Alan Watts: A Coincidence of Opposites – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 16 – Host: Mark Watts

they've simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line because 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 [Music] welcome to being in the way the Alan Watts podcast I'm your host Mark watts and today we're going to be listening to Coincidence of opposites the first talk in a seminar called learning the human game it was given in 1965 at the University of Michigan in the next episode we'll hear part two of this seminar which hasn't been aired before and both of these talks are wonderful examples of my father speaking and working with a small group in this case psychology and philosophy grad students so here's Alan Watts in the first session of learning the human game Coincidence of opposites it's really a very unorthodox and unacademic thing to do the stop 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 uh shall we say axioms for living and I find that psychologists tend to be blind to these fundamental assumptions maybe it's true 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 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 that 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 is 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 her that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable nobody ever saw quests without troughs or troughs without crests just as you don't encounter in life people with France but no bags just as you don't encounter a coin that has the heads but no tails and although the heads and the tails the fronts and the backs the positives and the negatives are different they're at the same time one and one has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things can be inseparable that what is explicitly too 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 being and non-being then we get scared because you see the human awareness has a very odd mechanism I don't think mechanism is quite the right word but it'll do for the moment that is to say 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 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 there are all sorts of close work and it's like using a spotlight whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight now civilization and civilized human beings or maybe 5 000 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 can drive not to notice that because what we notice is what is noteworthy and we notice it in terms of notations 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 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 the inside what's inside goes on inside your skin is inseparable from what goes on outside your skin do you see that for example in the science of ecology one learns that a human being 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 they're 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 who has not updated his philosophy interpreted in terms of Newtonian mechanics he interprets the organism as something determined by the total environment and 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 uh 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 the existing universe is 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 now then that's the first step it seems to me in what I want to present to you but I called all this the human game or learning the human game and uh 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 want to discuss is existence serious like you said it doctor um after he's looked at your x-ray picture is it serious what does that mean means am I in danger of not continuing to survive the question is ought I to continue to survive in other words must I survive if life is serious then of course I must survive if it is not serious it really doesn't matter whether I do or I don't now in Western culture it is practically a basic assumption that existence is serious this is particularly particularly true among people who call themselves existentialists when they talk about a person who exists authentically they mean that he takes his life seriously and other people's lives seriously but the poet and SAS GK Chesterton once observed that the Angels fly because they take themselves lightly and if I may Venture into mythology if the Angels take themselves lightly how much more so the lord of the Angels but you see we have been brought up in a mythological context where the Lord God definitely does take himself seriously and is indeed the serious person so that when we go into church laughter is discouraged in the same way as it's discouraged in court this is a serious matter and everybody has to have the right expression on their faces because this is the great great authority figure this is Grandpa this is you know and we don't realize that he has a twinkle in his eye now therefore you see other mythologies under which the West has uh developed its culture our first of all the the first great mythology is that the universe is an expression of the very very serious purpose of the Lord God rather uncomfortable mythology as a matter of fact and people couldn't stand it imagine you're being watched all the time by your creator who loves you dearly but in the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you and who you never escape from his judgment you get the idea lots of preachers emphasize this you're under judgment the whole time and that this goes into modern existentialist Theory that the human being to be authentically human has to have ontological guilt but that's awful he watched all the time I know a very humorous convert to Catholicism and she's got in her toilet an old-fashioned toilet you know with a tank and a pipe going down to the John and uh on this pipe she has a little notice it shows an eye and underneath in Gothic lettering it says Thou God seized me well you know it just became too much so that at the end of the 18th century roughly the fashion began to change and we developed a new mythology and this one says the universe is not intelligent at all it has no presiding mind over it it's simply mechanism and the fact that there is intelligence in it at all is due to a fluke human beings just happen to evolve in the process of natural selection and uh they are it's a Pity in a way because you're something like a mouse caught in a cotton gin and uh if you're going to make your life comfortable you've got to fight the universe and make it submit to your own peculiar purposes but you're a foreigner in it even though you evolved out of it you're a fluke because the thing is actually witless it's a product of blind Energies and you see how this reflected itself in the various philosophies of the 19th century that constitute the common sense of most intelligent people in the 20th when Freud described the nature of the unconscious he gave it the name libido and that was a that was just name-calling libido meant something Lusty brutish definitely unintelligent and the process of psychotherapy uh from that point of