Alan Watts: Aesthetics and Mystical Vision – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 14 – Hosted by Mark Watts

so you and I have all conspired with ourselves to pretend that we are not really God [Laughter] of course we are that's perfectly obvious we are all apertures through which the universe is looking at itself only it is so arranged that we don't know that in exactly the same way as we don't look directly at our own eyes foreign [Music] to being in the way the Alan Watts podcast and I'm your host Mark watts and today we're going to hear a talk that was recorded in 1972. on December 13th at the new College of Sausalito total is landscape soundscape and painting music and mystical vision it's a delightful look at the Arts Aesthetics and Buddhist and Taoist philosophy so here's Alan Watts at the new College in landscape soundscape and painting music and mystical vision now let me see this was announced as landscape soundscape in painting music and mystical Vision that was what it was to be about hahaha now we don't realize that for perhaps thousands of years the art of painting and the Art of sculpture were iconographic that is to say they served mainly religious purposes there was no such thing as what we now call fine art all art was as functional and made objects to serve the supports for contemplation or for ritual or magical purposes and so if you go to a museum of any kind of ancient art almost everything that you will see will be uh something of religious or magical function and these consist principally of Effigies of human or Divine animal figures in painting of course you cannot see a figure without a background and as a matter of fact that's also true of sculpture but we consider the background in sculpture irrelevant because it is not something which the artist himself has created it's the temple or Museum or place in which it is shown but when you paint and especially when you paint on a rectangular surface instead of a surface that is shaped along with the figure so that the outline of the figure is also the frame when you paint you have to put in some kind of a background now uh if you've seen a Greek or Russian icons the background is solid gold often emblazoned with jewels But as time went on painters began to put landscape in the background because that's the way you see people they must be against something and in due course Western painters began to be fascinated with the background and they said to the figure move over and then there were landscapes but of course the people who looked at them and weren't used to this kind of thing said well that's not what I call a painting but in time they got used to it so used to it that in fact in every National Park you will find a place called Inspiration Point where it's a great view Everybody Wants A Room With a View and when all the tourists from Kansas and Iowa get there they say oh it's just like a picture that's a very mysterious thing is happening here what was it that intrigued painters about mountains trees clouds and rivers why did they feel they were beautiful why suddenly did they get this vision that these were things that were worth copying now painters uh were falling in love with the non-symmetrical how the human form although Wiggly is more or less symmetrical we uh so we look as if we had been folded down the middle because we have an ERI on either side two ears some of us part our hair in the middle and there were two arms two legs although we're not symmetrical inside two testicles two breasts or whatever you may be equipped with but you do look pretty symmetrical but uh clouds don't then there's another thing we worry about our Behavior a great deal and we talk about good behavior and bad behavior sane behavior and crazy behavior and artificial behavior and natural behavior and we are into a big thing about this but the painter doesn't worry about the behavior of clouds or of spraying water or rocks it would be unimaginable to accuse a wave of making an aesthetic mistake nobody has ever I think in history drawn an objection to a badly formed cloud and only once in history was there a complaint about the Stars and this was a Frenchman in the 18th century who criticized the good Lord for not arranging the stars in fine geometrical patterns that would be edifying to the intellect but had instead scattered them at random across the sky that was the period when people were making formal Gardens were making tulips form Falls and were clipping trees and hedges in a very formal topiary work so that trees look like birds and sundials and all sorts of things and the garden was laid out in squares and this is a very curious thing because we still tend to do that to some extent when you fly across the United States from San Francisco to New York you encounter first a long stretch of Mountain Country where human beings must be force a cord with nature except in some parts of Nevada and Utah but by and large all our roads are curly because they have to go along mountain valleys there are curly rivers and wonderful washes which interestingly enough are in the form of trees uh the river and the tree are the same shape so it's really fascinating and they go different directions the tree goes up and the river goes down but actually a tree flows up because there's a flow of sap and the flow of liquid is the flow of life if you study water flow you get what is really basic to Nature there's a marvelous book about this by Theodore schwenk and it's called sensitive chaos and is published by the Rudolf Steiner house in London and it is a series of photographs with commentary of the way in which water flows under all sorts of conditions and