Alan Watts Hinduism fully explained

now today I am going to go into the very fundamental the guts of Hinduism but what I want to do is to begin with certain documents that are known as the Upanishads and these documents constitute what is called Vedanta the IDI AMTA and that is compounded of two words veda anta anta means end or completion or summation Veda of course is related to the Latin video to see Veda is the fundamental revelation of the Hindu way of life contained in its earliest scriptural documents which are generally dated in the period between 15 and 1200 BC the Upanishads has been the summation of the Veda are from found from over a long period of time the beginning perhaps as early as 800 BC some of the Upanishads are much much later than that in the basic position of the Upanishads is that the self is the one and only reality without a second that all this universe is finally Brockman and appears to be a multiplicity of different things and different events only by reason of Maya which is illusion magic art creative power so then it is basic to the Vedanta that Brahma this intangible non objective ground of everything that exists is identical with the ground of you and this is put in the formula Tata masih t-80 taught same as our word that to vamp tvam same as the Latin tools thou I see art we should translate that into a modern American idiom as you're it this of course is a doctrine which is very difficult for those brought up in the judeo-christian traditions to accept because it is fundamental to Christian and Jewish theology that whatever you are you are surely not the Lord God and Christians feel about the Hindu doctrine that we are all fundamentally masks of God that it's pantheism and that's a dirty word in Christian theological circles because of the feeling that if everything is God then all moral standards are blown to hell because it means everything is as good as everything else everything that happens is really God and this must include the good things at the bad things and that seems to them a very dangerous idea actually all religious doctrines contain very very dangerous ideas however we won't worry about that for the moment because what the Hindu means by God when he says Brahman is not at all the same thing as a Jew means by the Lord Adonai because the Jew and the Christian means the boss to whom divine honors of you as above all others the Hindu on the other hand does not mean the boss he doesn't mean the king the law the political ruler of the universe he means the inmost energy which as it were Danson's this whole universe without as it were the idea of authority of governing some intractable element that resists his or its power so if a Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has discovered that he is God we put him in the loony bin because it's unfashionable to burn people for heresy anymore but in India if you announce that you're the Lord God they say well of course how nice that you found out because everybody is so then why the great problem arises does it appear that we are not why do we think why do we have the sensory impression that this whole universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things and we don't see it all as one well what would you think it would be like to see it all as one I know a lot of people who study oriental philosophy here about attaining these great states of consciousness Nirvana moksha which the Hindus use liberation Satori Zen Buddhist word for enlightenment or awakening what would it be like to have that what how would you feel if you saw everything is really one basic reality well a lot of people think then it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of vision suddenly became vague melted and we saw only a kind of luminous sea of light but rather advisedly the Vedanta philosophy does not really seriously use the word one of the supreme self because the word and the idea one has an opposite many on one side and another opposite none on the other and it is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither one nor many but as they say non dual and they express that in this word advisor is a negative word like naam divider is from the same as the laughing uo2 so advisor is non-dual and this at first for Westerners is a difficult conception because you naturally as a Western logician would say but the non-dual is the opposite of the dual therefore it has an opposite true but the Hindu is using this term in a special sense it's like this on a flat surface I have only two dimensions in which to operate so that everything drawn in two dimensions has a two dimension how therefore on a two-dimensional level can I draw anything but two dimensions how in logic in human rationality can I possibly think except in terms of opposites all rationally discourse is talked about classification the classification of experiences of sensations of notions and the nature of a class is that it's a box and if a box has an inside it has to have an outside is you is or is you ain't is fundamental to all classification and we can't get out it's almost as if you see whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference on the surface covering an implicit unity only it's very difficult to talk about what it is that unifies black and white of course in a way the eyes do sound and silence are unified by the ears so you can see can't you that if you can't have one without the other it's like the poles of a magnet North Pole and South Pole you can't have a one pole magnet true the poles are quite different ones North on the other south but it's all one magnet and some such idea is that is what the Hindu is moving into when he's speaking of the real basis or ground of the universe as being non-dual take it the fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel between self and other I am thou I am it there is something that is me there's an area of my experience that I call myself and there's an other area of my experience which I call not my self but you will immediately see that neither one could be realized without the other you wouldn't know what you meant by self unless you experience something other than self you wouldn't know what you meant by other unless you understood self they go together they arise at the same time you don't have first self and then other or first other and then self they come together and that shows you see the sneaky conspiracy underneath the two like the magnet between the two different poles and so more or less that sort of what isn't classifiable but which lies between all classes the class of elephants opposite the class of non elephants has as it were the walls of the box joining the two together just as your skin is an osmotic membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all the tubes in it and the nerve ends and the way in which the external energies flow through your skin into your inside and vice versa but we do don't we see and feel and sense or we think we do the world has divided into a great multiplicity a lot of people would think