Alan Watts' Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 6: On Being God

be here now just be here now [Music] welcome to being in the way with alan watts i'm mark watts your host and today's talk is on being god which was recorded in 1971 in new york city at a conference on western therapy and eastern religions like last week's talk zen bones it's a big haul presentation given to hundreds of people who attended the conference and in it my father explores both western therapy and western religions in relationship to the mystical experiences are altered states that are the basis of eastern religions he points out that neither western therapy nor western religions are particularly equipped to deal with individuals who've had these experiences and in the course of the talk he invites everyone there to participate with him in a clinical experiment in which he positions himself as a patient who's had one of these experiences and believes himself to be god and invites the audience to ask any questions they like the results are lively at times hilarious and definitely enlightening as he pivots from idea to idea and question to question and delivers a remarkable performance and now here's alan watts in on being god between western psychology psychiatry and psychotherapy and the so-called religions of asia there is common ground because both are interested in changing states of human consciousness whereas institutional western religion christianity judaism and even islam are relatively less interested in this matter western religions are more concerned with behavior doctrine and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world but this matter concerns psychiatry and psychology very much only those states of consciousness which are not normal are usually treated in western psychology as being in some way sick there are of course exceptions to this and there have increasingly been exceptions in the work of jung and to some extent even of groddick of prince han of more modern people rogers and ronald lang changing consciousness is often looked upon as a form of therapy but in general different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness and therefore official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality and very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak monday morning in this official doctrine i might even say dogma of what reality is because after all we know that our science such as it is of psychology is founded in the scientific naturalism of the 19th century and the metaphysical and mythological assumptions of that science still underlie a great deal of psychological thinking in behaviorism eminently but also to a large extent in official psychoanalysis indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho hydraulics not that that analogy is altogether uh inappropriate because there are certainly respects in which our psychic life flows and exhibits the dynamics of water but of course we want to know what kind of water and for the scientific naturalism of the 19th century the basic energies of nature were considered to be very much inferior to human consciousness in quality ernst hakel a biologist of that time would think of the energy of the universe as blind energy and correspondingly it seems to me that freud thought of the libido as essentially blind unconscious energy embodying only a kind of formless unstructured and insatiable lust this is a generalization some modification in that thinking is of course possible but the tendency is to regard all that which lies below the surface of human consciousness as being less evolved because you must remember that this was also the time of darwin's theories of evolution of seeing the human mind as a fortuitous development from much more primitive forms of life coming forth by purely mechanical processes by natural selection and by the survival of the fittest and therefore man was in general seen as a fluke of nature an embodiment of reason emotion and values for which the more basic processes of nature had no sympathy and about which they did not care if therefore the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution it can no longer be left to spontaneous process but must be directed by human ingenuity despite the fact that although our brains are capable of dealing with a colossal number of variables at once our conscious attention is not most people cannot consider more than three variables at the same time without using a pencil and this shows that in many ways the scanning process of man's conscious attention is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables the multi-dimensional processes of the natural universe however a serious attempt has been made and scientific naturalism issued in a fantastic fight with nature in this whole notion of the conquest and subordination of nature which has as a matter of fact very ancient non-scientific and biblical origins with the idea of man as the head and chief and ruler of nature in the image of god and their time has now dawned upon us all when our attempts to beat nature into submission are having alarming results because we see that it's very dangerous to mess around with processes that we don't understand that have enormous numbers of variables and we begin to wonder whether we hadn't better let well enough alone at the same time although i said that western psychology had more in common or more common interest with oriental religion than it does with western religion there is a sense in which psychiatry and psychotherapy are becoming the religion of the west psychoanalysis has much in common with the forms and procedures of institutional religion there is for example apostolic succession the passing down of mana of qualified power to practice therapy from the father founder sigmund freud through his immediate apostles to an enormous company of archbishops and bishops among whom there are of course as there were with christianity heresy arcs such as jung and gradac and rank and reich and uh the the heresy arcs are duly excommunicated and [Music] anathematized there are rituals as there are also rituals with religion there is the sacrament of the couch there is the spiritual discipline of free association there is the mystic knowledge of the interpretation of dreams and our there are also the two great symbolic fetishes the long one and the round one now it's extraordinarily easy to make fun of all this and we must not forget that we owe a tremendous debt to freud if for nothing else than pointing out that that much of ourselves of which we are aware in terms of the conscious ego is not really ourselves it is