then it goes on that to patterns of fire which are essentially the same but flowing up and then to patterns of the Grain in wood which are as it were a sculpture memorializing the flow of water then to patterns of Bones of muscle and finally to human painting abstract painting in particular the painting of the arabesque and Celtic illumination where everything is based on the patterns of the flow of water blood is basically water a little thicker I mean after all you are 90 water and uh that is really miraculous yes but it's the water it is the gravitational flow of water that is the life in us all energy is gravity and that is the real meaning of E equals m c squared so uh louder writing a little before 400 BC pointed out that the course of nature the Dao is like water in that although being extremely soft it overcomes all hard things and in being weak is extremely strong and that it always seeks the lowest level which men abhor and especially in our culture to go with nature to take the line of least resistance is considered unmanly weak need spineless and altogether wrong and we are all brought up to be energetic that is to say to use Force and then if anyone who isn't using Force say in school is reported on by the teachers as lacking aggression and not being uh upstanding uh this is really very weird and I adore you in thinking about human affairs always call Common Sense in question it is the most creative path in philosophy take ideas which are commonly accepted and which seem to be incontrovertible and question them turn them backwards and see what would happen if they were thought about the other way I give you an example everybody automatically assumes that the present is the result of the past turn it round and consider whether the past may not be the result of the present whether the past may not be streaming back from now like uh the contrail of a plane and then if you look at it that way it all makes sense only you see that just as the tail doesn't Wag the Dog the past doesn't cause the present unless you insist that it does and then uh well then that's your that's your trip but actually uh the the whole universe emerges from the present right now it's all beginning now we are present at this moment at the beginning of creation and the past is Echoes going back echoes in the corridors of your mind and the past is in fact present that is to say in terms of monuments that survive now in terms of memories that survive now and so on books are the records because you see the universe is a vibration although it seems to us to be still and something like a rock like Mount Tamil pies has been around for a long time but we are not normally aware of the fact that Tamil pies is an extremely fast vibration so fast that we can't see the intervals between the vibrations because the retina retains impressions in such a way that when you see a light uh going at 60 Cycles you can't see the intervals between the Cycles the on off but you can with an arc light and when you listen to an extremely deep sound you can hear the rattle in it when you get down to oh you can hear the rattle you can hear it going on and off on and off on and off but if it goes very fast you get up to you can't hear it but actually everything is going on and off it's going yeah yeah because it's an electronic performance and so the world is coming at you like a movie and it's all coming out of space see the stars vibrate out of space if the world in his space there couldn't be any stars couldn't be any Galaxy and so it is something is now coming out of nothing because nothing is perfectly obviously the root of something you can't have something without nothing just as you can't have a baby without a womb so there is a hollow and the hollow as laozza points out is the origin of the solid or in a way you might say they come into being together louder says to be and not to be arise mutually and that's the basis of the eging the book of changes Yang principle and the yin principle create each other because they are likened to the South and North sides of a mountain the South Side in the Sun the North in the shade and perfectly obviously you can't have a mountain with one side only although human beings who do not perceive this principle are always trying to have the Yang without the Yin they want the light without the dark the good without the bad the pleasurable without the painful the something without the nothing the life without the death and this is of course profoundly illogical so then all this has however in it pattern and this pattern is revealed basically in the flow of water and how it behaves and this is I think why artists copied it because in water it has shown that the Dao of the course of nature never makes an aesthetic mistake the fellow of course who complained to God that the stars were badly arranged didn't have uh a correct view of the Galaxy we are in the galaxy and close by it does indeed look as if the stars were just randomly scattered but if you go away to a tremendous distance you will see that this galaxy is beautifully formed as a double helix and we can see that with many other distant galaxies although they have varying shapes lots of them are these magnificent double helixes this pattern as when you clasp your hands together and you'll see that that is the same basic pattern as that of sexual intercourse in other words the one node is chasing the other and they're going you know in a spiral oh chasing after each other and the one node doesn't know itself except in terms of the other one and you would not be aware of the sensation of self unless at the same time you were aware of the sensation of something other now that's