Alan Watts: Inevitable Ecstasy – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 9 – Hosted by Mark Watts

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thank you welcome to being in the way the Alan Watts podcast and I'm your host Mark Watts and today we're going to be listening to a great seminar it's called inevitable ecstasy it was recorded in 1969 one of a series of seminars that he did that year on the ferry boat Vallejo he used to say of these recordings that I shouldn't be so careful to keep everything quiet because when anybody listened to a tape recording they were going to be listening with babies crying and dogs barking and cars driving by and this one in particular made me think of that because you hear a crackling fire keeping the place warm and also the ball on the old gas heater that warmed the ferry I left them both in because they contribute to the character and particularly the bongs of the sheet metal they seem to coincide with what he's saying almost in dialogue so here's Alan Watts in session one of inevitable ecstasy and that's going to be followed by an excerpt from session three the entire seminar is four sessions long and it's available through the Allen Watts organization website along with hundreds of talks today's podcast comes to you courtesy of the ramdas be here Now podcast Network our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records and additional support has come from Eaton hemp whose products of munchable goodies and tinctures keeps everybody mellow and in the groove as we make these shows and now here's Alan Watts in inevitable ecstasy this seminar called inevitable ecstasy is about a very sticky problem which is to say the problem to which the Buddha primarily addressed himself which is that of agony suffering but before we get into that we have to be clear about certain basics and these Basics have to do not so much with Concepts and ideas as they do with a state of mind the state of sensation a state of consciousness and we need to understand that even be in that before we can really go very far and this is an extraordinarily difficult State of Mind to talk about even though in its nature it's extremely simple because it is in a way like we were when we were babies when we hadn't been told anything and didn't know anything other than what we felt and we had no names for it now of course as we grow older we learn to differentiate one thing from another one event from another and above all ourselves from everything else well and good provided you don't lose the foundations just as mountains are differentiated but they're all based on the Earth so the multiple things of this world are differentiated but they have as it were a basis there is no word for that basis not really because words are only for distinction and so there can't really be a word not even an idea of the non-distinction we can't feel it but we can't think it but we don't feel it like an object you feel you're alive you feel you're conscious but you don't know what Consciousness is because Consciousness is present in every conceivable kind of experience it's like the space in which we live which is everywhere it's like a fish being in water and presumably a fish doesn't know it's in the water because it never goes out a bird presumably knows nothing of the air and we really know nothing of Consciousness and we pretend space isn't there so however when you grow up and become fascinated which is really the right word Spellbound Enchanted by all the things that adults wave at you you forget the background and you come to think that all the distinctions which you've been learning are the supremely important things to be concerned with you become hypnotized and so when we are told to pay attention to what matters we get stuck with it and that's what in Buddhism is called attachment attachment doesn't mean that you enjoy your dinner you enjoy sleeping or beauty those are responses of our organism in its environment As Natural as feeling hot near a fire or cold near ice so are certain responses of fear or of Sorrow they are not attachment attachment is exactly translated by the modern slang term hang up it's a kind of stickiness or what in Psychology would be called blocking when you are in a state of wobbly hesitation not knowing how to flow on that's attachment what is meant by the Sanskrit word glacier so we get a hang up on all the various things that we're told as we grow up by our parents our aunts and uncles our teachers by our peer group and the first thing that everybody wants to tell us is the difference between ourselves and the rest of the world and between those actions which are voluntary and those which are involuntary what we do on the one hand and what happens to us on the other and this is of course immensely confusing to a small child because it's told to do all sorts of things that are really supposed to happen like going to sleep like having bowel movements like loving people like not blushing stopping being anxious and all sorts of things like that so what happens is this the child is told in some that we your parents elders and betters command you to do what will please us only if you do it spontaneously [Music] [Laughter] and no wonder everybody's completely confused we go through life with that burden arms we therefore developed this curious thing we we develop a thing just called an ego now I've got to be very clear to you what I mean by an ego an ego is not the same thing as a particular living organism uh for My Philosophy the particular living organism which is Inseparable from a particular environment that is to say from the universe as centered Here and Now there's something real it isn't a thing I call it a feature of the universe but what we call our ego is something abstract which is to say it has the same order and kind of reality as an hour or an