Alan Watts' Being in the Way Podcast Ep.3: In Your Own Way

be here now just be here now [Music] you see in science fiction which was published around about the 1920s it was always expected that future human beings would have enormous heads because they would have very big brains and they would be very wise it didn't work that way what happens is that the human race is building a brain outside its body that is to say an interlocking electronic network of telephonic television radionic communications which is rapidly being interlocked with computers so that you will within a few years be able to plug your own brain into a computer [Music] welcome to being in the way with alan watts and i'm your host mark watts and today we're going to hear the title talk for which this podcast was named being in the way now in the last episode i outlined some of my father's early life about how he came to america and ended up teaching buddhism at the american academy of asian studies in san francisco we lived across the golden gate bridge just north of the city and my father was often busy typing away in his study on his numerous books with the way of zen in 1957 he set out on the first of many integrative works showing the relationship between the various branches of far eastern ways of liberation as he described them the book quickly became a new york times bestseller and the following year he went on a book tour with speaking stops in chicago new york philadelphia and zurich at the time he'd been speaking on public radio at kpfa in berkeley for five years and was a reassuring although still somewhat reserved voice on the bay area airwaves but over the next few years he began to intersperse his regular radio booth talks with live recordings the more lively and engaging style of these talks had a dramatic effect on his audience and his programs were soon being rebroadcast in los angeles on station kpfk where they still air today also around this time kpfa held a fundraiser to buy my father a portable swiss tape recorder so that he could make more frequent lecture recordings working with american folkways recording artist and audio pioneer henry jacobs my father began a collection that by 1968 included over 200 recordings when i began recording in 1968 it was on the east coast and he was regularly speaking in chicago boston and philadelphia in 1971 i returned to california and that my father's suggestion began to assemble what he described as a collection of his essential lectures which were released in 1972 this time we also produced a series of videos that we called the essentials half-hour talks on specific subjects like god time ego death nothingness meditation and by 1973 looking at the vast collection of seminars i began to assemble what became electronic college courses from the recordings when my father passed on in 1973 his final words were i wish i could figure out how to do all this without my body and i think that he has this podcast was made possible by a grant from the rizzuto foundation and is being produced with the help of the ramadas be here now podcast network our theme music is by zakir hussein and the rhythm experience courtesy of moment records and to find out more about the legacy of alan watts please visit alanwatts.org on the internet and now here's my father with being in the way part one [Music] one of the first things which everybody should understand is that every creature in the universe that is in any way sensitive and in any manner of speaking conscious regards itself as a human being that is to say it knows and is aware of a hierarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it if you take such a tiny creature as a fruit fly which lives only a few days it is aware of all sorts of weird little animals and objects and spores floating in the atmosphere which we don't even notice unless we've got a microscope around and very few people have and it criticizes them as being inferior animals and uh all that sort of thing whereas human beings are things that it doesn't comprehend they're in as much outside its uh intellect as a quasar is outside ours and we see these far-off objects floating in the heavens and we have only the vaguest idea of what they may be actually we may all be some kind of uh atoms in another dimension and all these galaxies being the constituent elements who knows but there is i think a fundamental principle that everybody must understand in order to know what is the meaning of the tao or the chinese sense of the course of nature and that is the principle of relativity it's absolutely fundamental to an understanding of taoist philosophy relativity that is to say that wherever you are and whoever you are and whatever you are you're in the middle and you you you see just in the same way as when you stand say on the deck of a ship and you can see a horizon all around you to exactly the same distance you're in the center of a circle because your senses extend a certain direction in all directions and therefore give you the impression of being in the middle now everything in the world feels like that and also it has its own kind which look natural to it you see uh spiders and uh hydras and sea urchins and so on don't look very natural to us we say well i wouldn't want to look like that but they say when they see us well what kind of an awful thing is that and what a lot of nonsense it does but now here is a very strange thing that every creature therefore which feels that it is human and which knows that it's there in the same way as you know you're here experiences the sensation of a certain tension which constitutes the feeling of highness of theirness of being here because after all every creature