Alan Watts ~ Exploring Your Dark Side

foreign should do in their lifetime sometime two things one is to consider death to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up never that is the most is a very gloomy thing for contemplation but it's like manure just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creative life you'll get wonderful things out of that and the other thing to contemplate is to follow the possibility of the idea that you are totally selfish that you don't have a good thing to be said for you at all you're a complete utter rascal [Music] now when you go deeply into the nature of selfishness what do you discover you say I love myself I seek my own advantage now what is the self that I love what do I want and that becomes an increasingly ever deepening puzzle now I've often referred to this when you say to somebody else I love you [Music] it's always rather disconcerting to the person to whom you say that if you imply that you love them with a pure disinterested and holy love they automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony [Music] but if you say I love you so much I could eat you that's an expression as a way of saying to a person you attract me so much that I can't help it I am absolutely bowled over by you I'm gone and people like that then they feel they're really being loved that it's absolutely genuine but now I love you so much I could eat you now what the devil do I want I certainly don't want to eat the girl in the sense of literally devouring her because then she disappear but I love myself and what is me how do in what way do I know me well it suddenly occurs to me that I know me only in terms of you and that the main task of the psychotherapist is to do what he called to integrate the evil to as it were put the devil in US in its proper function because you see it's always the devil the unacknowledged one the outcast the scapegoat the bastard the bad guy you see the black sheep of the family it's always from that point that generation comes in other words in the same way as in the drama to have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain it's necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble so in the whole scheme of life there has to be The Shadow because without the shadow there can't be the substance so this is why there is a very strange association between crime and all naughty things and holiness so you see Holiness is Way Beyond being good people aren't necessarily holy people a holy person is one who is whole who has as it were reconciled his opposites and so there's always something slightly scary about holy people and other people react to them in very strange ways they can't make up their minds whether they're Saints or devils and so holy people have throughout history always created a great deal of trouble along with their creative results let's take Jesus for example trouble that Jesus created is absolutely uncountable think of the Crusades the impossession the heaven only knows what's gone on in the name of Jesus very remarkable Freud's a big Troublemaker Yong had a tremendous humor and he knew that nobody can be completely honest that you will try and you'll have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark unconscious depths but there will be a certain point at which you will say well I've had enough of that you know and do you see how in a strange way there's a certain sanity in that when a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity of deception there is something you all laughed when I said that there's something humorous about it and this humor is very funny thing basically humor is an attitude of laughter about oneself there is malicious humor or which is laughing at other people but real deep humor is laughter at oneself now why fundamentally do you laugh about yourself what makes you laugh about yourself [Music] isn't it because you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside now I passed you around a lot of embroidery to look at before we started and I'm perfectly sure that you've got the point that there's a big difference between the front and the back in some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front because people take shortcuts in the front everything is orderly and it is supposed to be kind of messy on the back side see which side will you wear you've got to be sure you'll get the front and the front of them have the back in the back the back has all the little tricks in it all the shortcuts all the lowdown that people don't acknowledge see and it's exactly the same with the way we live you know like sweeping the dust under the carpet in a hurry just before the guests come I mean we do ever so many things like that and if you don't do it if you don't think you do it and you think well really I my embroidery is the same on both sides see well you're deceiving yourself because what you're doing is you're taking the shortcuts in another dimension which you're keeping out of consciousness everybody takes the shortcuts Everybody Plays tricks everybody has in himself an element of duplicity of deception because you see from this point of view that I am discussing where the web is the Trap to be is to deceive d think of camouflage the chameleon who changes its color think of the butterfly pretending it has eyes please think of the flower saying to the bee like my honey B says wow but then that means that the B has to be and it has to go on living and all the trouble it takes to go around collecting honey and raising other bees and organizing itself and doing that dance which tells the other bees where there's more honey there's all that stuff to do there's a flower was deceptive now in the same way I've often said life is is a drama and a drama is a deception it's a big Act when you peel an onion and you don't really understand the nature of an onion you might look for the pit in the center like any ordinary fruit has but the onion doesn't have a center it's all skins so when you get right down there's nothing but a bunch of schemes who say well that was a kind of disappointing well in rather the same way you see you find when you explore yourself uh and your motivations and you'll go through and through and you try to find out that thing which is really genuine so you explore the onion and you'll go in and in and in then you'll find well uh it's all a deception now then the question arises who's deceiving who who's fooling who I'm fooling me what is fooling fooling is playing like you're there when you're not you know getting somebody else to answer your name in the Roll Call we're all this is the metaphysical basis of it this is what the Hindus mean by Maya the world illusion the world is playing it's there when it isn't and it's a trap and it sucks you in and you can't get out of it and it's a thorough big trap too but always when you get an idea like this or a feeling like this follow it to its extreme don't back out from it if you find you're selfish go to the extreme of what selfishness means confusion largely results from not following feelings or ideas to their depth you know people think they want to be immortal they'd like to live forever do you really want to do that think about it really go into it what it would be like people say they want this that and the other they want this kind of car they want this kind of dress or so on and this much money and so on it's always a good idea to think it right through what it would involve be in that situation to have those desires fulfilled also when you form a relationship to another person think it through too you see how inconvenient would they be however attractive and uh always turn the embroidery around and look at the underside but don't get caught doing it see that's something one does on the side in secret because otherwise you'll play the game that everything is as it's supposed to be on the front but that makes you humorous and that makes you human [Music]

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Id: NqUt0BvgpQc

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023