of the universe as a collection of different things a kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam washed together in this particular area of space and prefer to take a pluralistic attitude and don't see anything underlying in fact in contemporary logical philosophy the notion of any [Music] basic ground or continuum in which all events occur would be considered meaningless for obvious reasons if I say that everybody in this universe every star every planet is moving in a certain direction of a uniform speed that will be saying nothing at all unless I can point out some other object with respect to which they are so moving but since I said the universe that includes all objects whatsoever therefore I cannot make a meaningful statement about the uniform behavior of everything that is going on true but on the other hand every sound you hear on the radio whether it be a honking horn a bar Sonata or a newscast is the vibration of the diaphragm in your loudspeaker the radio doesn't tell us this the announcer doesn't come on first thing in the morning and say ladies and gentlemen from now until closing time all the sounds you will hear will be vibrations of the diaphragm in your speaker that is taken for granted and nor so in the same way you're here drum is basic to all that you hear your lens of the eye and retina is basic to all that you see what is the color of the lens of the eye we say it is no color it is transparent in the same way as a mirror has no color of its own but the mirror is very definitely they're colorless as it may be the eardrum unheard as it may be is very definitely basic to all hearing the eye transparent as it may be is very definitely basic to all seeing so therefore if there were some continuum in which everything that is going on and everything that we experience occurs we would not notice it we would not be able really to say very much about it except perhaps that it was there it wouldn't make any difference to anything except the one all-important difference that if it wasn't there there wouldn't be any differences but you see philosophers nowadays don't like to think about things like that it stretches their heads and they would rather preoccupy themselves with more pedestrian matters but still you can't help it if you're a human being you wonder about things like that what is it in which everything is happening what is the ground well you say obviously it's not a part because I think that is a what is a is a classifiable thing and so very often the Hindu and the Buddhist will refer to the ultimate reality as no thing not nothing but no special thing unclassified can't put your finger on it but it's you it's what you basically are what everything basically is just as the sound of a automobile horn on the radio is in one way an automobile but basically it is the vibration of the diaphragm okay so you are all in the Hindu view vibrations of the entire cosmic diaphragm put it like that that's analogy and I'm using subliminal language or katha fatik language from the point of Christianity the best language to say nothing but to experience it how could you experience and that's the whole thing as I pointed out last time the nub of all these Oriental philosophies is not an idea and not a theory not even a way of behaving but it's basically a way of experiencing a transformation of everyday consciousness so that it becomes quite apparent to us that that's the way things are but you when you it when it happens to you it's very difficult to explain it so in exactly the same way when somebody has that sort of breakthrough which transforms his consciousness and it happens all over the world it's not just a Hindu phenomenon but somebody suddenly realizes it's all one or technically non-dual and really are always coming and going and all this frantic living and dying grabbing struggling to fighting suffering all this is a fantastic phantasmagoria he sees that but when he tries to explain it he finds his mouth isn't big enough because he can't get the words out of their dualistic pattern to explain something non-dualistic but why is this so why are we under this great magnificent hallucination well the Hindus explain this in Saguna language as follows it's very nice explanation a child can understand the fact of the matter is that the world is a game of hide-and-seek peekaboo now you see it now you don't because very obviously if you were the supreme self what would you do I mean would you just sit there and be blissfully won and never ever and ever and ever now obviously not you would play games you would in other words for the very nature of the fact that I said no energy system is an energy system unless it lets go of itself so you would let go of yourself and you'd get lost and you get involved in all sorts of adventures and you would forget who you were just as when you play a game playing poker and although you're only playing for dimes or for chips you had absorbed in the game and nothing really important to win nothing really important to lose and yet it becomes fantastically interesting who wins and who loses and so in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call all the different beings in the plot just like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he's doing or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama at first we know it's a drama we go to a play and we say it's only a play and the proscenium arch tells us that what happens behind that arch is not for real just a show but the great actor is going to make you forget it's just a show he's going to have you sitting on the edge of your chair he's gonna have you crying he's gonna have you trembling because he almost persuades you that it's real and what would happen if the very best actor was confronted by the very best audience why they'd be taken in completely and the one would confirm the other so this is the idea of the universe as drunk that the fundamental self the saguna brahman plays this game gets involved in being all of us and does it so that well the the it's so superbly acted that the thing appears to be real and we're not only sitting on the edge of our chair but we start to get up and throw things we join in the drama in the door becomes whatever it is that's going on in Lucy then of course at the end of the drama because all things have to have an end that have a beginning the curtain goes down and the actors retired of the green room and they are the villain and the hero cease to be villain and hero and they're just that the actor and then they come out in front of the curtain and they stand in a row and the audience applauds the villain along with the hero the villain for having been a good villain the hero for having been a great hero the play is over and everybody gives a sigh of relief well that was a great show wasn't it so the same idea the greenroom is the near goona broth that behind the whole show where there are no differentiations of i and thou subject and object good and evil light in darkness life and death but within the sphere of the