very interesting if you can't have self without other or Yang without Yin or front without back all the knowledge of voluntary action without the experience of what involuntarily happens then it indicates that there's a conspiracy going on in other words these two are different but uh esoterically and secretly the same only when you know that you have a problem this is why one could say that being enlightened in the Buddhist sense of the word is a sort of calamity because you found out the ruse which you were playing on yourself you found out that the universe is a system which creeps up on itself and says boo and then laughs at itself for jumping in other words it is a self-surprising arrangement so as to avoid the monotony and boredom of knowing everything in advance so you and I have all conspired with ourselves to pretend that we are not really God [Laughter] of course we are that's perfectly obvious we are all apertures through which the universe is looking at itself only it is so arranged that we don't know that in exactly the same way as we don't look directly at our own eyes we don't hear our hearing and uh so on there's always a blind spot they take your head for example is marvelously invisible now you can't even see it in the form of a black blob in the middle of everything it isn't black it isn't even fuzzy it's just plain not there from the standpoint of sight and yet out of that emptiness you see just as the stars shine out of the emptiness of space all right now I want to go back to the Watercourse character of the formations that emerge in space they all wiggle just as the roads wiggle until you get to Denver but after Denver where the country is flat and the people likewise to some extent everything goes straight everything is rectangles Everything is euclidean Everything is straightened out squared away and so we have a kind of a passion a compulsion to straighten things out they said let's get this straightened out why I would say it wouldn't it be more fun not to have it straightened out but rather to be made curvaceous but it says on the road dangerous curves and uh somehow that's dangerous women have dangerous curves and for that reason attractive I mean they did for a time try to straighten women out we may if you look at photographs of fashions in the 1920s they flattened their breasts and wore dresses that went clunk and hats that went boom you know and they they became straight women and it was a terrible era and uh people we call straights or squares you see are of this mentality they don't wiggle all that say they don't swing for example the fundamental movement of dancing is where the hips can move independently of the shoulders say the shoulders remain still and the hips wiggle well a lot of people think that's obscene and won't do it man in England wouldn't dream of making a motion like that because it would be improper I mean old boy you've got to keep a stiff upper lip and do the jolly old thing but uh don't uh don't uh behave like a hula dancer but when you watch Hindu dancing you see their arms too are going in that Rhythm and they look as if they were in water like water plants moving in a current and uh lots of us think that that is extremely beautiful really Wiggly human behavior it still gets us back to water it still gets us back to what it is that fascinates artists about landscape well now then there was an evolution Beyond this point in the history of Art the artist got together and said why do we have to copy what clouds and trees and water are doing why can't we do it ourselves why don't we create works of nature and so they did they experimented with people like Jackson Pollock in Dripping paint on canvas and actually letting this Watercourse thing happen without copying anything Gordon Onslow Ford who's a local painter has been doing that for years only a slightly different technique but essentially the same thing uh all kinds of painters they say Mark Toby he looked at Chinese writing in the cursive Style we are Chinese writing is the flow of the brush and when you do it fast in long hand is distinct from print what they call in Japan gyosho you get these amazing Rivers dancing on paper and Mark Toby saw that and introduced white writing and did the most marvelous paintings but he discovered that you had to be in a certain state in order to achieve this because it was something fundamentally different between fine abstract painting and mere Miss a lot of people thought oh any child could do that and so they they set out to make uh abstract paintings which nobody was interested in they were just terrible and some people took typewriters and hit them several times with a sledgehammer and then mounted them on a cubic block of Walnut and said Opus 14 you know foreign but other people for no explainable reason nobody could possibly figure it out but it was obvious that Mark Toby was not a phony but it's impossible to explain why just in the same way as it is impossible to explain why the patterns in water and clouds and mountains are beautiful now you'll get courses in Aesthetics where somebody takes a landscape and draws a lot of triangles all over it and says you see the reason why this is a good landscape is that it holds your eye in a certain pattern and you go from here to here to here to here and that satisfactory this is just geometry this is absolute foolishness nobody knows and cannot possibly say why a mountain is beautiful in art school where they try to teach one to do beautiful things they all eventually find it's perfectly unteachable and if it were teachable it would be terrible because if thousands of Rembrandts and uh Leonardo's and picassos would be