view is very largely saying now in the pastimes you tried to train your animal and absurd urges by whipping it in the new days we are not going to do that we are going to give it lumps of sugar instead because we realize that the energies of the unconscious can't just be repressed they have to be respected but canalized in a constructive way so somehow some sort of compromise can be made between the Pleasure Principle and the reality principle but you see this was using a metaphor Freud used these two metabolts one that the unconscious is the horse and the ego is the rider the other is that the psychological construction of man is a system of hydraulics damming up repressing or letting the flow of free association come out all these are hydraulic metaphors and we have no evidence that the human psyche or the human nervous system is a hydraulic system but I mean these metaphors we have to use them because metaphors or myths are our tools for making sense of the world only just so long as we realize what we're doing and don't take them too seriously but you see when we substituted the mechanical metaphor for the Creator metaphor incidentally that's based on ceramics uh in the Book of Genesis the Lord God makes Adam Out of the Dust of the ground this is a Pottery business and then he breathes the breath of life into the nostrils of this figurine so everybody by taking that metaphor too literally they think the world is made that it's a construct and that somebody knows how it's done and it's natural for a child to ask its mother how was I made it's a very weird question but underneath both these metaphors is a definite feeling that the world is serious in the first one it's the serious purpose of God and you better not call it in question or you'll get angry with you you watch out you've got to be polite when you're associating with the Lord God very polite watch your p's and cues on the other hand the mechanical metaphor it's serious too it's an engineering job it's efficient I mean let's take something like a giraffe I'm to quote Chesterton again once he said it's one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin a creature that doesn't exist but it's of a much higher order to look at a rhinoceros a creature that does exist and looks as if it doesn't and so in the same way the giraffe with that long neck and all the spots over its skin some people always say about giraffes well there's nothing irrational about a giraffe it's got a long neck so that it can eat Branch it leaves off high trees and it spotteds us to disappear into the forest and not be seen by its enemies well I mean that's a sort of engineering conception of a giraffe other people would say it's slightly the same thing but in a different form just because there were creatures with long necks and spots they could eat better than creatures that didn't have lit necks that long in that kind of environment and because they were spotted they weren't seen by their enemies and so they survived but this still you see is an interpretation of the world that is based on the notion the myth that the one Instinct that everything has is to survive if the WASP didn't now uh this idea of an instinct to survive is similarly a Newtonian a mechanical and hydraulic idea when a creature exists it is at the same time surviving in other words things go on as long as they do go on and then they don't now explain that well we have to drag in something to explain and so we invent an instinct to survival which is a force that motivates this in the same way when a billiard ball moves it has to have a cue to hit it but actually you don't need that idea at all it's completely unnecessary it's a ghost you're not driven to survive you don't have drives as if they were something different from you it's all based on an Antiquated notion of causality you know when you have a exposing you have a very narrow slot in a wall and you look out of it and a cat goes by you see first the head of the cat and then there's a kind of blurred cylindrical experience and then the tail comes well you think look at that then the cat turns around and walks the other way and you see again the head comes first but from the right instead of the left and then it's followed by the tail cat turns around and comes back again you say well isn't that interesting every time I see the thing that we'll call head it is followed by the consequence called tail and this is cause and effect now actually if you actually could see beyond the narrow slot you would see the head and the tail aren't cause and effect they simply the cat they go together and where cats come with heads and the tails except man's cats which don't have much tail but never mind for ordinary purposes cats come with heads and tails you don't get a tail cat without a head or a head cat without a tail so we begin to see for more sophisticated point of view that events that were called causes and effects aren't two events it's all the same event and we are simply looking at it and chopping it up into two pieces for purposes of description we call the first part of it the cause and the second part the effect so with motivation an action is not different from its motivation it's all the same so who gets motivated by what see all this chopping up and distinguishing between the Act and the motivation is a creation of ghosts it's like saying it is raining what is it that is raining well of course it's the raining or a light flashed what is the difference between the light and the Flash or the flashing there is none unless you mean a flashlight flashed which is a little different but if you say the lightning flashed while lightning is flashing and to separate the lightning from the flashing is to introduce an unnecessary spook so then uh we came in to feeling that we are driven by the great instinct to survive and therefore you must survive it's about the only value anybody can agree on today survival value we want to survive I mean we just we don't want to just continue to exist but we want to exist fairly elegantly but you must go on so here here is the thing you see you must survive if I want to check out and I feel life is lousy and I but I mustn't because I'm responsible I have dependents and uh trying to support them take care of my uh mature commitments but you see the trouble is if you drag on to help your children your children will learn to drag on to help their children they'll go and survive compulsively too and teach everybody to do the same now look here what is survival I've said that survival is the same thing as being the thing is as long as it is and then it isn't that's Survival but it isn't something that you must do just in the same way look here if you said to a person in order to be human you must have a head is that a commandment or is it simply the expression of a state of affairs obviously it's a state of affairs we don't think people running around trying to have heads all right a mother says to a child you must have a bowel movement after breakfast every day the child