Alan Watts: Our Place In The Universe – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 4 – Hosted by Mark Watts

if you take a worm and Bruise it the worm Wiggles both sides of the bruise but it can't make it a wave wiggle through the whole length of the worm and there was a very strange man called Wilhelm Wright who said that most people have a thing like the worms Brew across their diaphragm so that they find difficulty in wiggling all the way through so in exactly this way taoism teaches you to Wiggle all the way through not only from foot to head but from one end of space to the other and you are a wiggle in the middle of that but let's let it happen you see and so this then to to learn how to be with the wiggle is to be in the Dao [Music] welcome to being in the way I'm your host Mark Watts our new podcast has us diving deep into the archives in particular to the taoism talks where we come across being in the way this episode explores the individual's position in the universe in the center and the place where the self other and relativity all converge wherever you are whoever you are and whatever you are you are in the middle the experience or sensation of the self of being I puts us in the center of our perceived world and yet at the same time the self-relies on what has been defined as others to know its boundaries and this is also to say the two are interdependent but in due course the nature of polarity reveals itself as being and not being as two sides of the same coin and while it's easy to understand that the sensation of self is experienced in relationship to something other and therefore they have something in common with that also comes the sensation of being Inseparable from everything that you formerly described as other than yourself and in the end this shows the necessity of each component in relationship to the whole and this in turn helps us understand not only the relativity of a particular perspective but that of every other creature that shares the planet with us each experiences itself as human which is to say as the center we all realize ourselves in differentiation with another and this is particularly relevant in today's world where there's a tendency to label groups populations and others as good and bad my father used to speak about the necessity of in-groups defining out groups in order to know that they are the in one and pointed out that this goes on on all levels of biology including within our own bloodstream where we realized that we wouldn't be a healthy organism unless all these wars and fights and plots and politics were going on between various cells but increasingly now we see the world as an energy system in which both forces are present a dance of balance and imbalance and not an amalgamation of things but instead a system of mutually defining forces and now here's Alan Watts from part two of being in the way what I was doing was establishing as the foundation of the philosophy of the Tao the principle of relativity and I explained that this was the one absolutely important thing you had to understand in order to get the whole point of what this is about and all this relativity Theory is an explication of the Tao The Tao or the way or cause of nature this idea of Dao the flow of life is really very very basic to Chinese thinking and is becoming very basic to our thinking too because we are more and more aware of the fact that the universe is an energy system that is to say it is not an amalgamation of block entities called things it is not based as the Newtonian Universe was based on the analogy of Billiards you see the original idea of an atom is something which is R Thomas which means undividable uncuttable and so you had to feel that if there was material in the world if there was matter uh you although you can chop a cake and then you can divide it again and divide it again and divide it again and you know how children divide up the last piece then you finally are eventually going to get down to an absolutely uncuttable crumb but with very fine instruments you can still cut that but we can go down and down until there will be something so fundamentally hard and so tiny that there will be no way of cutting it at all and that's the original atom and Newton devised you see and Descartes theory of the universe which was these little Billet balls were banging each other around and everything could be explained by Cosmic Billiards until Along Comes 20th century physics and shows that these atoms are not uncuttable at all but that they are made in an extraordinary way in fact perhaps made is quite the wrong word to use for them when uh Sir Arthur Eddington many years ago discussed the nature of electrons in his book the nature of the physical world he said the time has passed when we even asked the question what an electron is something unknown is doing we don't know what that is what our Theory amounts to it is reminiscent of something we have heard before it was brilliant and the slithery toves did gar and gimbal in the wave so uh in other words the transformation which took place in Western thought was this that the operation of nature is not produced by the operation of force and energy upon stuff or matter that was thinking about the universe by analogy with ceramics and you don't need to think about it that way although the ancient Hebrews did and gave us the idea of God creating Adam by making a clay figurine and then blowing the breath of life into his nostrils and so ever afterwards it has become Aristotle compounded this with his form and matter and then it's become common sense for almost every European speaking people to think that the world is fundamentally shaped stuff and stuff by itself is obviously stupid like clay and therefore it needs to be informed by Spirit or energy but today we don't think about this in this way at all we think of the universe as a system of energy and the energy flows in such a way as in Iraq to act hard and in water to act liquid and in air to act pretty soft and gassy and uh so all the way around everything is pattern of energy and I don't want you to think of the words pattern of energy as if the pattern were one thing and the energy another as if a pattern were a thing made of something called Energy and pattern are the same thing because you will never find energy not in a pattern or a