is a particular form everything is individual not only you as a total organism standing here but all the component cells of your body each one of them has some sort of a feeling of its own and it is individual you can look at a microscope at the right level of magnification and you can see that thing there with its own little life and if you examine the stream of your blood you'll find it full of all kinds of organisms that are having all sorts of conspiracies and games and plots and eating each other and doing these things that like we do only we we realize that we wouldn't be healthy as a total organism unless there were all these wars and fights and plots and politics going on between the various cells in our blood but from their point of view you see they feel a little bit put out and we're in the same situation because very slowly the human beings on the surface of the planet are realizing themselves into a total planetary organism with an electronic nervous system you see in science fiction which was published around about the twenties it was always expected that future human beings would have enormous heads because they would have very big brains and they would be very wise it didn't work that way what happens is that the human race is building a brain outside its body that is to say an interlocking electronic network of telephonic television radionic communications which is rapidly being interlocked with computers so that you will within a few years be able to plug your own brain into a computer you will have a little gadget here behind the ear slightly like a hearing aid and that will be integrated with your brain in such a way that you can plug in right here that will only be an intermediate stage uh because just in the same way as when we thought that all communications by electricity had to go through wires and then we got rid of the wires and got radio and television so in exactly the same way we will eventually get rid of telephones and radio and television and will communicate by some entirely new method that is at present called esp but that will mean that absolutely nobody has a private life anymore you will have no defenses everybody else will see right through you and some people will protest and say well this is terrible there's no privacy anymore that means there's no me well that's what's happened to your own cells and your own neurons and they objected at some time in the course of evolution we're getting our private life taken away we're being organized into a body and we're doing the same thing only we have got to try and see if we can be clever about it and that is to say to do two things at once to have this tremendous openness to each other whereby i don't care if you read my thoughts and you don't care if i read yours but at the same time nevertheless each one of us retains a peculiar individuality almost in the same way as nothing could be more unlike a stomach than a heart despite the fact that it is a an organism functioning altogether so then the problem though as i said is that for each individual which is outlined which is a separate thing or rather i would instead of using the word separate i would like to use the word distinct separate as i use the word means disjointed cut off from distinct means a feature of something where a an absolutely distinguishable pattern is part of a larger pattern of a whole so something can be distinct without being separate in just the same way as back and front can be very different and yet inseparable so then there is then this sensation of practically every living being of constituting a center of tension and of resistance that is to say of being a little bit blocked or shall i say of being in the way being in one's own way imagine the opposite let us suppose for example that you got up in the morning with a feeling of total transparency there's no resistance in your organism to the external world you just float through it you're part of it it's part of you and just in the same way for example that when you see if you see well you aren't aware of your eyes but if there's something wrong with your eyes and you see spots in front of you then you are looking at your eyes and your eyes are getting in your own way so the taoist sage wangza says that when clothes fit well you are not aware of them when your girdle or belt fits properly you are not aware of it good shoes you are unconscious of and so in exactly the same way the perfect form of man is unaware of himself because he doesn't get in his own way he is in this sense completely transparent now you were thinking i'm trying to sell you a bill of goods that i'm going to teach you some technique so that you can feel perfectly transparent and that this is the proper way to feel this is the way you ought to feel it's not that simple point is to begin with if you do in a really rather natural way feel alone and feel a little bit vulnerable that you've got a soft skin and you've got a weak heart and you've got uh you know all those ills that the human body is heir to going on inside you let's begin with that and that fact we hurt a bit and through hurting a bit we know we're here and uh this is part of the whole meaning of penances and uh all sorts of trials that people go through and all kinds of adventures and all sorts of very very difficult uh massage experiences and so on is that as a result of this it becomes quite apparent that you do truly exist you are there you are a kind of uh an obstacle to the flow of life and as life impinges upon you you rebound and you hurt a bit and so you you you are there now then although people cultivate this they say in general they rather it would be not that way we'd like