emerging from Art School and everybody would say oh it's his old hat why not let's have something new or same way in music school you can't teach music you what you can teach is how to play an instrument how to read notations and things the technical things like that but you cannot really teach what to do with the instrument What notes to write you can copy the Old Masters but you're still just copying when Bach wrote music he really invented the laws of Harmony and everybody studies Bach to find out what the laws of Harmony are it's like language comes long before grammar eventually grammarians I mean a child doesn't learn grammar before it learns English the child picks up The Language by ear and then afterwards goes to school and is amazed and horrified to discover that this language has grammar and lots of languages in the world lots of peoples didn't know they had grammar until anthropologists told them and discovered the rules of their so-called primitive languages so the artist doesn't really know what constitutes Beauty and he doesn't know this for exactly the same reason that you and I cannot see our own heads and do not know how our brains work even the greatest neurologists don't know how the brain works and they're the first people to admit it they don't know how they manage to be conscious they don't know how they make decisions it just happens in the same way as you can move your fingers without knowing any physiology you just do it so in the same way the artist manages to create the Beautiful so therefore one may suppose that when uh spontaneous painting has become really understood by the great masses that people will walk down city streets and there will be a filthy old brick wall somewhere covered with scraps of torn off posters and bird droppings and scratches and they'll stop and look and say oh it's just like a picture because the artists you see has the function of teaching one to see now then let's look at it in music western music we'll discuss first we're not really going into the Orient yet was very formal I mean look at a western concert what a ritual it is you know all these ladies and gentlemen wearing black clothes sitting in a great semicircle and uh then the conductor arrives and there's a tremendous hullabaloo and uh bows and uh motions the orchestra then suddenly he was ready to go see and then this thing starts up well first of all it's on a regular beat say it's four four times six eight time or whatever it may be but it's all on basically on a regular beat and so to Oriental ears it sounds like a military March even if it be sentimental in melodic form but everything is one two one two three and four over to the window and back to the door is all that and very serious you don't see Orchestra members laughing at each other as you do say in a Hindu Orchestra very serious they're up there and they are doing the thing that's what you're supposed to listen to see that's the object going on and so likewise they they they want to suppress in as far as possible all other sounds the audience must be silent they don't want coughing blowing noses shuffling of feet anything like that because there is a thing to listen to and so in the same way in radio Studios and Television Studios what the links they go to to pretend that they're not on the radio not in the television studio is in fantastic you're covered with soundproof walls and somebody looks at a clock and it's like countdown for a rocket going off and says standby everybody has to be silent and then he points at the main speaker go and it would be a terrible faux pas for another television camera to be seen on the camera that is transmitting the signal but I have a wrestled with television stations and told them that this is an abomination that we've got going television in the round whether a camera's all around so that we can have a group uh of discussion people sitting in a ring and doing all sorts of things or we could have dances in which uh you would see the other cameras but so what who cares so likewise when you're listening to the radio although it's done in a perfectly silent Studio suddenly a truck goes by or a jet plane goes over or somebody burps or you've got a crackling fire so what's all this about eliminating exterior noise incidentally if you've got any old records that have scratches on them and they they make funny noises when just put them on and imagine that you're sitting in front of a fireplace and they the sound comes through quite clearly it's no problem so then there was an extraordinary eccentric called John Cage it was a good friend of mine and uh he used to he was a very competent musician oh I mean Juilliard and all that he knew it all and uh so he first of all experimented with uh opening up the piano and attaching paper clips nails and washers to the strings so that they made very unusual noises then he played regular set pieces of various kinds but with what he called a prepared piano then he got weirder he decided that he would set up in a row 12 radios and each one would have an operator and according to a series of intervals derived from playing with the Aging they would turn the radios on and off all arranged on different stations and so you've got this extraordinary Babel then he got 8 impex tape recorders and recorded all kinds of funny sounds the street sounds people washing uh uh airport sounds any kind of funny stuff and then he played them all at once well then he got another idea which was uh to get an enormous amount of miscellaneous noise and to play it in an art gallery where people were Milling around and record The Happening itself the noise made by the audience in reaction to all the noise