pattern that is not energy and if these things are inextricably Associated you can be sure that some sort of conspiracy underneath the whole thing and that they're really one so then the costs of the world is a constant flow I used the analogy last night of each person being like a whirlpool in a stream now you see the form of a Whirlpool as you watch it remains fairly constant but the water it never stays in it you see so in exactly the same way are all things and all people all plants and whatsoever there is uh is a form of constant change it's changing perpetually but it's changing in a certain dance and the form of the dance remains constant until you get bored with it or it falls apart now we are sort of hypnotized by our social institutions and conventions into thinking that any given form of energy is by itself and that for example that I I'm a tremendously important person who has to be looked after and watched and protected from dying and all that sort of thing or going broke and uh so uh I have to protect this thing as if somehow or other if I fail in protecting this particular display of energy It All Is Lost you see why it isn't but we're taught to think that way and you can be Untold in other words your mind can be wiped clean and you can experience yourself as a Whirlpool of energy in a stream which is the Tao which is the total cost of nature the energy field of the whole Cosmos and so the the objective if you might call it that of the Taoist way of life the Taoist discipline is to enable people to feel that way but to become transparent to yourself to feel in other words that you are just like anything else around you uh if something through which life is is flowing and you're sort of transparent and you you don't constitute a block in it like you know you swallow something that's stuck in your throat or that cause constitutes a block in the elementary tract or if you take a worm and Bruise it the worm Wiggles both sides of the bruise but it can't make it a wave wiggle through the whole length of the worm and there was a very strange man called Wilhelm Wright who said that most people have a thing like the worms uh Brew across their diaphragm so that they find difficulty in wiggling all the way through so in exactly this way taoism teaches you to Wiggle all the way through not only from foot to head but from one end of space to the other and you are a wiggle in the middle of that but let's let it happen you see and so this then to to learn how to be with the wiggle is to be in the Dao so but you do have here you see the idea of an intelligence that is rhythmic that goes on and stops the pulses and intelligent yes but this is in a curious way quite different from our idea of God and it's very important to understand at the beginning the difference between the Tao and God the idea of God in the west has a history which is originally political that is to say the title with which the Lord is addressed very often is King of Kings Lord of lords now the King of Kings or the Diane Khan is a Persian term which was applied to the Persian emperors the word Cyrus is not a personal name it means the lord it's the same as the Greek kirios so the idea of the great Persian Emperors or before them the Chaldean Emperors and the Egyptian pharaohs these tremendous potentate was the original model of the Hebrew idea of Yahweh he is the ruler in heaven and so all creatures below him obey his orders for one of the great things that all these near Eastern Emperors did was to issue laws and so the laws of the medes and Persians you know the thing about them why they're always referred to as sort of fundamental laws they could never be repealed and so you've got the code of hamurabi and you have the law of Moses which is based on the Code of Hammurabi so here is the model of the whole Hebrew Christian notion of God is the one who lays down the laws of nature who gives you the word the word is the law the Commandment by the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth now the Chinese simply do not have that conception of the universe in their thinking they do have a word for law as we use it that is to say positive law rules and this word is and in the original form of this word it looks like this and that is supposed to be a sacrificial cauldron with a knife beside it because in very ancient times there was a certain emperor who did write down laws for the people and what he did was he had them engraved on the Big Iron cauldrons to which the people brought sacrifices so that when they brought the sacrifice they would read the laws but his sages said this was a very bad idea because once you write the law down people will develop a litigious spirit they will say but he doesn't say this it isn't specific about that and so come lawyers and all the complications that follow a good judge is a reasonable man and he has this absolutely necessary quality which is called approximately run in Chinese and that means human heartedness it means being a being a reasonable human being after all come off it damn you you could be reasonable and so it's a spirit of compromise of balancing things out and of generally muddling through so the model of the political ruler gives orders is not suitable for the idea of Tao in one chapter of the Dao de Jing laozer says this of the Tao the great Dao flows everywhere both to the left and to the right it loves and nourishes all things but does not Lord it over them and when meritorious consequences arise or when merits are accomplished it lays no claim to them now you see the Western God in the popular literature at any rate is always laying claim to things people bow down before the Lord and say any good that I have done is of you and all the evil I've done is of me and you God are to be thanked for everything you have given us this you've given us that you've given us the other and and so on and so you feel that the Lord is sitting up there and receiving all these compliments just like the the Oriental potentate may receive them very graciously but nevertheless these Compliments are definitely in order now for the Taoist philosophy you have to get used to the idea of thinking of nature as a system which has no boss that's absolutely fundamental then that's why the word for nature you see is or what is so of itself it's almost automatic except that the word