is simply

a spongy, porous membrane through which you breathe and through which your nerve ends

have contact with everything outside it.

It's the bridge between you and the outside, and you on the inside and it on the outside

always go together.

You see, look, do you know the most fundamental important thing in all metaphysics, you understand

everything, in all mysteries of the universe, if you just realize that every inside has

an outside and every outside has an inside.

They just go together, as do, incidentally, black and white, light and darkness, and life

and death.

They go together in the same way as the crest and the trough of a wave.

Did you ever see a wave with a crest and no trough?

Or a trough and no crest?

Never was there such a wave.

Did you ever see an inside without an outside?

Could you have life without the contrast of darkness or vice versa?

Of course not.

This is the simplest thing that everybody should learn before they learn 1, 2, 3 or

ABC.

But it's always left out.

And you see, when that's left out, and you don't understand that black and white are

brothers, they're inseparable although different.

See, they're explicitly different but implicitly one.

If you don't understand that, you get involved in a game called, uh oh, black might win.

In other words, it would be easier for there to be death than life.

It's a little bit funny, isn't it, that anything exists at all that ever struck you?

I mean, it would be so much easier for there not to have been anything because being is

a bit of an effort.

I mean, it would be a much more rational universe if nothing had ever happened.

But as a matter of fact, that's an impossible state of affairs.

There can't be nothing.

But something, existence, is not just being.

It's an alternation of being and non-being.

Do you understand that?

Listen to a sound.

Noise.

Air, noise, something you hear.

But noise isn't just sound.

It is an alternation of sound and silence.

It's a vibration.

It, so now you see it, now you don't.

And everything is that way.

Supposing I'm sitting next to a pretty girl in the movies, and I put my hand on her knee

and leave it there.

In a short time she will cease to notice it because it's pure being.

But if I pat her on the knee then she notices, she knows I'm still there because I put my

hand on and take it off and on and off and on and off and on and off and that's what

creates existence.

So in the same way, all our sensations are sensations of vibration, of now you see it

now you don't.

And these two together constitute being.

Life and death, black and white, solid and space, something and nothing.

But we play the game you see, that nothing might win.

Now when you see you've forgotten the connection between these two things, which is the secret,

that Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle.

When you've forgotten that connection and you're afraid that the black side may win,

that everything may be lost, that all existence may plunge into the abyss of endless night,

then you play the contrary game, but white must win.

And that's where you get into trouble.

You must love.

You must live.

And that's the biggest hoax ever invented.

So we go around doing battle against our own nature.

Now can we get out of this trap?

Or are we hopelessly hypnotized?

Is there anything, I mean supposing you realize this is true, can you change your state of

consciousness so that you don't any longer have to feel that you are an isolated island

of sensitivity locked up in a bag of skin?

Could you come to feel that you are really, deep down, simply a particular expression

of everything that there is?

To put it more strongly, could you realize as clearly as when you put your hands on something

hard and you know it's there, could you realize that clearly?

That your real self is the works, is the whole cosmos.

How would you go about that?

A lot of people do know this.

In the east they call them Buddhas.

And they know this in a very natural way.

But in order to approach that kind of knowledge, really the main problem about it is to get

rid of our chronic objections to it.

For example, this is not something you know in quite the same sort of way that you know

a thing you can look at from the outside, like looking at your own hand.

See the funny thing about consciousness is this, it's like the headlights of a car.

The headlights of a car shine down the road, but they don't shine on the wires immediately

behind the bulb that connects it to the battery.

They don't even shine on a battery.

Consciousness does not illumine its own origin.

You are conscious, you are aware, but you don't know how.

That's because consciousness looks out instead of in.

But in just the same way that underlying your consciousness is the whole complexity of your

nervous system, which is very much you, but you don't know it.

So in just that sort of way, your essential self looks out rather than in.

You don't feel it just as you don't see your own brain.

But there it is, and when you die, you go back, as it were, you are withdrawn into yourself.

The place, the center from which you came out when you were born.

And what happens once can happen again.

Did you ever think it was funny to be born?

Think about it.

What would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up?

Think about that.

Imagine.

To die.

And that's that.

Now don't imagine yourself lying around forever in the dark, in a dark room, buried alive

as an Edgar Allen Poe.

No experience of darkness, no experience of anything, neither darkness nor light.

I can give you an immediate illustration of that by asking you, what color is your head?

From the point of view of your looking around without having a mirror near you.

What color is your head?

I can't see it.

But do you experience darkness there?

No.

It's not dark.

I don't have a black thing behind my eyes.

I don't have a white thing.

I can't get at it at all.

It just has no color.

You see?

But it's a very lively thing, isn't it?

You can't have any conception of it.

But it's on this thing which you can't get a color on, on this depends all the colors

you can see.

So in the same way, when you're dead, you go back into this thing, which can't be seen

and which can't be thought about.

Because you see, the moment you think about what would it be like to go to sleep and never

wake up, becomes the corollary.

What is it like to wake up without ever having gone to sleep in the first place?

In other words, that's birth.

Now you were born.

You have no memory of having existed before.

And what happened once, can happen again.

Doesn't matter how long the interval between is, because that won't bother you.

If I mean everybody on this planet is suddenly annihilated in a huge atomic explosion, well,

maybe in several billion years the human experiment will happen again in some other galaxy, and

it'll feel just like we feel now.

That's the way it works.

Just as in a seasonal way the apples come on the trees.

But what we need for our health at this time is human beings who have the sense of belonging.

Who have the sense that they really do come out of this world.

Because people who have that sense are in a way better fitted to live in the world than

those who don't have it.

They're better fitted to live because they respect their environment.

They respect the earth as they respect their own skins.

And you aren't fit to interfere with the outside world, and you must interfere with the outside

world, there's no way of getting around that.

But you aren't fit to interfere with it unless you reverence it.

Unless when you build a town, you do it with love.

Now the striking thing about our countryside, Americans are materialists, everybody says

that.

They're not.

They hate material.

Look at any American city, almost any American city.

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

No.

It's a junk heap.

It's a set of fronts down Main Street, and behind there are wrecked automobiles and shacks

and junk of every conceivable description.

The most fantastic example of this is Los Angeles.

You can drive from central Los Angeles way out to Claremont, forty miles to the east,

and go continuously through pasteboard and junk.

This is not a materialist culture.

It is devoted rather to the abolition of material in all its aspects, to the abolition of time

and space.

Not to the civilization of the universe, but to the Los Angelization of the universe.

But don't think that because I put this thing off to a few thousand miles to the west that

it isn't here too.

A race of people you see who is not at home, doesn't love the environment, and is blind.

You can go to the mountains of the west, the most gorgeous valleys, and see cities put

up by people who obviously don't know where they are.

Huge billboards, weird and grotesque structures that absolutely are out of any kind of harmony

with the environment.

Expensive ugliness.

And so by this means, this is merely a symptom of the fact that we are destroying our planet.

And we are destroying it because we don't realize and have no awareness of the fact

that this planet is ourselves.

The earth is not merely our mother.

It's the close to our heart.

And closer still is the solar system in which the earth moves.

Closer still to our heart is the galaxy in which the solar system moves.

And the very heart of hearts is the whole system of universes and galaxies in which

we exist.

That is the middle of you, not something far off and remote.

And the conclusion of tonight's Alan Watts Lecture is Zen and the Limits of Explanation.

From the late Alan Watts, his lectures we bring you every Thursday between 6 and 7 here

on WFMU.