to forget ourselves and so ever so many people say well i want something to lose myself in i want something to belong to i want to join a religion where i can sort of feel that i take part i mean something or i go to the movies to forget myself i read a mystery story to forget myself i get drunk to forget myself because the peculiar quality of the drug called alcohol is that it turns you off it uh makes you increasingly insensitive to pain and to being and so on so that you can get a certain vague sense a rather misty sense of floating but here it is so as things stand one ordinarily doesn't feel that way and therefore takes alcohol or something in order to disappear in order to feel less this sensation of uh resisting the world do you know if you study your body and its dynamics you will find that you are fighting all the time most people are some aren't but most people are fighting the external world all the time my friend charlotte silva often tries an experiment where she makes a person lie down on the floor and says to them now look the floor is solid and it will hold you up you don't have to do anything to stay where you are just lie on the floor and then she looks at the person or may touch them slightly and say do you realize you are making all sorts of efforts to hold yourself together because you are basically afraid that if you don't do that you will just go blue and disappear into a kind of formless goo all over the floor but but you won't you see your skin bones your muscle toners and everything is all there naturally and it will hold you together this is nothing to worry about and all you have to do is lie on the floor and you don't have to make any special efforts to stay together but very many people are afraid that they will fall apart or somehow disintegrate if they don't make efforts to hold themselves together or else that they will be disintegrated by some outside agency if they're not constantly on the alert like this you see to protect themselves now i'm not a preacher that's the most important thing to understand about me i'm not saying you shouldn't do that but i'm inviting you to become immensely aware of the fact that if you do that at all that you do it and that you have therefore this sense of being alone of being a particular separate form that is unlike any other form on earth that's just you and concentrate on that after all for many people they define this as their problem so you ought to be able to feel it without the slightest difficulty listen if i were asking you to feel some transcendental sensation or something of that kind this is just a very ordinary sense of being you and being alone now as you focus on that sensation of distinctness we'll even call this one separateness because we do we have been brought up to feel separate we have been brought up to feel actually disjoined from the external world although that is pure mythology and doesn't exist at all you're as much part of the external world as a whirlpool is part of a stream but we're brought up not to notice that but if you've been brought up that way and you don't notice that you're as much part of the world as the whirlpool as of a stream you feel this intense separateness the thing to do with all feelings that you don't like is to experience them as deeply as possible and go into the inmost depths of loneliness and indeed let us say the inmost depths of selfishness are you selfish you know lots of people try to pretend they aren't and uh say well i try not to be but i guess i don't succeed all the time and so uh krishnamurti you know is a very devil because he always roots it out he shows all the people who are very good and have the highest ideals and uh who are doing everything that they are really doing it for the most the same sort of motivation as other people are robbing banks and only they are giving it a name so as to conceal it better you know that's like culture culture is a way of more cleverly concealing the fact that you have to eat see like the queen of spain who in the days of uh the 1860s came on with these enormous skirts and floated into the room and uh you know was sort of coming on like she was an angel and somebody when they were first invented gave her a present of beautiful silk stockings a dozen pairs and sent them to the queen and her majesty's chamberlain replied with the letter returning the stockings and saying her majesty the queen of spades does not have legs i managed to float along just the same because i'm an angel so you see the the way in which all kinds of high culture are subtle ways of concealing and pretending that we do without the things that the lower classes whether of humans or of animals do see we pretend that we don't it's like you don't go around crudely taking a bull and banging it on the head with a mallet or sticking a knife through it and tearing it apart and eating it all that's done somewhere off in the stockyards and it comes to us in the butcher shop as a completely neutral looking thing called a steak the steak has absolutely nothing to do with a cow the steak is something wrapped up packaged like that and they're all down like that and nobody when they pick up a steak and test it thinks poor cow it doesn't even look like a cow it doesn't remind you one in any way so that's culture but you see however much you mask it under lofty ideals i mean the most religious people in the world the greatest saints are the various rascals i've known lots of them so uh when anybody is frighteningly holy you know that that guy is playing an extremely far-out game [Laughter] because he has put so many layers and so many wiggles between what he's outwardly doing and his inward irreducible