something superficial however we define its nature it is superficial and the realities of human life are not under the gaze of its scanning process at least not in the ordinary way and that was a tremendous revelation there's no question about that but one sees troublesome signs when the doctrines and processes of psychiatry psychoanalysis and so forth become officialized i think thomas sas in his books the myth of mental illness and the manufacture of madness is pointing out something extremely important to us which is that in effect the psychological official of today is the priest and that he is beginning to exercise the same sort of controls over human life as were exercised by the church in the middle ages so that a professor of psychiatry at columbia or harvard or yale medical schools has today the same sort of intellectual respectability and authority as the professor of theology at the university of toledo or padua would have had in the year 1400 now you must realize that the theologians of those days not simply believed in their cosmology and the theology they almost knew it was true in the same way that our scientists know certain things to be true despite the fact that they change their opinions very often while they hold them they have in effect the force of dogma has witnessed the anathematization of velikovsky for his uncomfortable ideas and therefore there are heresies existing today which are persecuted in the same way as heresies were persecuted by the holy inquisition and they are persecuted out of kindness in exactly the same way that the holy inquisition persecuted heresy out of kindness and deep concern for human beings that is unimaginable to us but it was so for after all if you seriously believed that someone who did not hold the catholic faith and who voluntarily rejected it would be tortured physically and spiritually forever and ever and ever in hell you would resort to almost any means to preserve a fellow human being from such a fate especially if the complaint or disease of heresy from which he suffered was infectious you would first of all reason with him and if he was not responsive to reason he would resort to abuse and to forceful argument and if he was not responsive to that you would give him shock treatment and bang him about if that didn't work the thumb screw and the rack and the iron maiden and if that didn't work as a last desperate resort you would burn him at the stake in the pious hope that in the midst of those searing fires he would think better and make a last act of perfect contrition and so be rescued from everlasting damnation and you did all this when the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you in the spirit of a surgeon who is very very sorry indeed that he has to make you undergo this extremely painful operation but it is in your best interests and there really is at least a 50 50 chance that you may survive and so therefore in perfectly scientific medical spirit people may be very arbitrarily and without due process deprived of their civil rights incarcerated in prisons that are in many cases much worse than prisons for criminals and generally left to rot be neglected and ignored and when bumped us given shock treatment or put in solitary confinement for what because they have unorthodox and heretical states of consciousness a lot of these people are not dangerous until provoked into being dangerous by being ignored by being treated as machines and in generally defined as non-human and if you are defined as non-human there's precious little you can do about it because everything you say that sounds human will be taken as a kind of utterance of a mechanical man as imitating humanness out of lunatic cunning you will be suspicious everything you say will be listened to in a different way and with different ears and you will have one hell of a time talking yourself out of it because there really are no rules as to what one must do when incarcerated for having unorthodox consciousness there is no clear road to repentance and this is found likewise in jails where people are incarcerated on one to ten year sentences as in places like vacaville california where when i visited such prisons young men have come to me in perfect desperation saying i don't know what's happened to me because i want to live like a decent citizen i know i've done things that are wrong but i simply don't know what what is expected of me here if i try to do what's expected they say i'm compliant and that seems to be some sort of a sickness thomas sas drew attention to this when he quoted a discussion of the types of school children who may very well need therapy there were over-achieving children there were underachieving children there were children who exhibited erratic patterns there were children who were sort of duly mediocre in fact every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick as young once suggested life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death [Music] and i submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous for i would suggest that today we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in thirteen hundred and that while there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy it is the sheerest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so we do not know how it is done just as we do not know really how musical artistic and literary genius is done you cannot really teach it you can put the tools for doing these things into people's hands and you can show them how to use the tools but whether they will use those tools with genius is quite unpredictable and this is above all true of the art of psychotherapy we don't know how it's done we've got some vague ideas there probably are some people who by reason of their mental derangement are probably not qualified to perform it because they are maybe out just to make other people into messes but to say that there are certain standards and certain examinations that can be passed and certificates that could be issued which do indeed qualify people for this work is i think pernicious nonsense and is used of course out of economic self-interest when those who consider themselves official therapists run into competition the same was done by religion i was talking imagine it to a buddhist priest in thailand some years ago i was looking at some books in a book shop in the precincts of the buddhist temple and i was wandering over and i noticed a book on a certain form of buddhist meditation and i murmured hmm which is the name of a certain kind of buddhist meditation and a voice suddenly said to me you practiced sati patana i looked up and there