inch or a pound or a line of longitude it is for purposes of discussion it is for convenience in other words it is a social convention that we have what is called an ego but the fallacy that all of us make is that we treat it as if it were a physical organ as if it were real in that sense when in fact it is composed on the one hand of our image of ourselves that is our idea of ourselves as when we say to somebody you must improve your image now this image of ourselves is obviously not ourselves anymore than an idea of a tree is a tree any more than you can get wet in the word water and to go on with our image of ourselves is extremely inaccurate and incomplete would that some God the gifted gears to see ourselves as others see us we're done so my image of me is not at all your image of me and my image of me is extremely incomplete in that it does not include any information to speak of about the functioning of my nervous system my circulation my metabolism my subtle relationships with the entire surrounding human and non-human universe so the image I have of myself as a caricature it is arrived at through mainly my interaction with other people who tell me who I am in various ways either directly or indirectly and I play about with what their picture is of me and they play something back to me so that we set up this conception and this started very very early in life and I was told you see and you were told that we must have a consistent image you must be you you have to find your identity in terms of image and this is an awful red herring a lot of the current Quests for identity among younger people is a search for an acceptable image what role can I play who am I in the sense of what am I going to do in life and so on now while that has a certain importance if it's not backed up by deeper matters it's extraordinarily misleading so therefore on the one hand there is this image which is intellectual emotional imaginative and so forth now we would say I don't feel that I am only an image I feel there's something more real than that because I feel I mean I have a sense of their being a particular sort of how do we say a center of something some sort of sensitive core inside the skin and that corresponds to the word I let's take a look at this because the thing that we feel as being myself is certainly not the whole body because a lot of the body can be seen as an object in other words if you stand stretch yourself out lie on the floor and turn your head and look at yourself you know you could see your feet and your legs and all this up to here and finally it all vanishes only there's a sort of a vague nose in front and you assume you have a head because everybody else does and you've looked in a mirror and that told you you had a head but you could never see it just like you can't see your back so you tend to put your ego on the side of the Unseen part of the body the part you can't get at because that seems to be where it all comes from and you feel it but what is it that we feel because if I see clearly and my eyes are in functioning order the eyes certainly are not conscious of themselves there are no spots in front of them no defects in other words in the lens or in the retina or in the optic nerves that give hallucinations so also therefore if my ego my Consciousness is working properly I ought not to be aware of it as something sort of there being a nuisance in a way in the middle of things because your ego is awfully hard to take care of well what is it then that we feel well I think I've discovered what it is laughs it's a chronic habitual sense of muscular strain which we were taught in the whole process of doing spontaneous things to order when you're taking off in a Jet Plane and the thing has gone rather further down the runway than you think it should have without getting up in the air you start pulling at your seat belt get this thing off the ground perfectly useless so in the same way when are Community tells us look carefully now listen pay attention we start using muscular strains around our eyes ears Jaws hands to try to use our muscles to make our nerves work which is of course futile and in fact it gets in the way of the functioning of the nerves try to concentrate and then when we try to control our emotions we hold our breath pull our stomachs in or tighten our rectal muscles to hold ourselves together now put yourself together immediately what are you to do what does a child understand by that he does it muscularly pulls himself together so everybody chronically pulls themselves together so that it's so funny if you get a person to just lie on the floor and relax but there's the floor Army was firm as can be holding you up nevertheless you will detect that the person is making all sorts of tensions [Laughter] so that chronic tension which in Sanskrit is called some kocha which means contraction is the root of what we call the feeling of the ego so that in other words this feeling of tightness is the physical referent for the psychological image of ourselves so that we get the ego as the marriage of an illusion to a futility even though the idea of an eye with a name without being is naturally useful for social communication provided we know what we're doing and take it for what it is but we are so hung up on this concept that it confuses us even in the proposition that it might be possible for us to feel otherwise because we ask the question if we hear about people who have transcended the ego well we ask how do you do that well I say what do you mean you how do you do that because the you you're talking about doesn't exist so you can't do anything about it anymore then you can cut a cheese with a line of longitude that sounds very discouraging doesn't it but let's suppose now you are babies again and you don't know anything now don't be frightened because anything you know you can