rascality that he's a very cultured being indeed and is playing a very complicated game in hebrew theology incidentally it is admitted quite frankly that there is a thing called the yetza hara and in the beginning of time when god created adam he implanted in him the yet sahara and the yet sahara means the wayward spirit he put something funny in man so that man would be a little odd and it was a result of the yet sahara that adam was tempted by eve who was tempted by the serpent to eat that famous fruit and but the hebrew believes that everything that god created is good including the yet sahara because if it hadn't been for the yet sahara there would have nothing ever happened everybody would have obeyed god and god would have said well this is kind of a poor so now which you see you can't you can't just get up to someone and say disobey me because if they do they're repaying you see that's a double bind say to somebody disobey me but god was much more subtle than that he didn't tell adam to disobey him he told him to obey but suddenly he put this yet sahara thing in like that so that god would say well i'm not responsible well this thing's going to happen on its own because what everybody wants is something to happen on its own in other words something comes back and that's i'm not quite sure what it's going to do and it's to the degree that i encounter something like that that i know it's alive and everybody wants that because you see the sensation of being you this curious lonely center of awkward sensitivity subject to the most peculiar feelings and pains and anxieties and all that sort of thing all that is an essential prerequisite for feeling something else these two experiences go together if you want in other words if you want to be omnipotent and you want to live in a universe where nothing happens except watch exactly what you will to happen in other words you say i would like to be god if you think that's the way god is and everything is therefore totally under my control everything is absolutely transparent to my intelligence i have no problems a lot of people coming on like they think they've detained this state people like mehabah who says he's in charge of the universe and uh knows everything understands everything and so on and so forth well that's a lot of bunk nobody wants to be in that position because there wouldn't be anything to it because once everything is under your central control well just nothing is happening it's a ball from beginning to end so what any one or any being whatsoever who has a sense of centrality who has a sense of selfhood who has a sense of identity that sense of identity is inseparable from something else going on that is defined as not being me as not being under my control and that may jump at any time it might even eat me so what i want you first of all to understand is that these two sensations one of being the lonely central sensitive vulnerable self living in the midst of a world that feels other that is not under your control now i want to try and show you that these two sensations are really one sensation or rather two aspects of one sensation you couldn't have the one experience without the other experience this is a rather good thing to know because it means that you won't panic if you discover this people who suffer from chronic anxiety are always in doubt you see about this relationship between what i feel is myself and what i feel is something else let's suppose you're anxious about your relationship with other people you walk into a room and some stranger opposite to you you know nothing about the stranger and maybe you feel a little reluctant to open conversation you don't know whether this person is going to be sane or some kind of a crackpot or some kind of a awful stuffy square or you don't know what it is so you start fencing around a little but you get the feeling you see of uh now i better watch myself because i do after all i want to make a good impression i don't want to make an enemy so you watch yourself and uh this is a funny thing then begins called self-consciousness people say sort of to each other the usual way in which strangers come on and also there is involved in this encounter the secret games that people are playing all the time to defend themselves by putting other people down you see every living being if the truth be told is a manifestation of everything that there is you know what it's what we call god in old-fashioned language every human being is and every one i as i look around i can see every one of you as the the divine being coming at me in a different way uh crazy but the thing is that what we do is to try and prevent people from realizing that this is so by pointing out them in the most subtle ways their limitations and seeing if we can phase them put a person off a little bit make them uncertain make them unsteady it's like all sorts of games you can play where if a person wavers he loses where it's absolutely essential that he has total nerve in order to win but people play that with each other all the time and the reason they do it is not the reason they think it is that if everybody were perfectly clear that they were a manifestation of the divine being nothing very much would happen but so as to keep everybody a little bit unclear about it the whole thing bugs itself and creates these little doubts so what we're beginning with is these little doubts you see these sensations of of blockage of uh not being very sure of yourself but knowing very much indeed that you are yourself and that you're alone and it's all up to you it's a terrible feeling of responsibility so but what i'm trying to point out to you is if you intensify that