was a skinny buddhist monk in a yellow robe with rather red eyes looking at me i said not exactly sati patana i use a different method it's called zen oh sati patana not zen i said oh well it's something like it isn't it no well it's rather like yoga i said isn't it not yoke no sati patana different only right way well look i said to him i have a lot of roman catholic friends who tell me that their way is the only right way who am i to believe you know i said you know you're like someone who's got a uh a ferry boat for crossing the river i use the buddhist simile and another fellow down the stream has opened up ferry business and you go to the government and say he's not authorized to operate a ferry boat because he's competition to you let all operate ferry boats who will and if you haven't got the sense to stay off one that sinks it's your fault and after all i could say to him you believe that everything that happens to you is your own karma why worry but now it's so interesting that since official psychiatry and i underline that word official because i hope those of you in this audience who are therapists will regard yourselves as unofficial lisa that'll give you an out but nevertheless official psychiatry has curious things in common with western religion as well as with easton with easton i said only insofar as it has an interest in states of consciousness and inclines to regard other states of consciousness than the ordinary as sick but it has one very important feature in common with western religion and that we have to go a little bit into western religious history and ask ourselves what in western religion and especially in christianity and this goes also for judaism islam what is the great heresy curiously enough the great heresy was first in the west committed by no less a person than jesus christ who believed himself to be god this of course will be unquestionably true if you think that the gospel of saint john has historical value it's a little vega in the synoptic gospels but if you read the gospel of sin john there is absolutely no doubt about it for he said i and the father are one he who has seen me has seen the father before abraham was i am i am the way the truth and the life i am the resurrection and the life he said all that according to this gospel and that is something that in the western world you are not supposed to say especially you are not supposed to believe it and actually it was very difficult for jesus because he was saying all this in the context of the hebrew culture and he tried to find language in the hebrew scriptures with which to express his state of consciousness because he had an unusual state of consciousness as i read it he had cosmic consciousness otherwise known as mystical experience otherwise known as moksha or what you will and that happens to people it has happened as far back as we know it happens all over the world and in all cultures we don't know very much about it we don't really know ways in which to make it happen because it seems to be of the nature of it that it is a spontaneous surprise but it unquestionably happens and most people keep their mouth shut about it when it does i had a friend who in the middle of having a stroke had this illumination and he said to me i fear to speak to my friends of this but it was the most beautiful experience i shall never be afraid of death in fact i recommend everyone to have a stroke [Music] this was my friend jean varda lately deceased greek painter but jesus certainly had this transformation of consciousness and he was crucified for it why because he had committed an act of insubordination and treason against the cosmic government because if you believe that god is a monarch an absolute omniscient and omnipotent authority shall we say a sort of cosmic ego then to claim to be that is to introduce democracy into the kingdom of heaven to use up divine authority and to speak in its name without proper authorization and they asked jesus by what authority do you speak of heaven or of men and he was tricky about answering that one he said by what authority did john the baptist speak and they were nervous about answering that one he could have asked by what authority did isaiah speak etc or moses but moses became official authority and if you could wander it that what you said was simply an extension of what moses said because rabbi so-and-so said it who got it from rabbi so-and-so who got it from rabbi so-and-so who got it from moses then it's okay notice this that to be an authority today in the academic world depends on documentation it's not enough to say for i say unto you you must put in your footnotes and the more the footnotes the more the authority obviously so our dissertations tend to be books about books about books about books and our libraries multiply by mitosis [Music] so when somebody speaks as an authority that means speaks as the author that's all it means it's a statement for which you of which you are the author and therefore for which you assume responsibility that is to speak with authority and to be original is likewise not to be freaky but to speak from the origin that is what christians mean when they say to speak in the spirit to have your mouth possessed by the holy spirit as they believe the mouth of jesus was possessed by the holy spirit so the gospel of jesus which of course was hushed up from its inception was that wake up everybody and find out who you are asking that again in the gospel of sin john they pointing to his disciples may be one even as you father and i are one and when he was accused of blasphemy the jews took up stones to stone him you know and he said many good works have i shown you from the father and from which of these do you stone me and they said for a good work we don't stone you but for blasphemy because you being a man make yourself god now listen to the reply he said is it not written in your law i have said ye are gods and if that is what the scripture says it can't be denied so why do you tell me i blaspheme because i say i am a son of god no answer because i said i am a son of god. it doesn't say that in your king james translation it says i am the son of god and you'll see the the italicized and you will think that that is for emphasis if you don't realize that passages in italics in the king james bible are interpolations by the translators so son of in hebrew and in arabic means of the nature of when we call someone a son of a we mean and so if you call someone a son of god you mean divine of the nature of god as the nicene creed subsequently defined it he is of one substance with the father but what happened was that this