he had prepared originally then he played that back to them and re-recorded their reaction to it and then played that back then he hit a real one he gave a formal concert in New York I was one of the important Halls Carnegie Hall is a man and he appeared beautifully dressed and white tie and Tails and with an assistant to turn the pages of the score grand piano everything formally set up but the score consisted entirely of rests and it had it had a is a key signature and repeat places where you turn the page back and he sat down at the piano and waited through the proper time of the thing while the man turned the page no and the audience began to titter and Shuffle and cough and sneeze at the point of the performance was however for the audience to listen to itself he didn't explain this but the word got around that that was the idea now we'll see what he was doing he was drawing attention to soundscape just as landscape is the natural background of people and buildings and so on so the background of music is soundscape which is what I would call the susurus of sound going on all over the place well now there's a certain importance to all this and to understand it we have to go to Chinese philosophy the Chinese developed landscape long before we did oh as early as 700 A.D the very least there were landscape painters in China and as and when human figures appeared in landscape they're very tiny because they always saw a man in the context of nature they did not see man as the ruler of nature or something independent of nature they didn't see the organism except in relation to its environment they had also a different concept of perspective [Music] see our Convention of perspective is that Things become smaller as they are far away from you that is to say less important huh and uh there's a famous story about this well several stories for that matter um a lot of people when we show them a perspective drawing who don't belong to our culture they just don't comprehend it at all but they say the tree there in the distance is not that small in relation to Something in the foreground they just don't see it and once when a GI was visiting Picasso during the liberation of France he said uh he could not understand his paintings why does you paint a person looking from the side and from the front at the same time and Picasso said do you have a girlfriend he said yes have you got a picture with you he said yes he pulled out his wallet and showed a photograph of his girlfriend and Picasso looked at it in astonishment and said is she so small laughs so you realize therefore that um what we think is art depends to an enormous extent on convention now in Chinese painting there are at least two Vanishing points as a rule we'll take a full landscape painting where the entire silk or paper is filled and the things that are distant tend to be not diminished towards the vanishing point in the center but to be higher on the paper and things close at the bottom and so you get this convention of painting on a scroll now also the Chinese make full use of the paper we tend not to especially in our more conventional Style um I don't think we have a conventional painting here but the thing is that when you go into a motel you will very often find that over your bed is a flower painting and it will be a bunch of flowers smack in the middle of a white sheet now this is very curious because that renders the background null it turns it into mere background but a Chinese painter would never do that if he drew a spray of bamboos on a rectangular surface he would put them right over to one side and then he would vitalize the empty space because it would appear to you to be water or mist not paper he might bring that out with a few hints just a single line Thin Line indicating a wavelet a ripple then at once that whole blank area is alive he balances it against what is drawn so it becomes the end to the end there was another Chinese painter who was a Zen Monk and uh the way he liked the paint was to drink lots of sake wine and when he was sufficiently drunk he would dangle his hair in ink and then slosh it right down the strip of paper then he'd wash it out his hair I mean then in the morning when he'd recovered from being drunk he would take a long look at this squishel and he'd do a raw shark on it and would it last see a landscape and then he'd take his brush and just fill in a few necessary details and immediately there was this magnificent landscape Leonardo da Vinci did the same thing he'd look at dirty old walls and watch them until his eidetic vision brought out an extremely Vivid picture then all you'd have to do was to fill in the details like you do when you wake up in the morning sometimes you have eidetic vision and you're sleeping in a room where the walls are made of Knotty Pine and you suddenly begin to see faces or beautiful nudes or something or other in the pattern of the the wooden grain and you bring it up so remember then we go back to the principle that nobody knows just exactly how this happens we do not know how to make something beautiful as soon as we know it becomes a cliche for example we've got techniques now for copying sculpture jewelry and paintings that are incredible and you can go to brentanos or certain department stores and you can buy the most astonishing reproductions of the greatest statuary in the world there's something wrong with it you begin to see it everywhere you remember years ago somebody thought it the great game to use wrought iron to make fishes very formally outlined fish of wrought iron see and at first they were interesting but then they began to sell them in the dime store only the ones in the