saguna brahman all these differentiations appear because that's out in front that's on the stage and no good actor when on the stage performs his own personality that's what's wrong with movie stars they tried to cast the person to act a role which corresponds to his alleged personality but in a great actor can assume any kind of personality male or female and suddenly convert himself right in front of the audience into somebody who takes you in and Todd but in the greenroom he's his usual self so Hinduism has the idea that you see it's all the conventions of drama you're right along with it that all this world is a big act Leela the play of the supreme self and it's therefore compared to a dream to a passing illusion and you should not therefore take it seriously you may take it sincerely perhaps as an actor may be sincere in his acting but not serious because that means it throws you for a loop although that of course is involved we do take it seriously but you see one of the great questions that you have to ask yourself when you really get down to the nitty-gritty about your own inmost core is are you serious or do you know deep within that you're a put in the last session of this particular course which is an introduction to oriental philosophy I tried to condense the fundamental principles of what you can call the central viewpoint of Hinduism Vedanta the not so much the doctrine as the experiential realization that what you are basically is the same as the root and ground of the universe in other words in the formula Atman the self is Brahman the ground of being now today I want to relate this way of playing hide-and-seek with the very design of Hindu society because Hinduism is difficult to characterize as a religion especially because we belong to a religion where in its institutionalized form it can very well degenerate into a religion that's for Sunday's only that doesn't apply to every detail of life in other words when a Hindu brushes his teeth it's a religious act there is not such a thing as a Christian way of brushing your teeth but in Hindu life all the details of life are Hinduism so then underneath all the presuppositions of Hinduism it can be found a transition from one kind of culture to another from my hunting culture to an agrarian culture this explains a great deal about this way of life now in a hunting culture which is a culture on the move nomadic every man knows the whole culture in other words you do not get a high specialization division of labor and man who is a hunter has to know how to make clothes how to skin animals how to cook them how to shoot them how to trail them he has to know every kind of skill because he's often alone and in a hunting culture you do not get a special division of priesthood from ordinary people every man in his own way is capable of being a priest but some more so than others not by virtue of any ordination or schooling that they've received but by their receptivity because the priest or holy man of a hunting culture is called a shaman a shaman is an individual who separates himself from society for a certain period and goes alone into forests or mountains to commune with what he will usually call the ancestors that is to say with his basic origins and he will find something by way of a spiritual experience for himself not through any teacher not through any previous Authority he finds it genuinely on his own and the shaman therefore goes into solitude to find out who he really is because in society everybody is busy telling you who you are and you rely on others to see yourself but to find himself in other words to find out what all this really is all about the spiritually minded man of the hunting culture goes alone and so the culture of the American Indians is to a very large extent hunting culture and you will find the spiritual man of the American Indians is a Shan however when a hunting culture becomes settled it becomes agrarian there arises farming looking after the land and then you get a completely different kind of society let me suggest that it's something like this where do agrarian communities settle where do they build a village usually and in Crossroads especially if roads across the water a river and where the crossing meets the agrarian village settles itself and protect itself by building a cane we say a person is beyond the pale that means he's an outcast he lives outside the village he's a pariah but in the village notice that the pale having been built around the crossroads it divides the village into four sections and oddly enough there are four divisions of labour in all fundamental agrarian societies and these consist of [Music] one the priests you know the word clever Clerk cleric and clear are all the same word it meant someone who's literate clever also clear put it down clearly you can't do that unless you look and so if you're illiterate person you're a Carrick and clergy is the same word as clever in Old English much conceit of clergy is an old English phrase meaning he's intellectually snobbish so that's your past number one pass number two warrior or incidentally rule three nothing of craft and for labor unskilled so now one of these there are four castes or four rows answers in society where there's a division of labor because an agricultural society is more complex than a hunting culture we immediately get division and labor and we all play different roles that is to say assume different masks for purposes of living in this kind of community all of you you see are essentially be are essentially clerics you're what the Hindus would call Brahmin because you're all being trained in the university so the the Hindu name for this class is brahmana for this class Kshatriya for this caste by ship and for this class children so those are the basics of the forecasts and so if you are in the pale if you belong out of the community you have to be typifies they say is you is or is you ain't into which of these do you fit and you must fit into one of these now caste is something of course which has got a very bad name from a modern point of view both modern point of view with us and with the modern India because they say once you get into a caste you're stuck if you are born to a laborer a laborer you must be if you are born to a warrior you must be a warrior or a ruler you could never become a character and we think that's pretty terrible because in our culture we work under the assumption that you as an individual are free to choose whatever occupation you will follow but unfortunately this involves going to school and for certain purposes going to school is one of the worst things you can do for example if you want to become a completely fantastic expert carpenter you have to begin the trade at the age of seven at the latest and your father if he is a carpenter is obviously the best teacher you can have in a very ancient form of agrarian culture as in India or as in Japan or China a young man who was son of a carpenter would become fascinated with his father's occupation and that would mean a very special