being blasphemy for the jews it became blasphemy for the christians for anyone else than jesus to say it they said okay baby it was so with you but there it stops no more of this business and as a result of that jesus was made irrelevant by pedestalization by being kicked upstairs [Music] in spite of the fact that he said greater works than these that i do shall you do oh no upstairs with you baby because uh we just can't have that sort of thing going on in a monarchical universe we are not going to have democracy in the kingdom of heaven so this is why the gospel is impossible because we are supposed to follow the example of christ where he says for example be not anxious for the morrow do not worry about what you shall eat what you shall drink and what you shall wear god will take care of you doesn't he take care of the birds don't the flowers grow and they are wonderful they're crazy they're great what are you worrying about i've never heard a sermon preached on that never because it's totally subversive the economy would crash so they say oh yes that's all very well but he was the boss's son see he had that colossal advantage take up your cross and follow him hey but wait a minute i don't know i'm going to be resurrected three days later [Music] i can't do all those miracles he had an unfair advantage so how could you ask us to follow the example of christ but supposing he didn't have an unfair advantage supposing that what was true about jesus as a son of god is true of us only only a few of us know it and we are pretty careful to be quiet about it lest the same thing happen to us has happened to jesus and indeed it often does and you know you get these people from arkansas or texas or anywhere in the bible belt who never heard of the upanishads and they have this cosmic consciousness experience and they realize that that's what happened to jesus they say i'm jesus come back well everybody says to them you want jesus it's pretty obvious you're not jesus you're just you just joe dogs well they say he says that's what they said about jesus he has a perfect argument except they say you're not much of a jesus they say all right if you're jesus command that these stones may be made bread and he says a wicked and deceitful generation seeketh for a sign and there shall no sign be given no why talk about this is it interesting is it important for the human being to realize that in some sense of the word whatever it means he is god or one with god as is plainly taught by the hindus hinted at by the buddhists only they don't like to put it out as a concept in case people will use the concept as an idol to hang on to they want you to find out for yourself and not believe in it and certainly the taoists understand it the sufis understand it a lot of people understand it but so what well the importance of it is this that to know that you are god is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe you feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it you feel in other words that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate it is not something to which you are a stranger but it is that with which you whatever that is are intimately bound up that in your seeing your hearing your talking you're thinking you're moving you express that which it is which moves the sun and other stars and if you don't know that if you don't feel that well naturally you feel alien you feel a stranger in the world and if you feel a stranger you feel hostile and therefore you start to bulldoze things about to beat it up and to try and make the world submit to your will and you become a real troublemaker so i feel also uh one reason why you become hostile is that feeling that you were just brought into this place that your father and mother went up to some monkey business that they probably shouldn't have done or it was bad rubber goods and as a result of this here you are and you didn't ask to be here well you always feel you can turn around and blame them you can blame somebody you can blame the government you can blame the rascals you can play the blame the cheaters always supposing you yourself aren't a rascal which is a long odds you always can blame someone and say i didn't ask for it take it away and yet and yet and yet very few people are all too ready to take it away camus said that the only serious philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide and if you don't if you don't say take it away what are you going to do you've really got to assume responsibility for it you've got to say yes to what happens it's my karma and that doesn't mean merely there are many misinterpretations of the doctrine of karma it's usually in popularly understood that what happens to you either fortunate or unfortunate is the result of good or bad deeds in a previous life well that's popular superstition the real meaning of karma the word in sanskrit means simply doing and if i say of an event it is your karma it is saying it is your doing so the exposition a book which would expound karma would be not so much a whodunit as a you done it [Music] but that seems fantastic now therefore what i propose we do is that we um instead of just ideologizing we have a clinical experience you know in psychiatric school in medical school it's very usual for a doctor to bring a patient out in front of the students and talk with the patient as a kind of demonstration he says i want you to recognize the difference between a psychopath and a manic depressive or a schizophrenic or something they don't know what all these things mean and uh especially the schizophrenia and uh so he he has a dialogue with the patient right there so let us suppose that i'm the patient and you are the students and the doctors and i suffer from what you would call the delusion that i'm god and therefore you might want to do something about me or with me or humor me or ask me questions and so i'm perfectly willing to submit your examination and your treatment and uh invite you to help yourselves now when did you become god no will you marry me no [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] sleeping is like politics one sleeps on the right side and then when you're tired of that you sleep on the left when you're tired of that you sleep on your back and when you're tired of that you sleep on your stomach and it is thus that the world goes round [Music] [Applause] if you were god now what were you yesterday now [Music] [Applause] no remember three persons but one god can you tell us a little about satan could i tell you a little bit about satan yes uh although the matter is a little esoteric but uh i told you all about it in