get back later but for the time being [Music] here is our awareness and let's suppose you have no information about this at all and no words for it and that my talking to you is just a noise [Music] now don't try to do anything about this well don't make any effort because Naturally by force of habit certain tensions remain inside you and certain ideas and words drift all the time through your mind just like the wind blows or clouds move across the sky don't bother with them at all don't try to get rid of them just be aware of what's going on in your head like it was clouds in the sky or the crackling of the fire there's no problem to this all you have to do really is look and listen without naming and if you are naming never mind just listen to that now that you can't force anything here that you can't willfully stop thinking and stop naming is only telling you that the separate you doesn't exist it isn't a mark of defeat it isn't a sign of your lack of practice in meditation that it runs on all by itself simply means that the individual separate use of figment of your imagination so you are aware at this point of a happening remember you don't know anything about the difference between you and it the government told that you've no words for the difference between inside and outside between here and there and nobody has taught you that what you see out in front of you is either near or far from your eyes watch a baby put out a finger to touch the Moon you don't know about that just therefore here it is we'll just call it this and if you will feel it the going on which includes absolutely everything you feel and it's a happening it doesn't happen to you because where is that you what you call you is part of the happening or an aspect of it has no parts it's not like a machine and it's a little scary because you'd say well who's in control around here why should there be anyone that's a very weird notion we have that processes require something outside them to control them which never occurred to us that processes could be self-controlling even though we say to someone control yourself we can always in order to think about self-control we split a person in two so that there's a u separate from the self that's supposed to be controlled well how can that achieve anything how can a noun start a verb yet it's a fundamental Superstition that that can be done so you have this process which is quite spontaneous going on we call it life it's controlling itself it's aware of itself it's aware of itself through you you are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself and because of it so the universe looking at itself through you there's always an aspect of itself that it can't see so it is like that snake you see that is pursuing its tail because the snake can't see its head like you can't [Music] so therefore we always find as we investigate the universe make the microscope bigger and bigger and bigger and we will find ever more minute things make the telescope bigger and bigger and bigger and the universe expands because it's running away from itself [Music] it won't do that if you don't chase it [Laughter] so who's doing the Jason the universe is chasing its own Tails see this it's the thing we're talking about the style and uh it's a game of Hide and Seek really when you ask the question who is doing the chasing you are still working under the assumption that every verb has to have a subject that when there is an action there has to be a doer well that's what I will call a grammatical convention foreign called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness like the famous it in it is raining So when you say there cannot be knowing without a Noah this is merely saying no more then there can't be a verb without a subject and that's a grammatical rule and not a law of nature anything you can think of as a thing as a noun can be described by a verb and there are languages which do that it sounds awkward in English but face it when you look for doers as distinct from Deeds you can't find them just as when you look for stuff underlying the patterns of nature you can't find any stuff you just find more and more patterns there never was any stuff it's a ghost what we call staff is simply patterns seen out of focus and it's fuzzy so we call it stuff like that K-pop so we know we have these words energy matter being reality even Dao and we can never find them they always elude us entirely although we do have the very strong intuition that all this that we see is connected or related so we speak of a universe although that word really means one term now or like you make one turn to look at yourself but you can't make two turns and see what's looking [Laughter] so it's very simple therefore you only have to understand that you can't do anything about it you can struggle and struggle and struggle and indeed will do so as long as you have the feeling inside you that you're missing something and of course if you are learning any sort of skill and you haven't perfected the skill there is indeed something you're missing but in this thing that we're talking about that isn't true because you as the Buddhists say are Buddhas from the very beginning and all that searching is like looking for your own head which you can't see and therefore might conceivably imagine that you're lost so that indeed is the point that we don't see what looks and therefore we think we've lost it and so we're in search of the self the Atman well that's the one thing we can't find because we have it we are it that we confuse it with all these images so therefore if you understand perfectly clearly that you can't do anything to find that very very important thing God Enlightenment Nirvana whatever then what well I find you know it's so stupid because even if I tell myself well there's nothing I can do about it why did I say that