===== 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.
So
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
or
thusness.
Actually
Tathata
is
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
Da
but
Da
doesn't
mean
anything.
Da
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
do
you
mean
by
bad music
always
expresses
something
other
than
itself
like
the
overture
or
the
sunken
cathedral
good music
never
talks
about
anything
other
than
the
music
if
you
ask
Bach
what
is
your
meaning
you
say
listen
that's
the
meaning
giraffes
are
giraffing
trees
are
treeing
stars
are
starring
clouds
are
clouding
rain
is
raining
and
if
you
don't
understand
look
at
it
again
and
people
are
people
wow
we
notice
that
all
these
suchnesses
appear
and
disappear
they
keep
changing
they
come
and
they
go
but
if
you
get
hung
up
on
your
particular
form
I'll
have
to
alter
the
language
a
little
bit
because
you
see
your
form
makes
a
what
you
are
doing
now
you
think
for
some
strange
reason
I
must
make
that
go
on
as
long
as
possible
and
therefore
you
think
you
have
an
instinct
to
survive
and
so
the
only
thing
anybody
can
agree
about
today
so
far
as
the
discussion
of
ethical
and
moral
problems
are
concerned
is
that
we
ought
to
survive
and
but
when
you
say
to
yourself
you
must
go
on
living
you
put
yourself
in
a
double
bind
because
you
said
to
a
process
which
is
essentially
spontaneous
that
it
must
happen
and
the
basic
form
of
the
double
bind
which
is
imposed
upon
all
children
is
you
are
required
to
do
that
which
will
be
acceptable
only
if
you
do
it
voluntarily
so
when
we
say
to
ourselves
you
the
reason
is
you
see
that
we
are
not
living
in
the
eternal
now
where
reality
is
we
are
always
thinking
that
the
satisfaction
of
life
will
be
coming
later
there's
a
good
time
coming
be it
ever
so
far
away
that
one
far
off
divine
event
to
which
all
creation
moves
don't
kid
yourself
as
the
Hindus
have
taught
us
in
the
course
of
time
everything
gets
worse
eventually
falls
apart
comes
Kali
Yuga
and
Shiva
at
the
end
and
boom
which
is
to
say
only
suckers
put
hope
in
the
future
you
see
I
tell
you
there
are
three
classes
of
people
in
the
western
world
the
aristocrats
the
proletariat
and the
bourgeoisie
the
aristocrats
live on
the
past
because
they
come
of
noble
family
and
they
are
like
potatoes
because
the
best
part
of
them
is
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
to
a
con
game
so
when
they
find
out
that
really
there
isn't
much
of a
future
you're
going
to
die
they
transpose
the
future
into
a
spiritual
dimension
and
they
figure
this
material
world
is not
the
real
world
but
the
spiritual
world
is the
real
world
and
there
will
be
somewhere
somehow
an
eternal
life
for
me
a
charge
to
keep
I
have
a
god
to
glorify
and
never
dying
soul
to
save
and
fit
it
for
the
sky
well
and
they
say
to
them
what
are
you
going
to
do
there
well
they
have
the
faintest
idea
you
know
that
if
you
ask
theologians
about
what
they
think
is
going
to
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?
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.
For a cassette copy of this program, call 1-800-969-2887, which is 1-800-W-O-WATTS.
Or send $10, with your name and address, to The Electronic University, P.O. Box 2309, San
Anselmo, California, 94979.
When you write, please include the name of your local station.
Ask for tape number 1, Myth of Myself.
You'll also receive the program, Who Am I?, which is included on the tape.
If you have any comments about the program or would like further information about the
spoken works of Alan Watts, please write us at the same address.
The Electronic University, P.O. Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.
The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by The Electronic University.
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.
Like
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
as
immoral
if not
more so
than
they
are
today.
Because
you see
all
this
fixed
notion
of
God
is
idolatry.
If
thou
shalt
not
make
to
thyself
any
graven
image
of
anything
that
is
in
the
heaven
above
etc.