the book of job where you will see that in the court of heaven satan is the district attorney he is not as christians imagine the enemy of heaven and the enemy of mankind he's merely the person who sees the bad side of things and carries out the dirty work and therefore he saw job and wondered whether job really was as great a guy as he seemed to be and suggested that god should appoint a committee of investigation to find out and the committee did its work very thoroughly but the case went against satan because it was proved in the end that job was an honorable man now you notice that although we pay the salary of the district attorney whenever there's a great criminal case before the public eye people begin to take the side of the underdog and the prosecutor always has less public sympathy than the defense except in political trials [Music] on the right hand of god and you know the defense is always on the right hand of the judge in court is our only mediator and advocate which is the phrase referring to jesus christ our lord so there is the defense and there is the prosecution and it is the function of satan to be the prosecutor there is a good deal more to it than that because before all this started as in a stage play there was an arrangement in the green room before coming on stage in which uh certain things were understood but that are only to be revealed uh when the curtain goes down at the end of the play yes but he doesn't know it why do you hide from the sight of so many why do you hide it's for the same reason you're hiding [Music] man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is not otherwise [Music] where i got it from woman yes to the extent that she knows who she is yes if a man has free will to know just what he is and man is god then you're saying then you'd say that you are no more than any god in this room or any man that is correct i'm no more god than any of you and you only have the power to know who you are well that is saying quite a bit yes what is not god what is not god there is nothing that is not god it's like waking up from a dream after a while one's experience begins to have what i would call i haven't we been here before feeling going round and round and round and then you begin wondering where am i going and to answer that question you have to try and find out what you want and so i went into that very thoroughly what do i want to happen and of course as soon as you ask yourself that you begin to fantasize and our amazing technology is of course an expression of human desire desire for power for what we want to achieve so i simply set myself to thinking through how far we could go and so i soon found myself in a great push-button place where i had a fantastic mechanism with buttons available for every conceivable thing i could wish so i spent quite a bit of time playing with those and science fiction wasn't it you know you go going like that and here is cleopatra and so on you know and then press this button a symphonic music in uh four-channel sound uh 16-channel sound anything you know the all possible pleasures are available and when you know you're like everybody's dream of the sultan in the palace you suddenly notice there's a button labeled surprise you push that and here we are [Music] yes boredom is of course the problem uh boredom is is the other side of creativity and the energy of creation has as its that is the yang the inside of that energy is called boredom everything of course is fundamentally yang and yin if you understand that you really don't need to understand anything else as god what responsibility do you feel to ameliorate evil in the world as god what responsibility do i feel to ameliorate evil in the world i begin with the point that i am responsible for the way the world is if i couldn't feel that i'd have to blame somebody else i'm not willing to do that because i know that under various changing circumstances it might be appropriate for me to be as big a rascal as rascals have been now as to improving the world the world is always improving it may look to some people slow but it's improving even when it is declining because the world works in an undulatory process like a wave it goes up and it goes down it goes up and it goes down and it couldn't go up all the time because if it did we wouldn't know that that was up so it goes down some of the time so that we can know when it goes up because if we didn't know when it went up it would like it would be like being in a space where everything was light there'd be nothing to write home about there would be no black marks on the space and so it would be like a piece of perfectly empty paper similarly to be in a completely black space would also be a kind of unconsciousness with nothing to write home about because there'd be nothing nothing would make any difference so therefore if you're going to have black you won't know that it's black unless you have some white and if you're going to have white you won't know that it's white unless you have some black [Music] correct but that's not a teaching it's a koan a koan a koan is a japanese word for a spiritual problem used in zen buddhism such as what is the sound of one hand and these problems are given to those who ask questions concerning their spiritual development and sometimes as paul pointed out commandments are given not in the expectation that they will be obeyed but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them uh that was some paul's comment on the whole mosaic law yes sir that we are all yes the hereafter is of course now because if you will examine it closely there is no when else than now and if you want to make hell of it you can make hell of it if you want to make heaven of it you can make heaven of it purgatory purgatory it's all here always was always will be what is death death is an undulation in consciousness how would you know you were alive unless you had once been dead yes you realize the same way that jesus did your god why was it unnecessary for him to have material possessions necessary for you it wasn't unnecessary for him to have material possessions they said of john the baptist that he was an ascetic but of jesus this man consorts with gluttonous and wine bibbers and comes eating and drinking and when uh the lady mary poured precious ointment on his feet and anointed him they said the same thing that the members of the vestry say to the minister today why this great expense couldn't it all have been sold for much money and given to the poor it is a problem sure but you see uh in many ways when you get down to these very deep ethical problems well there sure is no easy decision