relationship would grow up between him and his father which does not grow up in our culture because most of us do not know what our fathers are doing they go away to a mysterious office or factory where they do something called making mine as an incident as a the main reason for the incidental occupation which they pursue there but the the children and the wife have no active part in that occupation whatsoever they no papa only as a kind of clown who returns home in the evening having made money and one dad's money is the same as another dad's money it makes no difference except that everybody wanted more they don't give a damn how he gets it so long as he doesn't complain too much so the child instead of learning and participating in his close father relationship in learning an occupation or a trade or an art he sent off to an impersonal eyes din stitute to be taught to be everything and nothing and therefore doesn't learn early enough any craft so as to become a true master of it what is happening for example in Japan where a father can no longer apprentice his son at seven years old to become a carpenter because he has to send him away to school to learn to be an insurance salesman he can't teach his child and then comes high school and then when the kid gets out of high school he's interested in girls and it takes him until he's about twenty-two to be able to settle down to learn carpentry and it's too late too late to attain real mastery because a great Japanese carpenter never uses a plant he doesn't need a drawing does it all by eye and can fit the most complicated joinery together by eye and it's the same of the arts of weaving textiles of making superb ceramics jewelry any kind of gorgeous craftsmanship depends on beginning as a child and so alright we can't buy it anymore in this country there is not on any kind of commercial basis great craftsmanship available here we have to go abroad to get it to so-called primitive societies we must be content with plastics emulation so it is something to be said you see for the caste system I just wanted to present the other side now however in going through this system there are certain stages whatever pass through there are three stages of life which are called are from are from means really an abode a center for spiritual study for practicing yoga will be called an ashram an ashram also means an abode in the sense of the stage of life and the three stages are one called Ramachari that means the stage of being a student to clean hosta also the drama prosper that means forest whether not funny ji hasta householder vanaprastha forest dweller because you see in this order of society you come into society and you go through one of its act as a green hosta or householder but when you arrive at the point in life where you have got a son by birth from yourself or by the marriage of your oldest daughter a son who will take over your work you give up being a householder and you become a forest dweller in other words you go outside the pail and back to the forest with the idea of finding out who you really are while you are in the community you were playing a role one of the four roles or its subdivisions and you came on a stinker Tailor Soldier sailor rich men bigger than TV but that wasn't the real you that was one of the masks of the prom the true self behind everything to find out the brahmana who you really are in order to get ready to die you become gone across go back to the jungle having fulfilled your working well now in practice in India this means that the head of the house often moves to a cottage in the backyard you know in the course of time everything becomes sort of go through the motions if the original idea was that he became or they call it in sanskrit ramana it's almost the world challenge a shramana is a person who has gone back to live in the forest and therefore he is in regard to society and upper outcasts they're also lower outcasts those are the Aborigines the people living in India before the Aryan invasion who later became the untouchables they are not even sugar they are outside caste altogether like the Indians in the United States they are true Untouchables in our caste system and their plight is so much worse than the Negroes it's unbelievable but they are outcasts so in the same thing happening but the upper outcast is a man who goes wild and in Hindu society you have the right to do that you are respected if you voluntarily abandon caste and of course in doing so you give up your name and you take another name now taking a new name is taking a new identity an Indian in society maybe mr. Mukhopadhyay and that would be a family name indicating membership in a family when he becomes a shramana however he will take a name such as brahmananda bliss of God he takes a divine name and the original idea of a Christian name when he were baptized is that you gave up the name Julius as you might be a Roman and took on instead the name Matthew one of the Apostles one of the divine beings of the Christian religion or you might take the name of an angel Michael or in Spain or Mexico even faces Jesus faces Maria would be a perfectly reasonable name for a man in Spanish culture but you take on a divine name to indicate a transformation of your identity but in this case when you give up cast you see and return to the forest you become a nobody and therefore you take one of the names of that which is no one namely the brahmana the supreme self because it's no one in the sense that it's all ones and therefore in itself no one so you abandon you cast and you abandon name you give up property you give up both the responsibility and society is allowed to give up responsibility for you if they give you arms if they support you that's for gravy they don't have to do it and you don't figure that they owe it to you but this is of this kind of society has a profound respect for people who leave it and they feel that a society cannot be healthy unless it somehow pays respect to people outside the pale to non joins and outsiders who have indeed fulfilled some responsibilities within society and then abandoned it they would I think be a little uptight about hippies who would abandon society before having fulfilled a responsibility in it but in a sense every shramana is a sort of elderly hippie now of course our hippies have a different problem in that they are critical of the very structure of the society in which they are asked to enter because they feel that it is a rat race a game which has lost its quality they might even prefer a cask like society of this count in that it might have a bit more quality because you see in our society one works not as a vocation in this scheme of things every vocation that we perform is called swadharma and this word the word downline has many meanings dama it means a function in one sense it means the thing that is right for you here sois is the same as the latin sewers and so it is one's own your own function what we would call your vocation in life but as we say doing your own thing that's Photon and so