The
most
dangerous
and
pernicious
images
are not
those
made
of
wood
or
stone
nobody
takes
those
seriously
they're
the
images
made
of
imagination
and
conception
and
thought
and that
is why
in the
fundamental
approach
to
the
Godhead
both
the
Christian
I
God
it
is
necessary
to
go
by
the
way
of
remotion
of
saying
what
God
is
not
since
God
by
his
immensity
exceeds
every
conception
to
which
our
intellect
can
attain
so
then
when
of
the
Godhead
the
Hindu
says
all
that
can
truly
be
said
is
neti
not
this
not
this
and
when
the
buddhist
uses
such
on
comparative
religion
that
I've
read
by
various
theologians
say
this
is
terrible
negativism
this
is
nihilism
but
he
doesn't
realize
that
it's
nothing
of
the
kind
if
for
example
you
have
a
window
on
which
there's
a
fine
painting
of
the
sun
your
act
of
faith
in
the
real
sun
will
be
to
scrape
that
off
so
that
you
window
of
the
mind
need
scraping
off
because
otherwise
they
become
idolatrous
they
become
substitutes
for the
reality
now
I'm
hoping
that
this
sort
of
understanding
will
issue
from
god
is
dead
theology
I'm
not
quite
sure
whether
it's
going
to
because
as
a
matter
of
fact
there
are
precedents
within
the
christian
tradition
for
an
intelligent
god
is
dead
theology
for
what
I
would
call
atheism
in
the
name
of
god
or
agnosticism
in
the
name
of
god
the
word
agnostic
has
a
curious
history
based
on
the
greek
word
agnosia
which
we
used
to
translate
into
english
as
unknowing
and
there's
a
very
interesting
mystical
treatise
of
the
fourteenth
century
called
the
cloud
of
unknowing
showing
how
the
highest
form
of
been
left
behind
where
in
other
words
one
completely
let
go
of
clinging
to
god
and
this
was
the
supreme
act
of
faith
so
that
you
don't
any
longer
need
an
image
because
this
gets
in
the
way
of
the
reality
but
the
moment
you
insist
on
an
image
then
you
have
the
church
as
life
is
given
to
the
world
but
the
church
doesn't
want
to
be
broken
up
by
joven
now
it
goes
around
canvassing
for
new
members
see
the
difference
between
a physician
and a
clergyman
is this
the
physician
wants
to get
rid
of
his
patients
and
he
gives
them
medicine
and
he
hopes
they
won't
get
hooked
on
the
medicine
whereas
the
clergyman
is
usually
forced
to
make
his
patients
become
addicts
so
that
be
sick
people
and
the
clergy
also
need
faith
in
turnover
get
rid
of
your
congregations
say
now
you've
heard
all
I've
got
to
tell
you
go
away
if
you
want
to
get
together
for
making
celestial
whoopee
which
is
worship
all
right
but
don't
I
used
to
when
I
was
a
chaplain
in
the
university
I
used
to
tell
the
students
that
if
they
came
to
church
out
of
a
sense
of
duty
they
weren't
wanted
they
would
be
skeletons
at
the
feast
would
be
much
better
if
they
went
swimming
or
stayed
in
bed
because
we
were
going
to
celebrate
the
Holy
Communion
and
I
meant
celebrate
but
somehow
or
other
you
see
we
take
religion
in
a
kind
of
dead
earnest
I
remember
when
I
was
a
boy
at
school
how
wicked
it
was
to
laugh
in
church
we
don't
realize
and
as
Dante
said
in
the
paradiso
when
he
heard
the
song
of
the
angels
it
sounded
like
the
laughter
of
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
so
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
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


===== 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
is
it would be
very bad
indeed
if God
were the author
of evil
and we
were his
victims
that is to say
if we keep
the model
of the king
of the universe
and the creatures
are all subjects
of the king
then
a God
who is responsible
for evil
is being very
unkind
to other people
but in this theory
God is not
another person
there are no
victims of God
he's never
anything but
his own victim
you are responsible
and if you want
to stay
in the state
of illusion
stay in it
but you can
always wake up


===== 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
I.