automatic in English has a mechanical feel but in the same way as your heart beats without your having to govern it it does it of itself so the Taoist view of the universe is that everything happens by itself and yet just because everything happens of itself and you leave it alone and don't try to push it around it's orderly now this is a very democratic theory I can't understand for the life of me how people can be members of a republic like the United States and think that this is the best form of government and yet hold to a monarchical theory of the universe if the universe is a monarchy then that's obviously the best form of government and you ought to have a monarchy here but you don't and uh because you consider that you had bad experience in Past Times under the British and other kinds of rulers and to hell with all that you're going to be self-governing well to be self-governing you have to have a measure of Anarchy in other words you have to trust other people and they this is the country because it consists of people who originally lived under monikers finds it very difficult to trust other people this is the most paranoid country on Earth and it's always saying there ought to be a law against it and stop people doing this stop them doing that you know it was terrified that they may that they may run amok but you've got to take the risk if you want to live in a democracy of your neighbor running amok because democracy is simply based on trusting your neighbor even though he may be a crook otherwise you have to have a police state and you're back to a monarchy of some kind whether the individual in charge is one person or a committee makes no difference that's what you get back to if you won't trust your fellow man so then in the Taoist theory of the universe uh everything is let go it's as if God you see had said now I'm producing everything but I'm going to disappear and be invisible and just not there and let everything happen according to its nature and yet the thing is you see the more you let go the more things begin to work this is one of those interesting paradoxes of which taoism is full so you see when you consider for example the human organism as a totality you remember we were discussing last night whether the brain was made for the stomach or the stomach was made for the brain in other words who's in charge around here well the truth of the matter is nobody's in charge you see the brain and the stomach are not really different they have the same relationship to each other as bees and flowers now you realize there wouldn't be any flowers unless there were bees there wouldn't be any bees unless there were flowers nothing could look more different than a bee and a flower and yet they're a single organism nothing could look more different than head and feet and yet it's a single organism it happens to be tied in a certain way down here and you can see very simply that it's one but now bees and flowers are tied by things that are not quite so visible to us they're very visible to a bee but there are all sorts of subtle uh currents in the air along which drift the smells of flowers and these connect flowers with bees it just in this as effectively as our spinal column connects our head with our with our hips so the bee and the flower is a single organism one part of it doesn't exist without the other part and so you can't say it's the which came the first be your flower it's like which came the first egg or hen they as in the Chinese way of saying it they arise mutually and this phrase in Chinese means Mutual or reciprocal and this means to arise to grow to produce or to be born it's a originally an image of a growing plant of some kind so the world is seen as a system in which all the paths of opposites and all such symbiotic group relationships as you get with bees and flowers in groups and out groups heads and tails of cats eggs and birds arise mutually that simply means that they are aspects of one and the same pattern and it comes into being together now it may sound odd to say that you as an individual arise mutually with the rest of the universe but you do and it's very important to realize this because this is the key to understanding your own individuality let me first of all make it plain from a purely physiological point of view the world that you see outside you is a state of your own nervous system in other words it is because you have senses and a nervous organization of a certain particular structure that the sky is blue that the sun is light and that vibrations in the air are sound you turn them into color light sound Etc because supposing I hit on a drum which has no skin there is no noise so if air vibrates and pulses but doesn't encounter an eardrum there is no sound that's the answer to the old problem of a tree falling in a forest whether it makes a noise if Nobody's around to hear the answer is it doesn't but it makes vibrations in the air if there was something to measure them a Zen poem says the tree shows the bodily power of the Wind see if the wind blows across nothing nobody knows it's blowing but if there's some sand lying around and the sand gets up and drifts then you see the wind in the same way the sun can shine and shine and shine but if there are no planets to reflect the light space will be full of Darkness it takes two so it takes you as an individual sensitive organism with the particular structure of nerves that you have to evoke what we call nature and the external world so you say what is it outside that we evoke in this way well the physicist will say oh does a system of electricity of quanta and so on but that's only what they see through using their instruments in other words what's outside in relation to certain instruments that a physicist has may be described in terms of electrical vibrations or quanta and these if you analyze any scientific language electricity it comes down to some big completely superstitious Greek expression some mysterious Force that's all it means and it's like doctors will say a person has neuritis which simply means that his nerves hurt no you do watch out for these scientists they don't know why it is and they can they can measure it yes they can number it and by measuring and numbering Its Behavior patterns they can predict what it'll do next to a certain extent but uh the point is that you