dime store Were Somehow sleazy you know what I mean it's like the glaze on mugs that they sell at the supermarket you know the difference between a mug made by a fine Potter and those with the lead glaze on that they sell you in the supermarket something absolutely horrible about them even though they've allowed the glaze to run and so on and done what are supposed to be good aesthetic tricks they just don't come off and a lot of people are like that now what we call plastic people but then what does that makes a plastic person the answer is that anything that that person says or does is going to be very highly predictable no surprise so it is the element of surprise somewhere somehow of not knowing how it's done that is essential to Beauty all right then if that is the case we have to be very careful how we handle nature and ourselves because you see we are in a passionate state of wishing to predict it all to make it as they say foolproof but it should be obvious that if there are no fools there is no fun that is why um fools were used to be in great demand one would have a king would have a full present at court the jester was actually a very wise person those fools often are extremely wise and they see things that other people don't see just the same as children do somebody completely naive totally honest about not caring for the morrow and generally speaking screwy will say things that are exceedingly funny and everybody absolutely breaks up we used to play a game as kids uh you had a book little book with a story in it but every so often a word was left out and there was just a blank then we had an assortment of cards that were shuffled and passed around and people in turns would take the first car that came and read it in while the other person was reading the story he'd stop for a blank and then he'd read a word it's utterly disconnected but everybody just broke up because of the incongruity of the filling and so uh kids today uh they'll turn on the television with no volume see and then they'll play a record maybe people talking and singing or something or other and and compare it with what's on the on the TV it's the same principle I it was uh recently I had to visit someone who was uh insane and uh couldn't talk English anymore this is talking nonsense and I spent an hour with her having an extremely sociable Pleasant conversation in which I simply talk nonsense back to her and she was quite happy but you see or people don't ordinarily like to do that they're trying to correct the person in the state of insanity and see if they can't push them back into talking proper English there's no need to do this and what does music mean now we get together and make music but it has no meaning except itself music is beautiful like a flower like a fern like a cloud and we like to look at it just the same way as we like to look at a landscape and so if you can listen to music you can listen to soundscape you can listen to uh just anything and dig it now this is enormous fun but there's not generally recognized if you just uh close your eyes and listen to all the sound that's going on and you stop naming it see you don't call it anything you don't identify it but you just listen to this Buzz it's fantastic and you also make certain discoveries yeah the to the eyes the world appears rather static to the ears it's never static it's always on the move Now using ears only to study what is going on to study reality is a very very fascinating Enterprise there's a book about it um which is called sound and symbol and the author rejoices in the name of Victor zuka candle published by Princeton University and uh sound and symbol where he uses music as the method of inquiry into the nature of the physical world and it is an extremely interesting book but he doesn't bring up the point which I'm going to make which is that if you listen to the world you will discover that there is no past and no future they are absolutely inaudible the past pop of a champagne cork is certainly not Audible nor is the Future Sound of the San Francisco earthquake foreign and also you can't hear anybody listening so if we are to believe our ears there is no past and there's no future and there's no difference between yourself and the sound you're hearing it's all one so there is a process going on but nobody is being processed yeah there's just a process that's you see when you listen everything you hear is you or else there is no you at all in that state of pure listening without naming you cannot tell the difference between the universe and your action upon it that's kind of scary because when we experience the world simply as a happening we're apt to say well hell who's in charge around here because we always think somebody has to be in charge I mean doesn't somebody have to be in charge to make things go the right way or to make anything happen at all I mean don't you need a bit of a shove mustn't there be some primordial source of energy to Goose the whole thing into being no it doesn't all that is in military image of nature where somebody's in command based on the idea of a king a general commander-in-chief who gives the orders and makes the original shove like say when you have a row of dominoes all standing up on end somebody flips the first Domino and they go all the way down and you have cause and effect see that's not the way nature works but it's an image it's a model in terms of which we have been accustomed to think about nature so that uh God as conceived in the West is the big boss who is in charge who orders all things then they got rid of God you know around the 18th century and people stop believing in God although they continued