gets it as a commandment darling try to go to sleep worse still you must love me in other words not of course all good children love their mothers and I don't want you to do it because I say so but because you really want to did you ever ask your husband or wife darling do you really love me and get the answer well I'm trying my best to do so foreign the confusion between the expression of a state of affairs and a commandment and as a result of that you get the situation we call the double bind which is in essence saying you are required to do something which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily now existence you see is something that is spontaneous the Chinese word for nature uh means that which happens of itself your hair grows by itself your heart beats by itself you breathe pretty much by itself your glands secrete their Essences by themselves you don't have voluntary control over these things so we say it happens spontaneously so when you go to sleep and you try to go to sleep you interfere with the spontaneous process of going to sleep try to breathe you know real hard and you find you get balled up in your breathing so if you're you've got to be human you just have to trust yourself to have bowel movements and go to sleep and digest your food of course if something goes seriously wrong and you need a surgeon that's another matter but by and large uh the healthy human being doesn't right from the start of Life need surgical interference and he lets it happen by him by itself though so with the whole picture that is fundamental to it you've got to let go and let it happen because if you don't you're going to be all clutched up you're going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only if you don't try but we have a strange anxiety in US that if we don't interfere it won't happen now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble 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 game now it's my contention my personal opinion this is my basic metaphysical Axiom shall we put it that way the 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 that 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 until 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 and how you can get from San Francisco to Honolulu faster then you can get from San Francisco to San Jose practically especially in Russia which is 60 miles away now that means San Francisco or Worse still Los Angeles and Honolulu become the same place and so the tourist says I wonder about going to Hawaii has it been spoiled yet the answer is yes it's become the same place as you're starting from there's no point going there for a vacation because it's just like going down the block that's the result you see of abolishing limitations of getting too compulsive so you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the turning 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 was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest [Music] and there would be composers who wrote only finale people go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord because that's the end say we're 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 uh 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 um 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 you've got high school and it's revving up the thing is coming then you're going to go to college and by Joe then you get into graduate school and when you're through with graduate school you'll go out to join the world and then you'll 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 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 by expectation look at the people who lived to retire and put those savings away if they cheated ourselves the whole way down the line because 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 but you had to do that thing you didn't let it happen and so for this in this way the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration let's take uh koshipski 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 so he predicts golf is 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 they're all going to fall apart by one way or another it might happen tomorrow might happen 50 years from now but it all comes apart in the end and people get worried about that they get anxious so what they're gained on the roundabout they lost on the swings so then 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 the play of all kinds of patterns we can look upon different creatures as we look at different games as we look at chess Checkers backgammon tennis was the tree game the beetle game the grass game or you can look at them as you look at different styles of music as Walters um Sonata etc etc all down the line there are all these different things doing their stuff and they're going to do today we know in different rivers and we're doing that if you were in a flying saucer the Mars or somewhere and you came and looked try and make out what was living on this world from about ten thousand 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 uh let in the late afternoon or early evening it would spit them all out again and they say well this thing if things breathes and it does it in a special Rhythm it goes in and out in and out in and out once every 24 hours but then it rests today and doesn't spit so much it spits in a different way as a kind of irregularity and then it starts spitting all over again the same way why I say that's very interesting that's this kind of thing we have see this is something that goes this way just like uh music did you ever see a lady go this way go that way that's what it does and when people uh 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's telling them what to do it I'd go uh they like to make rhythms they listen to music they dance or they sing or they do something of a rhythmic nature playing cards or bowling raising their elbows you've been listening to Alan Watts in a talk from the seminar learning the human game this one was the first session Coincidence of opposites and this podcast was co-produced with the ramdas beaker Now podcast Network further information about the spoken word recordings of Alan Watts please visit Alan watts.org and also thank you to moment records for use of our theme music by Zakir Hussein from his rhythm experience album again I'm Mark Watts this has been being in the way and you'll find more information at the Alan watts.org website [Music] [Applause] thank you foreign [Music]

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Keywords: alan watts, mysticism, mystic, psychology, dharma talk, dharma talks, bhnn, be here now podcasts, be here now podcast network, bhnn podcasts, spiritualty, alan watts podcast, be here now network, mark watts, being in the way podcast, karma podcast, alan watts talk, alan watts lecture, be here now, daoism, daoist way, being in the way, ram dass podcast network

Id: R9_Put1v3p0

Length: 41min 18sec (2478 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022