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
of
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
as
the laughter
of the universe
and this sense
of nonsense
as
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
of
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
of
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
like
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
of
falde riddle
iddo
and hey
nonny
and all
those
babbling
choruses
why is it
that when
we get
hep
with jazz
we
just go
boo dee
boo and so
on
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
to
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
so if
i may
start
by
insulting
your
intelligence
with
what
is
called
the
most
elementary
lesson
the
thing
that
we
should
have
learned
before
we
learned
one
two
three
and
ABC
but
somehow
was
overlooked
now
this
lesson
is
quite
simply
this
that
any
experience
that we
have
through
our
senses
whether
of
sound
or
of
light
or
of
touch
is
a
vibration
and
a
vibration
has
two
aspects
one
called
on
and
the
other
called
off
vibration
seems
to be
propagated
in
waves
and
every
wave
system
has
crests
and
it
has
troughs
and
so
life
is
a
system
of
now
you
see
it
now
you
don't
and
these
two
aspects
always
go
together
for
example
sound
is
not
pure
sound
it
is
a
rapid
alternation
of
sound
and
silence
and
that's
simply
the
way
things
are
only
you
must
remember
that
the
crest
and
the
trough
of
a
wave
are
inseparable
nobody
ever
saw
crests
without
troughs
or
troughs
without
crests
just
as
you
don't
encounter
in
life
people
with
fronts
but
no
backs
just
as
you
don't
encounter
a
coin
that
has
heads
but
no
tails
and
although
the
heads
and
the
tails
the
fronts
and
the
notion
that
different
things
can
be
inseparable
that
what
is
explicitly
two
can
at
the
same
time
be
implicitly
one
if
you
forget
that
very
funny
things
happen
if
therefore
we
forget
you
see
that
black
and
white
are
inseparable
and
that
existence
is
constituted
equivalently
by
and
we
have
to
play
a
game
called
uh-oh
black
might
win
and
once
we
get
into
the
fear
that
black
the
negative
side
might
win
we
are
compelled
to
play
the
game
but
white
must
win
and
from
that
start
all
our
troubles
because
you
see
the
human
awareness
is
a
we
have
as
a
species
specialized
in a
certain
kind
of
awareness
which
we
call
conscious
attention
and
by
this
we
have
the
faculty
of
examining
the
details
of
life
very
closely
we
can
restrict
our
gaze
and
it
corresponds
somewhat
to
the
peripheral
field
I
mean
the
central
field
of
vision
in
the
eyes
we
have
central
vision
we
have
peripheral
vision
central
vision
is
that
which
we
use
for
reading
for
all
sorts
of
close
work
and
it's
like
using
a
spotlight
whereas
peripheral
vision
is more
like
using
a
flood
light
now
civilization
and
civilized
human
beings
for
maybe
years
maybe
much
longer
have
learned
to
specialize
in
concentrated
attention
even
if a
person's
attention
span
is
short
he
is
as
it
were
wavering
his
spotlight
over
many
fields
the
price
which
we
pay
for
specialization
in
conscious
attention
is
ignorance
of
everything
outside
its
field
I
would
rather
say
ignorance
than
ignorance
because
if you
concentrate
on a
figure
you
tend
to
ignore
the
background
you
tend
therefore
to
see
the
world
in a
disintegrated
aspect
you
take
separate
things
and
events
seriously
imagining
that
these
really
do
exist
when
actually
they
have
the
same
kind
of
existence
as
an
individual's
interpretation
of a
Rorschach
plot
they're
what you
make
out
of it
in
fact
our
physical
world
is a
system
of
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
of
notation
numbers
words
images
what is
notable
noteworthy
notated
noticed
is what
appears to
us to be
significant
and the
rest is
ignored
as
insignificant
and as
a result
of that
we
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
by
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
of
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
of
recorded
time
first
is
who
started
it
the
second
is
are
we
going
to
make
it
the
third
is
where
are
we
going
to
put
it
and
the
fourth
is
who's
going
to
clean
up
when
you
think
these
over
it
poses
a
fifth
question
is
it
serious
and
that's
the
one
I
x-ray
picture
is