you see why did I say that why did I go out of my way to tell myself there's nothing I can do about it because in the back of my mind it was a funny little feeling that if I did tell myself that something different would happen see all right so even that doesn't work nothing works now when absolutely nothing works where are you well here we are I mean you know there's this feeling of something going on now the world doesn't stop dead when there's nothing you can do there's something happening now just there that's what I'm talking about if there's The Happening when you are not doing anything about it you're not not doing anything about it you just can't help it it goes on despite anything you think or worry about or whatever now there is the point right there and remember although you will think at first that this is a kind of determinism there are two reasons why it isn't one there is nobody being determined now other people think of determinism as the direction of what happens by the past the causation of what happens by the past now if you will use your senses you will see that that is a hallucination the present does not come from the past if you listen and only listen close your eyes where do the sounds come from According to your ears you hear them coming out of Silence The Sounds come and then they fade off they go like echoes or echoes in the labyrinths of your brain which we call memories The Sounds don't come from the past they come out of now and Trail off and that that is recollected is the trailing off Echo like the wake of a ship and so just as the Wake doesn't move the ship the past does not move the present unless you insist that it does and if you say well naturally I'm always moved by the past that's an alibi and it completely fails to explain how you ever learn anything new [Music] that's why all the psychologists who are mostly behaviorists are completely bogged down in trying to find a theory of learning because according to the theory of learning that we have everything that knew that you assimilate is really only learned when translated into terms of what you already know so in that sense learning becomes like a library which increases only by the addition of books about books already in it a lot of libraries are indeed like that so that's what we call scholasticism so then you become aware that this happening isn't happening to you because you are the happening the only you there is is what's going on yeah feel it and disregard these stupid distinctions that you've been taught I mean stupid relatively speaking and feel it genuinely when you feel genuinely you get down to Rock Bottom all that isn't there that's a game that's been erected on it and it isn't determined in other words you get this odd feeling of a synthesis between doing and happening in which doing is as much happening as happening and happening is as much doing is doing and if you're not very careful at that point you'll Proclaim yourself God almighty in the Hebrew Christian sense like Freud alleges babies feel that they're omnipotent and in a way they are I am omnipotent insofar as I'm the universe but I'm not omnipotent in the role of Alan Watts only cunning so now then this sensation of The Happening is basic to all we want to explore it's there as you see you can't do anything and that as you see you can't do anything you don't go and distract yourself with something else any sort of distraction because if you do that you will miss what follows from the feeling of what is going on when you're not doing anything when you're not able even to not do anything see this is a sticky place you can't get in and you can't get out that's why it's called in Zen the mosquito biting the iron bull or the man who swallowed the ball of Red Hot Iron which he can't gulp down and can't spit out see it's that difficult what are you to do or not do and that tells you you see that dilemma that what you thought was you just isn't there at all I don't make it difficult because that's a form of evading it don't make it easy that's a form of evading it it's neither difficult nor easy because if it were difficult it would have to be difficult for someone if it were easy it would have to be easy for someone and the someone we're talking about is just the one that isn't there and if you think it is there okay it's a free country you can have that thought but it's a thought in other words your ego is a thought among thoughts it is not in fact the controlling thinker or the feeler or the sensor is one of them and so therefore this thing is going along and as I say we get anxious because we feel nobody's in control but nobody ever was you know you live thus far a reasonably orderly life I mean there have been some catastrophes and uh messes but it's amazing how we have got this far I mean the thing looks after itself and you will well remember that a lot of times that when you thought you were in charge and doing something sensible you did something extremely foolish and when you thought you did something extremely foolish it turned out to be a blessing that's the way things go now of course this is a dangerous way of speaking to people who are in the process of young people especially who is still in the process of learning Elementary competence in the culture learning the taboos and the conventions because we take their minds off The Happening to do that well it isn't necessary to do it that way it isn't really necessary to turn a child into a in the process of becoming an adult but that's what we do because we teach a child to be a child and that that prevents them from growing up it's a method of keeping them off the labor market but if you speak to a child from the beginning as if it were an adult and talk not baby talk but straight language your child will become master of English language say about three years old certainly in talking