as a pattern of energy which we call this physical body you evoke the external world but at the same moment you are something in the external world see each one of you is in my external world and I'm in your external world so we are simultaneously in the external world and yet we are evoking the external world and turning it into color and shape and hardness and softness and all these things hot and cold that we recognize so the existence of the external world as anything that can be thought about imagined or whatever is created by the structure of your organism and in turn the structure of your organism is a function of the external world see so there is a reciprocal relationship or what we might call a transaction between you as an organism and the universe so that we could say if the universe were not here you would not be here if you were not here the universe would not be here and that direction is rather more difficult to understand because you say presumably I was born at a certain time and I will die at a certain time before I was born the universe was there and after I am dead the universe will still be there for others how then can you say that the whole universe depends on me well that's very simple indeed it depends on you not as something that lasts all the time but it depends on you having been there some of the time in other words eternity is related to the temporal we contrast the Eternal and the temporal as a set of opposites and you will see that we couldn't have eternity without temporality and we can't have temporality without eternity the fact you see that Socrates existed tells us a great deal about the world if the world is capable of socratesing it makes it much more interesting you see the world once budded Jesus and this shows us the potentialities within the world that these beings did exist and so insofar as any manifestation of nature is symptomatic of nature it shows us that the whole is expressed here in a I won't say a part because I don't regard individuals as parts of nature like you cut up a pie and have parts of it individuals are all expressions of nature but going back the whole universe depends on the temporal existence of every single one of its expression and this in Buddhist philosophy is called in Japanese Gigi muge that is to say the mutual interpenetration of all things and events imagine a spider's web and the Dew of dawn upon it and you look at this web and you see in every little drop of dew the reflection of all the other drops of Dew and if you look closer still in every other drop of dew reflected in the first drop of due you will see again the reflections of all the other drops of Dew and so add infinitum and this is the great Mahayana Buddhist diagram or model of the universe each one contains everything you may be under the influence of a certain kind of 19th century nonsense which said man is after all only a tiny little microbe on a rather uh on an extremely unimportant Planet revolving around a minor star on the fringes of one of the smaller galaxies no what a put down [Laughter] but how exciting that this being in just that unimportant sort of position discovers that he can evoke the whole thing with his amazing body and furthermore since Einstein started scratching his head is quite legitimate to regard any place in the universe as the center of it see if you take the surface of a sphere supposing that space is curved perhaps an ordinary sphere isn't the best model we have to have a thing called a pseudosphere uh to get a good model but never mind if you take a sphere where is the center now other than the point at the inside where is the center of the surface of a sphere well it's any way you choose all you have to do is put your finger on it and then move that position so that it lines up with your vision take for example a a mirror ball and look at it you will always find that whatever you may do and however you rotate it the center of the sphere the mirror sphere is right here wherever you look at it you will be in the middle so any point in the universe can be regarded truly as the center so there's no reason why we shouldn't go back in an entirely new way to a kind of ptolemaic theory of the universe but a sophisticated ptolemaic Theory based on the 20th century where we are still in the center because we know now that space is curved and so we can also go back see in the 19th century they got very they got a legend going you know what the pathetic fallacy is the pathetic fallacy is the projection of human feelings intelligence and emotions upon non-human objects the sea is sighing the wind in the pine trees sound sad the sun is happy today all that sort of thing is called the pathetic fallacy but it's not so wrong after all what they wanted to prove in the 19th century was that intelligence resides only inside human skins and that everything else outside is blind Force brute energy dumb matter and generally stupid they couldn't see at that point that a human being is symptomatic of his environment and expresses his environment so if you're intelligent you are in an intelligent environment there's no other way to it well then now we see differently we realize that everything that we see is human that is to say all that is outside US whatsoever is known to us by being translated into the shape of our brains and therefore is humanized you may think it anthropomorphic to conceive God as an old gentleman with a white beard sitting on a Golden Throne but it is just as anthropomorphic to consider the nature of the universe in the Formula E equals m c squared because that too is a human rational conception in it's completely human it's anthropomorphic in other words it is of the form of man so everywhere you see a human Universe in relation to which you exist and it exists in relation to you and it's as big as big can be and you're as small as small can be and it's as long as long and goes on forever and ever and you go on for a limited time only but you see just as difference exemplifies Unity so brevity emphasizes and brings out length and time brings out therefore eternity just in the same way as a figure brings out a background and a background is necessary for bringing out a figure so then the the dowel process is not one of government the relationship between you as the little fellow and the universe is the enormous