Alan Watts - Choosing The Right Path

I want to start by reinforcing the point that what I call the religions of the East and the ones we're discussing Hinduism Buddhism and Chinese Taoism they don't involve that you believe in anything specific and they don't involve any idea of obedience to Commandments from above and they don't involve any conformity to a specific ritual although they do have rituals but their rituals vary from country to country and from time to time they our objective is always not ideas not doctrines but a method a method for the transformation of consciousness that is to say for a transformation of your sensation of who you are and I emphasize the word sensation because it's the strongest word we have for feeling directly when you put your hand on the corner of a table you have a very definite feeling and when you are aware of existing you also have a definite feeling but in the view of these methods or disciplines the ordinary person's definite feeling of the way he exists and who he is is a hallucination to feel yourself as a separate ego a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world somehow locked up inside a bag of skin is seen as a hallucination that you are not a stranger in the earth that comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere else altogether but that you in your fundamental existence you are the total energy that constitutes this universe playing that it's you playing that it's this particular organism and even playing that it's this particular person because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide-and-seek that is to say that the colossal reality the energy that is everything that is a unitary energy that is one plays at being many at manifesting itself in all these particulars that we call you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and this and that and all around us and it's fundamentally a game and you can say that this goes really for all the systems that I'm talking about it's the basis of Hinduism of Buddhism and of Taoism this intuition now today we're going to talk about Buddhism Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism you could in a way call it a reform of Hinduism or Hinduism stripped for export it originates in northern India close to the area that is now Nepal shortly after 600 BC there was a young prince by the name of Gautama Siddhartha who became the man we called the Buddha now the word Buddha is not a proper name it's a title and it's based on the sanskrit root would be udh which means to be awake and so you could say the Buddha is the man who woke up from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be and found out who he was who he is it's curious that this title was not something new there was already in the whole complex of Hinduism the idea of Buddhas have awakened people and curiously they are ranked higher than gods because in the view of Hinduism even the gods or the Angels the divers are still bound on the wheel of the the sort of squirrel-cage of going round and round and round in the pursuit of success and the idea is that if you pursue something that you can call success pleasure good virtue which originally of course means strength magical power all these positive things you are under illusion because the positive cannot exist without the negative to be you only know what to be is by contrast with not to be so if we say now there is a coin in the left hand there is no coin in the right and from this you get the idea of to be and not to be and you can't have the one without the other so if you try to pursue to gain the positive and to deny get rid of the negative it's as if you were trying to arrange everything in this room so that it was all up nothing was down you can't do it you set yourself an absolutely insoluble problem because the basis of life is spectrum I'll consider the spectrum of colors when you think of a spectrum in what form do you think of it most people think of it as a ribbon whose red at one end and purple at the other but the spectrum is actually a circle because purple is the mixture of red and blue it goes right round and so in this way all sensation all feeling all experience whatsoever is moving through spectra you don't only have the spectrum of color you have a spectrum of sound you have various complex spectra of texture of smell of taste and you're constantly operating through all the possible variations of experience and it implies that you can't know one end of the spectrum without also knowing the other so if you wanted to say your favorite color is red and you wanted only red and you had to exclude therefore blue and purple without blue and purple you can't have red behind of course all the various colors in the spectrum is the white light and behind everything that we experience all our various sensations of sound of colour of shape of touch there's the white light and I'm using the phrase the white light rather symbolically I don't mean it literally but there is common to all sensations what you might call the basic sense and if you explore back into your sensations and reduce them all to the basic sense you're on your way to reality to what underlies everything to what is the ground of being the basic energy and to the extent that you realize this and know that you are it you transcend you overcome you surpass the illusion that you are simply John Doe Mary Smith now what have you so then the Buddha as the man who woke up is regarded as one Buddha among a potentiality of myriads of Buddhas everybody can be a Buddha everybody has in himself the capacity to wake up from the illusion of being simply this separate individual the Buddha made his doctrine very easy to understand because in those days there wasn't very much writing being done and people committed things to memory and so he put his doctrine or method in various formulae which are very easy to remember and I'm going to explain it in those terms so that you can remember it just as well he of course practiced the various disciplines that were offered in the Hinduism of his time but he found in a certain way that they had become unsatisfactory because they had over emphasized asceticism had overemphasized putting up with as much pain as you can there was a feeling you see that if the problem of life is pain let let us suffer and this is the root of the ascetics you see who lie on beds of nails who hold a hand up forever and ever and ever who eat only one banana a day who renounce sex who do all these weird things because they feel that if they head right into pain and don't become afraid of it but suffer as much pain as possible they will by this method overcome the problem of pain and they will set themselves free from anxiety there's a certain sense in that as you can obviously see supposing for example you have absolutely no fear of pain you have no anxieties you have no hangups how strong you would be nobody could stop you you would have ultimate courage but the Buddha was very subtle he is really the first historical psychologist the great psychologist psychotherapist he is very subtle because he saw that a person who is fighting pain who's trying to get rid of pain is still really fundamentally afraid of it and therefore the way of asceticism is not right equally the way of hedonism of