it and will be able to tell you a lot of funny things you don't know but then the trouble is you have to send the poor thing to school and uh where if it is that advanced it will be regarded as a freak and have a very bad time of it so it will have to conceal itself as a sometimes children are brought up without that Interruption of being a child you know with all the Cutie Pie stuff and uh I mean that's what bores me about Christmas it's a way of uh commercializing childhood you've been listening to Alan Watts in inevitable ecstasy part one and now we're going to go on to part three of the seminar well at least part of part three an edit of about 20 minutes where he gets into some very interesting territory enjoy Alan Watts in inevitable ecstasy brought to you by the ramdas be here Now podcast network with some help from Eden hemp I was making a basic comparison yesterday between the state of consciousness of a baby and that of a so-called mature adult respectively what we would call undifferentiated and differentiated the adult Consciousness being highly selective and the baby consciousness being very open and hardly selective at all and therefore unable to distinguish what adults consider to be the important things which have to do with the conventions and rules of a social game based on the positive aspects whether they be called good or Pleasant or uh life-giving and so on that must prevail over the negative aspects and I went on to show that this contrast between the two views of the world has another marked characteristic that in the case of the baby who hasn't been trained or told doesn't distinguish between voluntary behavior and involuntary occurrence and of course we think this is a very fundamental defect but if we go back you see to a principle that underlies the whole universe with a kind of mathematical exactitude we see that if we reduce things to this situation of Primal simplicity oh and we have a primordial self and other situation that is to say two balls in space there is absolutely no way of telling when they move which one of them is moving or which one is still they must um necessarily appear to move mutually there's no point of reference except each other to determine which is moving and which is still now everything that goes on in the universe is simply a complication of that principle because the same thing holds true if you multiply the number of balls you'll see that that primordial principle that all movement is mutual still applies and so in the complexity of things because we get situations where say there is relative Stillness and one particular body is moving with relation to that we think automatically those many bodies are indeed still and that this one body is going this see here's one and here's many and the one we say well is doing this we don't assume that the many are doing this and that's the principle of the majority is always right laughs they constitute the most impressive background the fixed stars as against the planets but we're always going to get back to that absolutely fundamental situation and therefore the baby's failure to distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary the I and the other is in a way correct psychologists psychoanalysts in particular make a great deal of this contrast and consider that the baby's view is inferior to the adults and if an adult you should go to that view or acquire that view in psychoanalysis this would be called regression the point that is missed is that the two ways of looking at things need each other to balance out and that one needs the baby's View as a basis for the adult view because if you don't have it you take the adult view too seriously get completely Carried Away by it all right now if we can see the first part which is that the ego is purely fictitious that it is a symbol or image of oneself plus a sensation of muscular strain occasioned by trying to make this symbol an effective agent to control emotion to concentrate to direct the nervous operations of the organism then immediately it is clear that what we have called ourselves what we have thought of as ourselves isn't able to do anything at all there follows this kind of Silence in which there is nothing to do except Watch What Happens but what is happening is watching itself there is nobody apart from it watching it and so we get into the state of meditation or as I prefer to call it contemplation so then the next problem that arises is well what about all the other illusions although they are somehow integrated and centered upon the illusion of ego nevertheless the whole value system of what is important what is not important what is good what is bad what is Pleasant what is painful has to be called in question now then we get to this as I explained yesterday afternoon what we are aware of is a complex of vibrations and we have been conditioned to call them graduatingly good bad Pleasant painful whereas as a matter of fact they are nothing but vibrations and if you look at any one of them by itself you won't know where it is that is to say if you only know red you can't see that it's red you could only know that this is read by contrast with yellow and green and blue and violet so you don't know that the sound is loud unless you know soft sounds or you don't know that it's soft unless you know loud and it is that comparison which gives us the feeling of the spectrum as being varied otherwise we wouldn't know for example when you watch television you are actually seeing a single moving point moving over the screen but it goes so fast that you see it in all these different places having different values of light but let us supposing there was someone whose retina was not retentive in this way he would look at the screen and see the moving point of light and say to human beings I don't see what you see in this now can we therefore