it
serious
what
does
that
mean
means
am
I
in
danger
of
not
continuing
to
survive
but
the
basis
of
it
all
is
this
then
if
we
say
you
must
survive
or
I
must
survive
life
is
earnest
and
I've
got
to
go
on
then
your
life
is
a
drag
and
not
a
way
that
existence
the
physical
universe
is
basically
playful
there
is
no
necessity
for
it
whatsoever
it
isn't
going
anywhere
that
is
to
say
it
doesn't
have
some
destination
that
it
ought
to
arrive
at
but
it
is
best
understood
by
analogy
with
music
because
music
as
an
art
form
is
essentially
playful
we
say
you
play
the
piano
you
don't
work
the
piano
why
music
differs
from
say
travel
when
you
travel
you
are
trying
to
get
somewhere
and
of
course
we
because
being
a
very
compulsive
and
purposive
culture
are
busy
getting
everywhere
faster
and
faster
and
faster
till
we
eliminate
the
distance
between
places
I
mean
with
the
modern
jet
travel
you
can
arrive
almost
instantaneously
what
happens
as a
result
of that
is
that
the
two
ends
of
your
journey
become
the
same
place
so
you
eliminate
the
distance
and
you
eliminate
the
journey
because
the fun
of the
journey
is to
travel
not
to
obliterate
traveling
so
then
in
music
though
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
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
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
kindergarten
you
know
and
that's
a
great
thing
because
when
you
finish
that
you
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
high
school
and
it's
revving
up
the
thing
is
coming
then
you're
going to
go to
college
and
by
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
up
one
day
about
forty
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
by
expectation
look
the
people
who
live
to
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
go
and
rot
in
an
old
people
senior
citizens
community
because
we
simply
cheated
ourselves
the
whole
way
down
the
line
we
thought
of
life
by
analogy
with
a
journey
with
a
pilgrimage
which
had
a
serious
purpose
at
the
end
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
but
you
had
to
do
that
thing
you
didn't
let
it
called
man
a
time
binder
that
means
that
he's
the
animal
peculiarly
aware
of
the
time
sequence
and
as
a
result
of
this
is
able
to
do
some
very
remarkable
things
he
can
predict
he
studies
what's
happened
in
the
past
and
he
says
the
chances
are
so
and
so
of
that
happening
again
and
so
he
predicts
also
it's
very
useful
to
be
able
to
predict
because
that
has
survival
value
but
at
the
same
time
it
creates
anxiety
you
pay
for
this
increased
survival
ability
involved
in
prediction
by
knowing
that
in
the
end
you
won't
succeed
you're
all
going
to
fall
apart
by
one
way
or
another
it
if
you
see
on
the
other
hand
that
existence
this
is
as
I
said
my
basic
metaphysical
assumption
which
I
won't
conceal
from
you
that
existence
is
musical
in
nature
that
is
to
say
that
it
is
not
serious
it
is
a
play
of
all
kinds
of
patterns
we
can
look
upon
different
creatures
as
we
look
at
different
games
as
we
look
at
chess
checkers
back
gammon
tennis
the
tree
game
the
beetle
game
the
grass
game
or
you
can
look
at
them
as
you
look
at
different
styles
of
music
mazurkas
waltzes
sonata
etc
all down
the
line
they're
all
these
different
things
doing
their
stuff
and
they're
going
to
do
you
know
in
different
rivers
and
we're
doing
that
if
you
were
in a
flying
saucer
from
Mars
or
somewhere
and
came
and
looked
trying
to
make
out
what
was
living
on
this
world
from
about
10,000
feet
at
night
or
early
morning
you
would
see
these
great
ganglia
with
tentacles
going
out
all
over
the
place
and
early
in
the
morning
you
see
little
blobs
of
luminous
particles
going
into
the
middle
of
them
see
and
then
in
the
late
afternoon
or
early
evening
it
would
spit
them
all
out
in
and
out
in
and
out
once
every
hours
but
then
it
rests
a
day
and
doesn't
spit
so
much
it
spits
in
a
different
way
that's
a
when
you
think
a bit
what
people
really
want
to
do
with
their
time
what
do
they
do
when
they're
not
being
pushed
around
and
somebody
is
telling
them
what
to
do
they like
to
go
they like
to make
rhythms
they
listen
to
music
they
dance
or
they
sing
or
that's
the
nature
of
this
whole
thing
we're
in
you
see
it
likes
to
swing
that's
why
it
does
it