seeking pleasure is not right so the Buddhist doctrine is called the middle way which is neither ascetic nor hedonistic so it summed up in what are called the four noble truths and the first is called dukka dukka means suffering in a very generalized sense you could call it chronic frustration and it is saying that life as lived by most people is dukkha is an attempt in other words to solve insoluble problems try to draw a square circle you can't because the problem itself is meaningless try to arrange the things in this room so that they're all up and none of them down it is meaningless such a problem cannot ever be solved so try to have light without dark or dark without light it could never be solved so the attempt to solve problems that are basically insoluble and to work at it through your whole life that is dukkha now he went on to analyze this that there are what he called three signs of being the first is do car itself frustration the second is Anita and this means the the the letter a in sanskrit at the beginning of a word is often the equivalent of our nan so nietzsche means permanent anita means impermanent that every manifestation of life is impermanent and therefore our quest to make things permanent to straighten everything out to get it fixed is an impossible and insoluble problem and therefore we experience dukka dukka all this sense of fundamental pain and frustration as a result of trying to make things permanent the third sign of being is called an Atman now you know I from my talk on Hinduism that the word Atman means self are not man means therefore non-self that there is in you no real ego now I've explained that already I've explained in talking about Hinduism that the idea of the ego is a social institution it has no physical reality it is simply the ego is your symbol of yourself just as the word water is a noise which symbolizes a certain liquid reality so the idea of the ego the role you play who you are is not the same as your living organism your ego has absolutely nothing to do with the way you color your eyes shape your body circulate your blood that's the real you but it's certainly not your ego because you don't even know how it's done from the standpoint of your conscious attention so the idea of anatman is firstly that the ego is unreal there isn't one now then this then is the first truth there is this situation that we have dukkha or frustration because we are fighting the changing nosov finns and because we don't realize that the ego the AI is unreal the second of the four noble truth is then called Krishna Krishna is a Sanskrit word again and is the root of our word thirst and it's usually translated desire but it is better translated clinging grabbing or there's an excellent modern American slang e word hang up that is exactly what Trishna is they hang up Krishna is clutching as for example what we call smother love when a mother is so afraid that her children may get into trouble that she protects them excessively and as a result of this prevents them from growing or when a when lovers cling to each other excessively and have to sign documents that they will curse and swear to love each other always they are in a state of Trishna and this is the same thing as holding on to yourself so tightly that you strangle yourself now so the the second truth in about Trishna is that the cause of dukkha is Trishna clinging is what makes suffering if you don't recognize that this whole world is a phantasmagoria and an amazing illusion a weaving of smoke and you you try to hold on to it you see then you start suffering seriously suffering Krishna is in turn based upon our Vidya the same negative ah Vidya from the root vid means knowledge as in the Latin video and the English vision a Vidya therefore is ignorant genesis guna means of course - no - knowledge is the same thing as G gnosis in Greek - no so this is not to know to ignore to overlook and I explained in the first talk in this series how we ignore all kinds of things because we notice only what we think noteworthy and therefore our vision of everything is highly selective we pick out certain things and say that's what's there just as we select and notice the figure rather than the background sometimes I draw this on the blackboard and ask the question what have i drawn what would you say what have i drawn the circle any other suggestions yeah you're getting the point I've drawn a wall with a hole in it you see but ordinarily you've been reading my books so but ordinarily people see the ball the circle the ring or whatever and never think of the background because they ignore the background just as one thinks that you can have pleasure without pain pleasure the figure and don't realize that pain is the background so avidya is this state of restricted consciousness restricted attention that moves through life unaware of the fact that to be implies not to be and vice-versa so now the third noble truth is called nirvana this word means blow out Neera is a negative word again like ah vana is blowing so it's a kind of out blowing now in breathing you know that breath is life the Greek word you may pronounce it Ponemah or plasma is the same as spirit and spirit means breath in the book of Genesis when God had made the clay figurine that was later to be Adam he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils and it became alive because life is breath but now if you hold your breath you lose it he that would save his life will lose it so breathe in breathe in breathe in get as much air as you can and Trishna cling and you lose it so near vana means breathe out what a relief that was the sigh of relief let it go because it'll come back to you if you let it go but if you don't let it go you'll just suffocate so a person in the state of Nirvana is what we might call a blown out person like blow your mind let go don't cling and then you're in the state of Nirvana and I reinforced eyes the point this is not I'm not preaching see not saying this is what you ought to do I'm simply pointing out a state of affairs that is so there's no moralism in this whatsoever it's simply pointing out like if you put your hand into the fire you'll get burned you can get burned if you want to it's ok but if you so happens that you don't want to get burned and you don't put your hand in the fire so in the same way if you don't want to be in a state of anxiety all the time and again I emphasize if you'd like to be anxious it's perfectly all right if that's si Buddhism never hurries anyone on they say you've got all eternity through which to live in various forms and therefore you don't have just one life in which you've got to avoid eternal damnation you can go running around the wheel and the rat race and play that game just as long as you want to so long as you think it's fun but if there comes a time when you don't think it's fun you don't have to do it so I wouldn't say to anyone who disagrees with me and who says well I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle and this world too right and so on and so forth and arrange everything in this world so that it's all up try it please it's perfectly okay go on doing now [Laughter]

Channel: True Meaning

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Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018