one way or or the other you you must look in the at the problem from the point of view of an artist which way of doing this is in some sense greater it may be better to go off with a bang than with a whimper let me see yeah yes if you put it that way of course you are consciously god as an experiencing unit on this plane wait a minute consciously not necessarily because that would spoil the fun if you press button surprise you'll press the button so that you forget who you are right so that you don't always know all the answers to a given problem yes that's perfectly true this is called in the bible kenosis in saint paul's official epistle to the philippians he says let this mind be in you which was also in christ jesus who being in the form of god thought not equality with god a thing to be grasped but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death and so you get from this the canonic theory of creation held by some of the greek fathers that the creation of the universe is the self-emptying or self-forgetting of the godhead um yes i think it's your turn now how does your concept of the creation of evil so that man i could see how good good it is differ from the old story of a man digging his head against the wall so he could feel it's really rather like it because the universe is fundamentally a system which creeps up on itself and then says [Music] and then it laughs at itself for jumping [Music] and you see every time it does it it forgets that it did it before so it never becomes a ball yes a lady in red can you make yourself into a point of consciousness and travel around the cosmos such as dr lily was speaking of last night and talking about the story yes but it isn't necessary to travel the question is can i make myself into a point of consciousness and travel around the cosmos and see things from all sorts of places i say yes but it isn't necessary to travel one is already there in other words uh i'm using your eyes where you are like you're using mine just in the same way my head is not my feet it uses my feet the head is very different from the feet you couldn't possibly say the head and the feet are the same but they are one organism they each have a soul two what do i do about boredom press button surprise oh it's always safe yes always yes the lady in purple here you talk about boredom it seems to me at least in my own case and maybe many people that one of the biggest problems in life is being forced to earn a living as something rather which is and i often wonder is the answer to uh move somewhere and live on less money and do the thing that i would like to do or must i resign myself as many people have to do the thing that gets me the bread and that in my spare time somehow trying to make up for the many days and weeks and years of this kind of living what well there are two sort of answers one of which you've already indicated which is to do with less and do what you want which uh you know those things that we sort of accepted as part of life wouldn't get done i think the objection if everyone did that is rather like asking what would happen if everybody wanted to catch the four o'clock train to grab from grand central to westport uh or if all the molecules of air in this room were suddenly to congregate over in that corner there is a bare chance that it might happen but very low yes would you say we're going around that circle is trying to eliminate evil because we never will it might not be any evil yes it's eliminated so we're just playing games we are going round in circles but you see going round in circles as you may have observed by looking at the sky is what the universe is doing [Music] yes yes that's the thing it's a dance and when you dance you don't dance to get somewhere yes all right but you turn when you wake up you turn the confusion into a dance and so i go back to your question what is the alternative to clearing out of the job you're doing and uh to say doing with less but having more fun well there are ways of making almost any activity into a dance uh supposing you had to drive a bus in new york which is a very harrowing job in the ordinary way you must not take seriously anything about it this is the first rule that uh it doesn't matter a dam if you don't get there on time but it would be fun to go as fast as is consistent with safety and therefore you swing that bus and you you play things with the horn you take the whole thing lightly as if it is not serious and because this is the nature say in ritual when you have a procession now people who don't understand religion don't know how to make the right kind of processions there are those who go a military march and they don't understand it because their objective is to get there there are those who dawdle like ducks and uh they don't understand because they are trying to be dignified on the other hand there are those who walk as if they had already arrived and this is the way kings walk because a king is the center and he is always where it's at where it's at is where the king is by definition [Laughter] [Music] so if you work in this way even i mean people who are practicing meditation take up monotonous things for fun and meditation is supposed to be fun i hope john lily told you that this morning well you say you're going to do um omani padme home oh [Music] man you know you can really have a gas doing that and uh so that anything monotonous can be treated in the same way this is the way one of the ways of overcoming boredom because boredom's the great problem for energy the energy is always on the go yes sir yes the gentleman the white shirt here that bother you sometimes by people who like the idea of your existence mythic no mythic is a great word does the question is does it bother me to be called mythic no myth is very powerful myth is fun myth is stories told to children everybody loves them yes sir what is god omniscient well it depends what you mean by the word a lot of people think that omniscience is like knowing everything that's in the encyclopedia britannica that's not omniscience that's intellectual elephantiasis now you see let me explain this question because it's always important and when anybody announces that he or she is god people say it once well will you tell us in millimeters the height of mumbling uh when i say look it up in the encyclopedia it's there the thing is this what we ordinarily call knowledge is the translation of life into words and that is a very cumbersome process because if we had to translate the process into words every time we took a breath we'd never get around to it did it take so long to describe and think through the whole physiology