feeling and bring it to its highest pitch you will immediately realize that you are aware of it only by virtue of the entire sensation of something else something defined as not you so the feeling of not you and the feeling of you are relative they go together and you can't have the one without the other and if you can't have the one without the other that means there's a secret conspiracy between the two they are really the same but pretending to be different because the whole idea is if there wasn't a difference you wouldn't know anything was happening i mean if it was all the same it's like that song of bob dylan's which says um something like well i'm just like a guy like you i'm just like anybody else no use me talking to you because you're just like me so the whole point is then if everybody were the same and all shared the same ideas exactly and so on there'd be no nothing to talk about because everybody would be a ball they'd be just yourself echoing back at you you see and you would feel like a madman in a hall of mirrors where everything you went this was just yourself you see in all directions just you well that's no fun but uh you may think that i'm speaking in favor of some kind of schizoid pluralistic universe no the whole point is this that difference and and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered so however wherever you notice the difference the difference has two sides what it is and what is not and these two sides since you can't have the one side without the other side they're really one because they go together inseparably so when you get this extreme sense of your own existence as a rather painful fact in the middle of everything else the everything else feeling and the you feeling are two poles of one and the same process so that the real you is what lies between these poles and includes both of them now this is the fundamental principle of the whole way in which ancient chinese thought developed the philosophy of the yang and the yin this is one of the oldest ideas in the universe i mean no that's a rather too big language on this planet and the the philosophy uh which i shall have occasion to speak of a little bit more later of the book of changes the yi jing is based entirely on this that the universe is the interplay of difference and the primordial difference is between up and down back and front black and white is and isn't male and female positive and negative so the word young in chinese means uh or refers to the south side of a mountain which is the sunny side the word yin refers to the north side of the mountain which is the shady side did you ever see a south sided mountain only with no north side or in uh it may also young may refer to the north bank of a river which gets the sun and yin to the south bank of the river which gets the shade and so you will remember this great symbol and one half of course is colored dark as it were two fishes interlocked and they are chasing each other they actually form you see more complicated symbols in which they form a helix and the spiral nebulae are shaped this way in the form of a helix and this is the position of man and woman making love fundamentally where i'm trying to get inside you and you're trying to get inside me and we're trying to get into the middle of each other but somehow or other a difference and we can never quite get there just like if i want to see the back of my head i can go round and round and i can chase it but i never quite catch up with it but that's what makes everything work uh it is said in the vedanta sutras that uh the lord the supreme knower of all things who is the noah in all of us doesn't know itself in the same way that fire doesn't burn itself and a knife doesn't cut itself so nothing to god even you see would be more mysterious than god do you know somehow how you surprise yourself for example when you feel your own pulse and you suddenly feel this life going on in you which you're not willing are there all sorts of ways in which you can say you have the belly rumbles and you didn't intend to have the belly rumbles and suddenly it happened or you had hiccups and now are you having hiccups or not is this something you're doing or is it merely something that's happening to you as if it was raining and the rain was happening to you this is a very debatable question consider breathing are you breathing or is it breathing you well you can feel it either way you can decide to breathe and feel that you're breathing in just the same way that you walk when you want to on the other hand when you forget about breathing altogether it still goes on and so it seems to be something that happens to you which is it do you grow your hair or does your hair just grow by itself what enables you to make a decision when you decide do you first decide to decide or do you just decide now how do you do that nobody knows you see when uh juan sir tells the story that one philosopher asked another how can one get the tao which is the power of nature so as to have it for one's own and the other philosopher answers your life is not your own it is the delegated adaptability of dao your offspring are not your own they are the outputs of dao you move you know not how you are addressed you know not why these are the operations of dao so how could you have it for your own that's a funny thing then we can experience ourselves through and through as something that just happens look at it this way if you feel your body your skin and the solidity of you and with regard what marvelous eyes you have which are the power which generate light and color out of all these electrical quanta in the external world and these ears these beautiful shells that