thing is not one of birds nothing like that you see foreign it is mutuality where there is an accord to move together like dancers who are who are wonderfully partnered so that you don't know which one is leading and which one is following they just read each other's minds and that's how you act in Concord with your environment you arise together not necessarily in time it may start long before you arrive just as the tree is growing before it produces any fruit but fruit is implied in the tree so people are implied in the cosmos and so is it where you are there from the beginning by implication just as the apple is implicit in the apple tree now when you find a relationship like that you see where the two aspects of it the Great and the small the vast and long and the little and short and you don't find one without the other then you know this is not a separation but a union where what we call the long is one end of the same energy pattern of which short is the other end imagine a triangle it has a wide base and a tiny point but that's the nature of a triangle imagine uh the ocean it keeps waving and the waves come and the waves go but the ocean keeps on waving well we are similarly like that no ocean without waves you know it's a dynamic system it's moving and so we are the universe waving each one of us is it waving in a particular way so what you do if you want to find that out is you have to or shall I say deepen your consciousness you have to go down to its roots and discover and the point where it ceases to be purely you where it ceases to be simply the system of memories and habits that you call your ego and underneath that system which is as it were the crest of the wave was going tickle tickle tickle tickle right out on the top where all the spray goes you see deep down underneath that is the huge force of the ocean which is present in you at all times operating at the basis of your Consciousness which is at the same time the basis of your physical energy muscular power and indeed existence at all but at that level you are Supra personal that is to say when you realize that you stand here as a body because you had a father and mother and they uh passed on to you those genes there's DNA and RNA tricks that produce you here as a physical entity and of course your father and mother had Parents and he goes way way way back it's as if you see uh there was according to certain cosmology cosmological theories today a primordial explosion which blew up and created the universe and you know how it is when you take a bottle of ink and you throw it at a white wash wall smash like that and it goes Splat all over the place there's a big blob in the center and then as it goes out it gets all sorts of little curly cues and Wiggles so you see the cosmic explosion is still happening it takes a long time from that big essential ban for the whole thing to go whoosh takes billions of years for it to happen and it's still happening and we are the little curlicues out on the edge see and we are connected we are part of the central explosion that originally happened that in a certain sense is in you you are still manifesting it you see so when you consider yourself as a physical being consider this hand it is very ancient just like you pick up a stone so how old is the stone well scientists will say well it's about comes from this the plasticine age and it's probably you know four million years old but then you think well wait a minute wait a minute give me four million years old where did it come from what was it before it was a stone well it was something or other and that goes back back you see so Everything You Touch including yourself is incredibly ancient goes back to the very beginning of time so if you mind awakens you suddenly see all your friends sitting around you looking incredibly ancient I don't mean in the sense of old and Haggard but like Angels like Eternal beings who were always there from the beginning this podcast was produced with the help of the ramdas be here Now podcast Network our theme music is by Zakir Hussein and the Rhythm experience courtesy of moment records and at the end of today's episode stick around because we're going to offer a little taste of something to come from the seminar psychedelic explosion it takes a look at the perception of self another from a slightly different perspective and seeing how polarity can be merged courtesy of psychedelic or non-dual experiences yesterday afternoon I was talking about the relationship between psychedelic experiences and mystical experiences and uh pointing out that there were really two major features in common one the sensation of polarity of you as a subject a Noah a center of action get this astonishing experience of being Inseparable from everything that you had hitherto defined as other than yourself because you understand that the sensation of self cannot be experienced except in relation to the sensation of something other and therefore that there is something in common between everything experienced as other and everything experienced itself it's as if there was sort of a conspiracy I like Tweedle Diamond Tweedledee agreeing to have a battle and you see and you have the Vivid sensation of the motions and behaviors going on inside you which are voluntary being simply is it where the other face of all the motions and behaviors that go on whether inside you or outside you that are involuntary as if they were two sides of the same coin uh dancing together now this is a very fascinating feeling and a very good feeling uh if you have the the there's something iffy about this which I'll come back to a very good feeling on the whole because you feel that the whole arrangement of life of the of the world of the universe is fundamentally harmonious even though you can understand that there are tragedies and agonies nevertheless for some peculiar reason you see that those are shall I say bands on the spectrum of experience the spectrum of experience is vast is multi-dimensional and that the energy of the world is playing on all parts of the spectrum so it ranges you see on the what we could call the pleasure Pain Scale from uh extremes of ecstasy to extremes of agony [Music] foreign [Music]

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

Id: AZpcTKzKoTY

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022