of breath therefore we do it without thinking about it and i find that i'm shining the stars in just the same way i mean if you want it in words it's going to take us a long time to get through them because words are strung out in a then i sense line internally we are and we are all gods how come as a god you are said that we are all god and therefore i am a god how can i find such difficulties in recognizing understanding how do you if you are god how do you find such difficulty in finding peace and tranquility in yourself that's because you're looking for it away from the place in which you are you are seeking it apart from the experience which you have at this moment and you are regarding that experience and saying that's pretty lousy i'd like something better than that but the trouble with that is that it splits you in two pieces and once you're split in two pieces you're lost because you've made a difference between the experience you are now having on the one hand and yourself who is having it on the other and you wish you could get away from that experience now the truth of the matter is you can't because you are what you experience it's a myth purely that there is some sort of experiencer who has the experience you are what you know then because it is not i know something there is simply a process called the knowing you could say the knowing like the world has two poles north and south and so the knowing ball has the knower and the known but only in that sense now knowing changes it changes itself but if you try to stand outside it and change it it'll be like standing outside your hand and trying to move your hand from outside and so comes the difficulty in other words this would be the difficulty for god in the press button surprise situation where you think you want something different from what you have but if you do think that you've got to ask yourself the question what it is that you really want this is the most fundamentally important question and you will find if you go into it very very deeply that you have it now you may change your mind about it but you do have what you want god if this place caught on fire i would find myself so scared that i wonder if i would also feel that i was god and if i am god and scared um what do i do about that well uh one of the ways of not being bored is to scare yourself yes don't we all go to the we go to the movies just to be scared we put certain limits on it indeed before we go and say it's a well this isn't really going to happen it's only a play or a movie and therefore while we see the safe outline of the proscenium arch back in the back of our minds as a sort of hindu guidance we know it's only a play how do you know it isn't if you see after all the the task of the actor on the stage is to come on so well that the audience thinks it's real so that he has them crying so that he has them shaking with fear so he has them sitting on the edges of their chairs well that's just one ordinary joe dog's actor but supposing the actor of the play is the real big actor wow that play would seem real and so that's what happens when the house cat is on fire yes lady in red yes you're looking behind yourself [Music] what is sleep the seventh day [Music] when is the seventh day when you sleep yes yes god the only reason i know that i'm god is because i take the responsibility for it yeah does that answer the lady's question about the fire oh yes that also would would answer it yes you it's a question of taking responsibility for what happens what happens if you don't well that's another way that's another way you can explore boredom you can bar into boredom and watch it sometimes when you're bored that's the only thing to do because even for god you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstraps because that is by nature of the the definition impossible you would enjoy yes i think that would be fun i mean why else does one go on stage except to make myths why not again excuse me what did you say what is my motivation for going on the stage that is like asking why is there a universe well now if you listen to george leonard last night george leonard explained how children were befuddled by being taught to ask why about everything because you always look away from what you're asking about to its antecedents and that won't lead you anywhere at all why am i here and i answer that question then somebody says well why that and then somebody says well why that why that why that and you get back and back and back and eventually you get tired of answering and so fathers when their children say why daddy why why they say oh shut up and eat your lollipop so but what happens you see when we trace the causation of things into the past it all begins to fade out in silence and no answer why because it didn't begin there the universe begins now it didn't begin in the past and the past trails back from now like the wake of a if ship is good and there is no time said now what is the role of chance if everything is god and there is no time except now what is the role of chance chance pairs with order we'll say randomness we'll call it and it pairs with order and it is part of the nature of order if you know what you mean by order you know that you mean contrast with randomness and if you know what you mean by randomness you know that you mean contrast with order so if you want to have order you must have randomness and vice versa yes did you have this much charisma before you discovered your true nature yes but it came out in a different way [Laughter] [Music] yes i think there's a sort of danger here though the riddles are funny and if you have time enough to think each one through they'd be very profound there's a certain danger of everything and everyone being god because you really found yourself as god then you know that certain things that you as god have created that don't personally affect you you create for a reason you stay out of them and you don't honor too good but if you think you're god and then you try to go into too much social action and change the evils of this world you end up hurting yourself and a lot of people and you you're playing god and you're not really being god well i admit to you my dear that this is a very very dangerous conversation uh that i thoroughly agree with but we didn't come here did we to play it safe um all all profound ideas and profound questions are dangerous uh it it is dangerous to go into science as we all know too well it is dangerous to go into medicine dangerous to go into writing because the pen is often mightier than the sword and so uh i don't think we should withdraw from certain things