to think they ought to believe in God but they don't really so they got rid of the commander-in-chief and were left with the mechanic mechanical consequence of the commander-in-chief's uh operations and so the universe was looked upon as a mechanism and we talked of the mechanisms of Nature and the mechanisms of the Mind and so now we'd all tend to regard ourselves and each other as machinery and we want to make that Machinery as predictable as possible because if you were a perfect psychologist you see you would always know what a person is going to do next you would always know what was wrong with them when they were neurotic or psychotic and you would be a mechanic and you would just go in there with your wrenches and screwdrivers and straighten it out and there would be no surprises left so there would be no fools it would be no crazy people and you see in this industrial society we're terrified of crazy people you can't have a crazy people driving automobiles and you know that it's gone so far that whether you are or are not in a fit condition to drive an automobile is just about the definition of sanity foreign well now most people are not really fit to drive an automobile especially people who are angry or depressed whose mind is not on the job because they're furious at their wives or in Terror of their bosses and uh just aren't thinking about anything except that and they're going down the road they're worse than drunks you can't drive an automobile while profoundly in love with a girl sitting next to you you're thinking about her her Vibes are coming right across you uh you know you can't read poetry and drive an automobile at the same time and what is this tyranny that's over us all that we all have to be in a fit condition to go roaring down freeways in a death dealing instrument what's good for General Motors is good for America so uh this industrial civilization is terribly tidy because it's so dangerous if you're going to work on a production line you know this thing is going whizzing along well you can't be a foolish another thing about the freeway is that uh you must be going somewhere you can't be purposeless on the freeway you can't wander you can't even wander in the suburbs because if you go out on foot and start wandering the police car will come and say where are you going and if you're not going anywhere well you're obviously suspicious so you have to be walking a dog or jogging or doing something important otherwise you're a deeply suspicious character so the passion to control everything to predict everything to square everything off is destructive of life when we get to the foolproof world you see and have no fools there's no joke left no jester no joker because the Joker in the deck of cards is your representative it's the wild man who can play any other card so the more predictable you are the less you are of a joker when everybody knows what you're going to do you're an ace two three four five six seven eight nine ten or a Nave maybe a queen or a king but not the Joker The Joker corresponds to the man whom in Hindu society would be called the jivan mukta the one liberated the sanyasin a holy man he's a joker when you meet real holy man you cannot figure them out they might do anything they are often shocking people because they do things that holy men are not supposed to do I mean characters like good Jeff and uh even uh SRI Ramana maharshi and so on our very very unpredictable they're weird but always surprising Zen Masters I know many you never know what they're going to do next now be careful though one warning you cannot be artificially weird there is no program for becoming spontaneous a lot of people think there is but what they do is this they become only extremely conventional in an obverse way that is to say they do all those things which are not allowed by convention and that is following convention you see just its mirror image so when we discuss spontaneity or say in an encounter group of some kind where everybody is going to be spontaneous well all they do is they become hostile because hostile is bad form according to Convention and so we call it being genuine now I uh being an Englishman by origin I have been brought up to preserve fairly good mammals be civil to people not lose my temper and so on and I feel perfectly comfortable with it I don't have to flout those standards in order to feel real but a lot of people tell me I'm not really there we want to see the real you are you in touch with your real feelings they'll say and uh well of course I'm in touch with my real feelings and uh I know that sometimes I'm furious but I don't have to blow up at people it's not necessary because one gets one's results much better by not blowing up by being subtle but Beware of the phony spontaneity of merely going against what is conventional because that is not the Watercourse Way that is not the line of least resistance and you have to be very sensitive to discover what that line is to be able to flow this podcast was produced in conjunction with the ramdas be here Now podcast Network our theme music is by Zakir Hussein from the Rhythm experience and for further information on the recordings of Alan Watts please visit Alan watts.org again that's Alan watts.org and thank you for listening today [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 188,212

Keywords: alan watts, mysticism, mystic, psychology, dharma talk, dharma talks, bhnn, be here now podcasts, be here now podcast network, bhnn podcasts, spiritualty, buddhism, zen, 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: YIyCAeWWXtE

Length: 64min 15sec (3855 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022