you have to find as it were your own thing now a job which you do purely for money can never be called a spot on because you are doing it for another end to make money which has a purely symbolic value but when you do certain work because that is what is your thing to do you want to be a doctor because you are fascinated with medicine and all its problems and you just you like people so much that you want to heal them from their diseases or for the same reason you might not be a nurse or you might be fascinated with problems of law and so become a lawyer or fascinated with religion and so become a minister then you've got a vocation because you would do that thing whether it paid you very much or whether it didn't because that's the one thing you have to do if you're a painter you have to paint if you're a writer you're one of those crazy people who just has to write I'm a writer I have to write whether it makes me money or whether it doesn't lie but still have to be right so that's a spot-on and every person vocation in cast is supposed to be your thing your spot-on but we feel in our culture you see that we have such a tremendous choice of swadharma but sometimes it's what the French call Bambara delicious it's like embarrassment of riches when you're confronted with one of those enormous menus in a restaurant which has so many things on it you can't make up your mind which to pick well now then you see as a person passes out of this he gives up the social order and becomes a nobody he then in that sense he goes back to the forest he goes back from the organization the role playing of the agrarian culture to the solitude of the hunting culture to find out who he is alone all by himself and so he becomes in that sense the upper house the man who is respected by those people who are still in caste because they say without this kind of person we should lose our sanity we should become confused with our roles unless there's always the hermit in the forest to remind us that man is not his Road that he's something deeper than that and that the true end of man is to play the game of hide-and-seek for a while and to get lost in these roads but then to return back to nature back to the way of the forest and in later life has distinct from infancy with all that experience behind find out again who you really are so that when death comes what a funny thing will happen death comes and will find no one to kill for while you are identified with your role with your name with your ego there's someone to kill but when you're identified with the whole universe death finds you already annihilated and there's no one to kill by ship and for this class sugar so those are the basics of the forecasts and so if you are in the pale if you belong to the community you have to be typifies they say is you is or is you ain't into which of these do you flip and you must fit into one of these now cast is something of course which has got a very bad name from a modern point of view both modern point of view with us and with the modern India because they say once you get into a cast you're stuck if you are born to a laborer a laborer you must be if you are born to a warrior you must be a warrior or a ruler you could never become a character and we think that's pretty terrible because in our culture we work under the assumption that you as an individual are free to choose whatever occupation you will follow but unfortunately this involves going to school and for certain purposes going to school is one of the worst things you can do for example if you want to become a completely fantastic expert carpenter you have to begin the trade at the age of seven the latest and your father if he is a carpenter is obviously the best teacher you can have in a very ancient form of agrarian culture as in India or as in Japan or China a young man who was son of a carpenter would become fascinated with his father's occupation and that would mean a very special relationship would grow out between him and his father which does not grow up in our culture because most of us do not know what fathers are doing they go away to a mysterious office or factory where they do something called making mine as an incident as a the main reason for the incidental occupation which they pursue there but the children and the wife have no active part in that occupation whatsoever they no Parker only as a kind of clown who returns home in the evening having made money and one dad's money is the same as another dad's money it makes no difference except that everybody wants more they don't give a damn how he gets it so long as he doesn't complain too much so the child instead of learning and participating in his close father relationship in loving an occupation or a trade or an art he sent off to an impersonal eyes din stitute to be taught to be everything and nothing and therefore doesn't learn early enough any craft so as to become a true master of it what is happening for example in Japan where a father can no longer apprentice his son at 7 years old to become a carpenter because he has to send him away to school to love to be an insurance salesman he can't eat his child and then comes high school and then when the kid gets out of high school he's interested in girls and it takes him until he's about twenty-two to be able to settle down to learn carpentry and it's too late too late to attain real mastery because a great Japanese carpenter never uses a plan he doesn't need a drawing does it all by eye and can fit the most complicated joinery together by eye and it's the same of the arts of weaving textiles of making superb ceramics jewelry any kind of gorgeous craftsmanship depends on beginning as a child and so all right we can't buy it anymore in this country there is not on any kind of commercial basis great craftsmanship available here we have to go abroad to get to so-called primitive societies we must be content with plastic simulation so it is something to be said you see for the caste system I just wanted to present the other side now however in going through this system there are certain stages whatever caster there are three stages of life which are called ashrams are from means really an abode a center for spiritual study for practicing yoga will be called an ashram and the ashram also means an abode in the sense of the stage of life and the three stages are one called brahmacari that means the stage of being a student - green hosta also that means forest not funny be hosta householder vanaprastha forest dweller because you see in this order of society you come into society and you go through one of its acts as a green hosta or householder but when you arrive at the point in life where you have got a son by birth from yourself or by the marriage of your oldest daughter a son who will take over your work you give up being a householder and you become a forest dweller in other words you go outside the pail and back to the forest with the idea of finding out who you really are while you are in the community you were playing a role one of the four