because they're dangerous but i entirely agree with you that if i were as it were in the spirit of god to go about social reform i would be failing to realize the construction of my own universe which is that when you interfere with it you've got to know exactly how you're interfering otherwise the most amazingly unexpected things will happen so when people ask for miracles they don't realize what the miracles involve i mean if i turned the microphone into a rabbit it's all together possible that you might drop dead because those events might be connected have you ever studied did i have a study with carl jung i never i didn't study with him i knew him and i read a lot of his writings yes [Music] it does in a way yes and it depends how you're watching i some there is a very interesting thing that comes up in this respect with regard to the bhagavad gita and to the the yoga sutra where they talk about the witness there is as it were behind our ordinary self with its emotions and involvements a witness self that does nothing more than perceive what happens and this is the atman or the purusa which is not involved and some of you no doubt especially in times of crisis have suddenly discovered this sort of witness center behind everything that just isn't involved most terrible things can be going on but the witness is impassive now when we go into these states we've got to be very careful of our descriptive language because the descriptive language makes the witness seem something apart from what is happening in such a way that if we want to become uh really sort of skitsy and catatonic about things we can always be withdrawn and go in and in and identify ourselves with a solitary and uninvolved witness who is merely a hangout for the ego uh as when the police raid a house in which there are burglars and the burglars know they'll be caught if they're on the ground floor so they go up the first floor so then the police come up with the first floor there after the second they finally they get to the roof where the open sky and the infinite and in this way this was why the buddha did not teach about the atman the real self within us because he knew people would use the real self as a hideout for the ego and so when i say krishnamurti tries to explain this he he doesn't talk about the witness he talks about awareness and people say to him but who is aware what is aware and he seems a little sticky in his answer here because what is what is the matter is that the people asking the question are bewitched by grammar they are using a language in which it is part of the grammatical convention that the verb always have a noun subject now how on earth do verbs get started by nouns i ask you how can a thing start a process surely this is really the same problem descartes was wrestling with when he tried to find out how spirit could influence matter or how mind could influence body because everybody knows that all proper ghosts walk straight through walls without disturbing the bricks so how can the ghost in the machine as kessler put it the soul in the body how can it do anything to the body with no connection two different realms the point is when we're talking about this awareness what we call thought feeling sensation emotion we could say in a very clumsy ways it's aware of itself it's the very nature there wouldn't be sensation without awareness you don't have to have something um which is aware of it anymore then you have to have a thing called lightning which does something called flashing the flashing is the lightning and so awareness is the one who's aware of it you could say this awareness if i say i am aware the word i as william james suggested is simply a word of position like this or here awareness here and your awareness there yes sir it's like like one great color yes life is like one great koan no death is not the solution it has no solution otherwise it wouldn't happen you see the thing is like this this is what is hard for westerners especially to understand i said if you understand the yang and the yin you don't need to ask any further questions and all you eejing buffs uh ought to know this by now what is not a component of western common sense is that nothing is something now that may sound a little contradictory but i think i can explain it we treat nothingness as if it were ineffective as if it wasn't really important at all and yet when we look out at the night and we see all these stars in space try and imagine what the heavens would look like if there weren't any space then obviously there wouldn't be any stars i mean you could think that they will all be jammed together in a lump there are various objections to that how would you see the edge of the lump and no it was a lump without space around furthermore we know when we investigate the constitution of matter physically that at the atomic level there's more space in something than there is anything else most of it is empty and which led a physicist at the argonne lab at the university of chicago had become a little nutty he was so impressed with the emptiness of mata that he went around in the most enormous padded slippers in case he should fall through the floor so now what the point i'm making is this if space is essential to solid it's perfectly obvious then that nothing is essential to something if you can't have something without nothing it means nothing is pretty powerful stuff because something comes out of it like that it's a dogma of western thought expressed in the latin phrase ex nihilo neofit out of nothing comes nothing but that's not so out of nothing comes something now you would say well if something comes out of nothing there must be some kind of mystery inside nothing it must have a secret structure of some kind i mean there must be sort of electrical goings on this is the trouble they have about cosmology how could this world generate could just be out of free floating hydrogen no it's just a much simpler idea than that it comes out of real solid nothing it's so simple you've been listening to alan watts in on being god delivered in new york city in 1971. it's from our philosophy and society series and to download this and other similar recordings please visit alanwatts.org today's broadcast was brought to you by the ramdas be here now podcast network and the rizzuto foundation thanks for listening [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Keywords: francesca maxime, podcast, buddhist wisdom, wise girl, buddhism, buddhist, rerooted, rerooted podcast

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Length: 80min 48sec (4848 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021