get back not only to the situation where we see that the ego is a mere construct but also where we see that all the values we put on the vibrations are arbitrary and that we get to a position where we see the vibrations simply as the vibrations and we would say that well surely all this is nonsense which is correct [Laughter] the Universe I mean is a kind of uh um going on in this fantastic way this is why music can be used as a meditative technique because a lot of music is this is nonsense yeah it doesn't mean anything but it can be very interesting so can you get back again to recollecting from childhood your pleasure in events that from your present point of view you would call entirely meaningless that you could listen to a sound like a twanging metal and it goes boing boing boing boing and that's fascinating [Laughter] it's just boring and that's that's all it is see now if you can really get with Boeing you can see the whole universe in Boeing really because every vibration that's possible implies all the others and so likewise with the candle flame with a reflection with grain and wood thing can from this child point of view be completely fascinating not because it means anything but just for what it is that it is shaped so because obviously that gives a taste equality to a vibration that is extremely interesting and it's only if you look very carefully at a vibration yet you can see this point that's why meditative exercise is often involve a repetition process om or saying a phrase or doing an act like a mudra over and over and over again after a while it becomes meaningless you can say your own name like the sufis do and go on and on and on and on and on and finally it doesn't mean anything at all it's just a noise but it isn't just a noise you see the attitude of saying that something is just a noise or just a wiggle is an adult attitude no wiggle to the child is just a wiggle to the child the elemental thing going on is blah you know I mean it's just fantastic now do you see why this is what Mystics call ineffable that is to say you can't really talk about it when I try to explain what I mean by digging a sound I suddenly realize that I'm not really saying anything and yet there are states of consciousness in which you can listen to sound and realize that that is the whole point of being alive just to go with this particular energy manifestation that is happening right at this moment to be it the whole world is the energy playing at doing all this you see like a kaleidoscope jazzing so if you watch that and watch it that way you will be accused of course by those who are Guardians of the game I'm doing something very dangerous they're going completely crazy the number of theological texts I've read which Express in one way or another this horror of everything becoming meaningless the meaningless life tale told by an idiot full of Sound and Fury signifying nothing those people you see have not dared to look at it now there's another way of looking at it of course where in states of acute depression people see it all as meaningless but not really meaningless they see it all as a conspiracy of Horror let's imagine that everything is mechanical there are no living beings at all there are a lot of beings that are such good computers that you can't tell the difference between them and what you thought were people but everything going on is simply Clockwork and there's nobody home although it puts on a convincing show that there is so you get the feeling that the entire world is enameled tin or patent leather or plastic and tasteless Hollow like a Wurlitzer jukebox that's a very common feeling of people who get into acute depression but you see there is still here evaluation you are associating the world with the mechanical is distinct from the organic and we have a tendency you see to put down the mechanical because obviously a plastic flower doesn't have the scent it doesn't have the soft feeling of a living flower perfume plastic flowers but it you know what it will do it'll smell vaguely like soap and it won't smell like a flower so it'll be plastic smell we know that you see and so we contrast it with the organic but in what we're doing now we are getting to a feel of the world that is neither organic nor mechanical simply what it is we don't know the contrast just as we don't know the contrast voluntary involuntary we don't know the contrast organic mechanical but neither you've been listening to Alan Watts in a recording on inevitable ecstasy the tape was made in 1969 aboard the ferry boat Vallejo tied up at the North End of Sausalito near San Francisco and was one of a number of seminars that he recorded that year this one toward the end of the year in November you can find this recording and many others that he made in the 60s and early 70s at the Allen Watts organization website which also gives an overview of his written works and life story I'm Mark Watts thank you for listening and thank you for our sponsor at Eaton hemp and the help of the ramdas be here Now podcast Network Eaton makes a line of Farm to Table hemp products from their organic facility in Upstate New York and they've been sending us goodies peanut butter Crunchies and other things and I highly recommend their oils and other products as well [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]
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Channel: Be Here Now Network
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Keywords: alan watts, alan watts podcast, be here now network, mark watts, being in the way podcast, karma podcast, alan watts talk, alan watts lecture, be here now, daoism, daoist way, being in the way, ram dass podcast network
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Length: 60min 36sec (3636 seconds)
Published: Mon Dec 26 2022
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