roles or its subdivisions and you came on the stinker Tailor Soldier sailor rich man poor man beggar man thief but that wasn't the real you that was one of the masks of the prominent the true self behind everything to find out the brahmana who you really are in order to get ready to die you become gone across go back to the jungle having fulfilled your work through the world now in practice in India this means that the head of the house off moves to a cottage in the backyard you know and cost the time everything the counselor going through the motions but the original idea was that he became or they call it in sanskrit ramana it's almost the world sharma ash rama is a person who has gone back to live in the forest and therefore he is in regard to society and upper outcasts there are also lower outcasts those are the Aborigines the people living in India before the Aryan invasion who later became the untouchables they are not even sugar they are outside caste altogether like the Indians in the United States they are true untouchables in our caste system which is an introduction to oriental philosophy I tried to condense the fundamental principles of what you can call the central viewpoint of Hinduism Vedanta the not so much the doctrine as the experiential realization that what you are basically is the same as the root and ground of the universe in other words in the formula Atman the self is Brahman the ground of being now today I want to relate this way of playing hide-and-seek with the very design of Hindu society because Hinduism is difficult to characterize as a religion especially because we belong to a religion where in its institutionalized form it can very well degenerate into a religion that's for Sunday's only that doesn't apply to every detail of life in other words when a Hindu brushes his teeth it's a religious act there is not such a thing as a Christian way of brushing your teeth but in Hindu life all the details of life are Hinduism so then underneath all the presuppositions of Hinduism it can be found a transition from one kind of culture to another from my hunting culture to an agrarian culture this explains a great deal about this way of life now in a hunting culture which is a culture on the move nomadic every man knows the whole culture in other words you do not get a high specialization division of labor and man who is a hunter has to know how to make clothes how to skin animals how to cook them how to shoot them how to trail them he has to know every kind of skill because he's often alone and in a hunting culture you do not get a special division of priesthood from ordinary people every man in his own way is capable of being a priest but some more so than others not by virtue of any ordination or schooling that they've received but by their receptivity because the priest or holy man of a hunting culture is called a shaman a shaman is an individual who separates himself from society for a certain period and goes alone into forests or mountains to commune with what he will usually call the ancestors that is to say with his basic origins and he will find something by way of a spiritual experience for himself not through any teacher not through any previous Authority he finds it genuinely on his own and the shaman therefore goes into solitude to find out who he really is because in society everybody is busy telling you who you are and you rely on others to see yourself but to find himself in other words to find out what all this really is all about the spiritually minded man of the hunting culture goes alone and so the culture of the American Indians is to a very large extent hunting culture and you will find the spiritual man of the American Indians is a Shan however when a hunting culture becomes settled it becomes agrarian there arises farming looking after the land and then you get a completely different kind of society let me suggest that it's something like this where do agrarian communities settle where do they build a village usually and the crossroads especially if roads across the water a river and where the crossing meets the agrarian village settles itself and protect itself by building a pain we say a person is beyond the pale that means he's an outcast he lives outside the village he's a pariah but in the village notice that the pale having been built around the crossroads it divides the village into four sections and oddly enough there are four divisions of labour in all fundamental agrarian societies and these consist of [Music] one the priests you know the word clever Clerk cleric and clear are all the same word it meant someone who's literate clever also clear put it down clip you can't do that unless you're literate and so if you're illiterate person you're a Carrick and clergy is the same word as clever in Old English much conceit of clergy is an old English phrase meaning he's intellectually snobbish so that's your past number one house number two warrior or accidentally Rule three much or crafts and for labor unskilled so now one of these there are four castes or four rows answers in society where there's a division of labor because an agricultural society is more complex than a hunting culture we immediately get division and labor and we all play different roles that is to say assume different masks for purposes of living in this kind of community all of you you see are essentially be are essentially clerics you are what the Hindus would call Brahmin as you're all being trained in the university so the the Hindu name for this class is brahmana for this class Kshatriya for this car now today I am going to go into the very fundamental the guts of Hinduism but what I want to do is to begin with certain documents that are known as the Upanishads and these documents constitute what is called Vedanta the IDI AMTA and that is compounded of two words Veda anta anta means end or completion or summation Veda of course is related to the Latin video to see Veda is the fundamental revelation of the Hindu way of life contained in its earliest scriptural documents which are generally dated in the period between 15 and 1200 BC the Upanishads has been the summation of the Veda from found from over a long period of time the beginning perhaps as early as 800 BC some of the Upanishads are much much later than that in the basic position of the Upanishads is that the self is the one and only reality without a second that all this universe is finally Brockman and appears to be a multiplicity of different things and different events only by reason of Maya which is illusion magic art creative power so then it is basic to the Vedanta that Brahma this intangible non objective ground of everything that exists is identical with the ground of you and this is put in the formula taught from hace ta t taught same as our word that to vamp tvam same as the Latin tools thou I see art we should translate that into a modern American idiom as you're it this of course is a doctrine which is very difficult for those brought up in the judeo-christian traditions to accept because it is