you wear on the side of your head with their little spiral bones the cochlea inside you know all that it's marvelous but you feel you don't feel responsible for this you don't know how it's made if it is made but it's you that's what you are that extraordinary pattern beautiful gorgeous um wonderful arabesque of tubes and bones and cartilage and myriads of interconnecting electronics and nervous systems and everything wonderful see but the point is most people don't own this they don't say this is me they say well it's some kind of very clever machine which the lord god made out of his infinite wisdom and put me in it and this is a very limited view because the extraordinary thing is you see that this is you this extraordinary marvelous goings-on see but you can feel it all of it as if it was just happening to you but if you want to feel it that way then you've got to go the whole way and you've got to feel that your decisions just happen to you and the thing that you call yourself to which things happen is just something that happens see you can't you don't know how you manage to be an ego how you happen to be conscious that just happened too so happenings happen to a happening so you can feel yourself completely irresponsible like that see there's nowhere or when you get that way that's a very interesting road to run but you can try the other way you can extend it and say now look here if if if i really am my eyes and although i don't understand them i mean let's say i can't describe it in lines in words this is me it's extraordinary thing but it is well i don't understand how it happens but then you see that's the whole point as i made a little while ago that the very lord god himself doesn't understand how he happens because if he did what would be the point there'd be no mystery be no possibility of surprises that's why there has to be yang and yin yang is bright and it understands everything yin is dark and damned if she'll be understood [Laughter] but there are two phases of the same being and so your young side is your conscious attention and all the bright things you know and all the information you have and all the know-how that you know what to do and your inside is the other side of the yang which enables the yang to function because you don't know why the young side of you functions that is the conscious bright intelligent side of you it all depends on something you don't understand at all because if it didn't it wouldn't be there just like you wouldn't be here unless there was something else so they moved together and therefore if you will accept the idea that you are your own eyes and your own heart and your own ears with that wonderful little spiral cochlear inside and all these amazing gadgets here you're all that but you know anything about it but you are it now therefore by a little extension of the imagination you can very well see that if all those bones and subtleties inside you feel other than your conscious ego but nevertheless are one with it the same argument will go for all the other things going on around you the sun shining the stars twinkling the wind blowing and the great ocean restlessly pounding against these cliffs that's you too you don't control it of course because there has to be something about you you don't control or you wouldn't be you i see that or all that is lessen elementary relativity and relativity i've talked about it in this way which is kind of unscholarly and so on but uh i i wanted to get the message across the idea across because to understand the principle of relativity is the absolute foundation of the philosophy of the dao loud sir takes it up in his second chapter when he says when all the world understands beauty to be beautiful there is already ugliness when all the world understands goodness to be good there is already evil thus to be and not to be arise mutually high and low are positive mutually long and short are compared mutually and he goes through a whole list of opposites and show how they create each other it's like uh that wonderful little parable the chinese character for man looks more or less like an upturned v and lafkario hearn in one of his books tells a story of a japanese girl telling her little sister the meaning of the character for man by taking two sticks of wood and balancing them together on the ground two sticks of firewood so that they form the upturned v and she says to her little sister this is the character for man because neither stick will stand up unless it has the other to help it but the profounder meaning underneath this is there's no self without other and no man and don't forget get back the original point every creature in the world feels it's a man i don't mean a male but a human and that is because it is in this situation where the thing it feels as itself as its separate identity is supported by the equal and opposite sensation of other center periphery here there now then is isn't or whatever these two are the yang and the in the two poles that hold each other up so the zen poem says when misfortune comes treat it as a blessing when fortune comes treat it as a disaster [Music] this podcast was made possible by a grant from the rizzuto foundation and it's being produced with the help of the ramadas be here now podcast network our theme music is by sakyo hussein and the rhythm experience courtesy of moment records and to find out more about the legacy of alan watts please visit alanwats.org on the internet [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Be Here Now Network

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

Id: bidz2YV6Awk

Length: 47min 44sec (2864 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021