fundamental to Christian and Jewish theology that whatever you are you are surely Lord God and Christians feel about the Hindu doctrine that we are all fundamentally masks of God that it's pantheism and that's a dirty word in Christian theological circles because of the feeling that if everything is God then all moral standards are blown to hell because it means everything is as good as everything else everything that happens is really God and this must include the good things are the bad things and that seems to them a very dangerous idea actually all religious doctrines contain very very dangerous ideas however we won't worry about that for the moment because what the Hindu means by God when he says Brahman is not at all the same thing as a Jew means by the Lord Adonai because the Jew and the Christian means the boss to whom divine honors of you as above all others the Hindu on the other hand does not mean the boss he doesn't mean the King the law the political ruler of the universe he means the inmost energy which as it were Danson's this whole universe without as it were the idea of authority of governing some intractable element that resists his or its power so if a Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has discovered that he is God we put him in the loony bin because it's unfashionable to burn people for heresy anymore but in India if you announce that you're the Lord God they say well of course how nice that you found out because everybody is so then why the great problem arises does it appear that we are not why do we think why do we have the sensory impression that this whole universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things and we don't see it all as one well what would you think it would be like to see it all as one I know a lot of people who study oriental philosophy here about attaining these great states of consciousness near vana moksha which they can lose use liberation Satori Zen Buddhist word for enlightenment or awakening what would it be like to have that what how would you feel if you saw everything is really one basic reality well a lot of people think then it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of vision suddenly became vague melted and we saw only a kind of luminous sea of light but rather advisedly the Vedanta philosophy does not really seriously use the word one of the supreme self because the word and the idea one has an opposite many on one side and another opposite none on the other and it is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither one nor many but as they say non dual and they express that in this word advisor is a negative word like non divisor is from the same as the laughing uo2 so advisor is non-dual and this at first for Westerners is a difficult conception because you naturally as a Western logician would say but the non-dual is the opposite of the dual therefore it has an opposite true but the Hindu is using this term in a special sense it's like this on a flat surface I have only two dimensions in which to operate so that everything drawn in two dimensions has only two dimensions how therefore on a two-dimensional level can I draw anything but two dimensions how in logic in human rationality can I possibly think except in terms of opposites all rational discourse is talked about classification the classification of experiences of sensations of notions and the nature of a class is that it's a box and if a box has an inside it has to have an outside is you is or is you ain't is fundamental to all classification and we can't get out it's almost as if you see whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference on the surface covering an implicit unity only it's very difficult to talk about what it is that unifies black and white of course in a way the eyes do sound and silence are unified by the ears so you can see can't you that if you can't have one without the other it's like the poles of a it North Pole and South Pole you can't have a one pole magnet true the poles are quite different ones North on the other south but it's all one magnet and some such idea is that is what the Hindu is moving into when he's speaking of the real basis or ground of the universe as being non-dual take it the fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel between self and other I am thou I am it there is something that is me there's an area of my experience that I call myself and there's an other area of my experience which I call not my self but you will immediately see that neither one could be realized without the other you wouldn't know what you meant by self unless you experience something other than self you wouldn't know what you meant by other unless you understood itself they go together they arise at the same time you don't have first self and then other or first other and then self they come together and that shows you see the sneaky conspiracy underneath the - like the magnet between the two different poles and so more or less that sort of what isn't classifiable but which lies between all classes the class of elephants opposite the class of non elephants has as it were the walls of the box joining the two together just as your skin is an osmotic membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all the tubes in it and the nerve ends and the way in which the external energies flow through your skin into your inside and vice versa but we do don't we see and feel and sense or we think we do the world has divided into a great multiplicity a lot of people would think of the universe as a collection of different things a kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam washed together in this particular area of space and prefer to take a pluralistic attitude and don't see anything underlying in fact in contemporary logical philosophy the notion of any [Music] basic ground or continuum in which all events occur would be considered meaningless for obvious reasons if I say that everybody in this universe every star every planet is moving in a certain direction of a uniform speed that will be saying nothing at all unless I can point out some other object with respect to which they are so moving but since I said the universe that includes all objects whatsoever therefore I cannot make a meaningful statement about the uniform behavior of everything that is going on true but on the other hand every sound you hear on the radio whether it be a honking horn a bar Sonata or a newscast is the vibration of the diaphragm in your loudspeaker the radio doesn't tell us this the announcer doesn't come on first thing in the morning and say ladies and gentlemen from now until closing time all the sounds you will hear will be vibrations of the diaphragm in your speaker that is taken for granted in the penny so in the same way your eardrum is basic to all that you hear your lens of the eye and retina is basic to all that you see what is the color of the lens of the eye we say it has no color it is transparent in the same way as a mirror has no color of its own but the mirror is very definitely they're colorless as it may be the eardrum unheard as it may be is very definitely basic to all hearing the eye transparent as it may be is very definitely basic to all seeing so therefore if there were some continuum in which everything that is going on and everything that we experience occurs we would not notice it we would not be able really to say very much about it except perhaps that it was there it wouldn't make any difference to anything except the one all-important difference that if it wasn't there there wouldn't be any differences but you see philosophers nowadays don't like to think about things like that it stretches their heads and they would rather preoccupy themselves with more pedestrian matters but still you can't help it if you're a human being you wonder about things like that what is it in which everything is happening what is the ground but you say obviously it's not a part because I think that is a what is there is a classifiable thing and so very often the Hindu and the Buddhist will refer to the ultimate reality as no thing not nothing but no special thing unclassified can't put your finger on it but it's you it's what you basically are what everything basically is just as the sound of a automobile horn on the radio is in one way an autumn horn but basically it is the vibration of the diaphragm okay so you are all in the Hindu view vibrations of the entire cosmic diaphragm put it like that that's analogy and I'm using sublunar language or katha fatik language from the point of Christianity the best languages say nothing but to experience it how could you experience and that's the whole thing as I pointed out last time the nub of all these Oriental philosophies is not an idea not a theory not even a way of behaving but it's basically a way of experiencing a transformation of everyday consciousness so that it becomes quite apparent to us that that's the way things are but you when you it when it happens to you it's very difficult to explain it so in exactly the same way when somebody has that sort of breakthrough which transforms his consciousness and it happens all over the world it's not just a Hindu phenomenon somebody suddenly realizes it's all one or technically non-dual and really are always coming and going and all this frantic living and dying grabbing struggling to fighting suffering all this is a fantastic phantasmagoria he sees that but when he tries to explain it he finds his mouth isn't big enough because you can't get the words out of their dualistic pattern to explain something non-dualistic but why is this so why are we under this great magnificent hallucination well the Hindus explain this in Saguna language as follows it's very nice explanation a child can understand the fact of the matter is that the world is a game of hide-and-seek peekaboo now you see it now you don't because very obviously if you were the supreme self what would you do I mean would you just sit there and be blissfully won and their ever and ever and ever now obviously not you would play games you would in other words for the very nature of the fact that I said no energy system is an energy system unless it lets go of itself so you would let go of yourself and you would get lost and you get involved in all sorts of adventures and you would forget who you were just as when you play a game playing poker and although you're only playing for dimes or for chips you had absorbed in the game and nothing really important to win nothing really important to lose and yet it becomes fantastically interesting who wins and who loses and so in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call all the different beings in the plot just like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he's doing or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama at first we know it's a drama we go to a play and we say it's only a play and the proscenium arch tells us that what happens behind that arch is not for real just a show but the great actor is going to make you forget it's just a show he's going to have you sitting on the edge of your chair he's gonna have you crying he's gonna have you trembling because he almost persuades you that it's real and what would happen if the very best actor was confronted by the very best audience why they'd be taken in completely and the one would confirm the other so this is the idea of the universe as drunk that the fundamental self the saguna brahman plays this game gets involved in being all of us and does it serve that well the the it's so superbly acted that the thing appears to be real and we're not only sitting on the edge of our chair who we start to get up to throw things we join in the drama in the door becomes whatever it is that's going on here you see then of course at the end of the drama because all things have to have an end that have a beginning if the curtain goes down and the actors retire to the green room and they are the villain and the hero cease to be villain and hero and they're just that the actor and then they come out in front of the curtain and they stand in a row and the audience applauds the villa along with the hero the villain for having been a good villain the hero for having been a great hero the play is over and everybody gives a sigh of relief well that was a great show wasn't it so the same idea the green room is the near goona brahma that behind the whole show where there are no differentiations of i and thou subject and object good and evil light and darkness life and death but within the sphere of the saguna brahman all these differentiations appear because that's out in front that's on the stage and no good actor when on the stage performs his own personality that's what's wrong with movie stars they tried to cast the person to act a role which corresponds to his alleged personality but in a great actor can assume any kind of personality male or female and suddenly convert himself right in front of the audience into somebody who takes you in entirely but in the greenroom he's his usual self so Hinduism has the idea that you see it's all the conventions of drama you're right along with it that all this world is a big act Leela the play of the supreme self and it's therefore compared to a dream to a passing illusion and you should not therefore take it seriously you may take it sincerely perhaps as an actor may be sincere in his acting but not serious because that means it throws you for a loop although that of course is involved we do take it seriously but you see one of the great questions that you have to ask yourself when you really get down to the nitty-gritty about your own inmost core is are you serious or do you know deep within that you're a put-on in the last session of this particular course we

Channel: jorge wenzel

Views: 45,689

Rating: 4.8042417 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Watts, Universe, Society, Buddha, Spirituality, Willie Vargas, Study-Yourself, Religion

Id: tji6TomwFlI

Length: 90min 24sec (5424 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2017