Alan Watts: Out of the Trap Pt. 2 – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 23 – Hosted by Mark Watts

you become aware vividly of the fact that you as a an individual imply by your existence everything else that exists or ever has existed or ever will exist you can't exist as the kind of person you are without all that now that's the secret to the connection between you and the cosmos just as a back doesn't exist without a front in just that sort of way all of it doesn't exist without you and you don't exist without all of it foreign Watts being in the way podcast I'm your host Mark watts and today and in the coming weeks we're going to bring something special to you which is some of my father's radio talks from the 90s being in a half hour format these radio programs are a little shorter than what we've been doing in the past and so even though you may be spending a little bit less time with us I hope that you'll enjoy the program and seek out our other offerings at ellenwoods.org where you'll find a variety of selections including offerings from our new streaming Channel you'll also find the podcast there and a variety of other offerings including biographic material about my father and his Rich Legacy our podcast today is out of the trap part two this morning I was discussing the two great myths which underlie Western man's sense of identity the judeo-christian myth of a universe founded upon the personal decision of a cosmic King whose image however gracious and loving it may be in certain aspects is historically founded on the Great monarchs of the ancient near East on people like Hammurabi and uh I'm in hotep IV and in their turn David and Solomon also be it said on the image of Cyrus who liberated the Hebrews from their captivity in the Babylonian Empire and the Very word Cyrus of course is the Greek word for Lord Kyrie kirios so Kyrie eleison the question is are we worshiping Cyrus or the lord of the universe now I pointed out that this mythology became intolerable to Western man because it was a conception of the universe that was just too damn intelligent it was the whole thing was uh peaking on you and so it was very comfortable to be able to exchange this mythology for a conception of the universe as being purely mechanical stupid and empty only you paid for that the price of knowing that you were futile that you too were a machine but some people would rather a dead Universe than a living one with standards of righteousness that were a little bit oppressive but the point I wanted to make is that the latter story about the world is just as much of a myth as the former one although this conception of the Newtonian Universe this mechanical trap is plausible today this is merely a matter of fashion and so what we saw was this you can talk the universe down by describing everything intelligent in it as a special form of unintelligence on the other hand you can talk it up by saying that all unintelligent things are merely special forms of intelligence to say rather low-grade forms of intelligence but intelligent nonetheless and that is a more complementary view to things than the other one and I was suggesting that it's on the whole better policy to pay compliments to life than to give it insults as the proverb says you don't catch flies except with honey and uh after all if things do manage to exist uh and to go along a a the slightly the The View which has the positive Edge to it is likely to be better than the one that has the Negative Edge not because I'm trying to be some sort of Pollyanna person or silly Optimist but simply because uh the the in The Interchange or you might call it conflict game between the various pairs of opposites although the snake has the best lines the dove wins out in the end because uh the dove does it just a little bit more do you see what I mean in for example in the system of Hindu cosmology the period of manifestation is divided into four yugas for epochs and they differ in lengths the best one comes first that's the longest and everything is just splendid then there comes the second Epoch that's not so good uh it's got a it's a bit off balance and that lasts pretty long but not as long as the first one then there comes another Epoch in which the powers of Good and Evil are equally balanced and that lasts still shorter finally comes the so-called Kali Yuga which is the worst one when evil is triumphant and the whole world blows up at the end and that's the shortest so you see for exactly two-thirds of the time if you figure it all out the positive forces are in operation but the negative ones have their Innings because it goes off with such a big bang at the end so this is the way the world ends not with a whimper but with a bang according to this cosmology and furthermore I think to console you is that time goes faster in the Kali Yuga than in the other yugas and in the end you see uh the destruction is personified as Shiva who just dances the dance of the tandava with all his ten arms waving with knives and clubs and lightning and everything and the whole thing blows up but the instant it blows up everybody wakes up and finds out who they are and laughs it's silly because what a terror and how easily overcome now that of course again I I'm speaking mythological language and it is important to realize this because mythological language is useful you can say things with it you can't say in other ways and often mythological ideas are more sophisticated than what you might call abstract or even scientific ideas you see if you think of the universe as founded on Brahma or someone like that even Jehovah you've got definitely an anthropomorphic idea of the Lord he's the or the Old Gentleman or he's the great dancer whichever image you want to use and you might say this is rather primitive yes it is primitive but there isn't really a better image if you think of it as say to use northrop's inimitable phrase the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum what you've got is a conception vaguely resembling tapioca or some kind of goo and that is really an inferior conception to the human image alas you see we don't know anything more evolved than the human image you may have had some of you conversations with angels or with the the ultimate itself and when you do meet the ultimate itself for some of you have uh you you know that uh you can't think about it but it's certainly not a minus quantity it's certainly nothing like goo there's plain undifferentiated goo so uh the the advantage of mythological ideas is that you know they're mythological and therefore you don't take them literally that's a very important thing to remember so don't worry about people who believe in God the problem about believing in God incidentally is that believing is the wrong attitude believing is a form of mistrust because it's saying I fervently wish that you exist and if you don't I don't know what to do with myself now the the real attitude of faith is not believing but simply being open to whatever reality is and to say you don't know that's why even in early Christianity you'll find out that they call the highest form of Faith unknowing agnosia in Greek from which we get in its kind of deprived sense the word agnostic but agnosia unknowing is the highest form of Faith because ultimately of course what is the the the final which in which there is no Witcher wouldn't completely know itself what it was because in order to know what something is you have to be able to classify it and you have to compare it with something it isn't and so the Final Ground of the universe is perfectly unclassifiable therefore strictly speaking outside the domain of logic and formal philosophy now having examined them these two mythological forms which underlie the Western man's intense feeling of alienation and separateness we have to go into another dimension of the question and that is the influence upon who we think we are of our social institutions now what is a social institution we know that there are things like uh the family marriage the police the courts the law the church and we know that these are social institutions but social institutions are far more subtle than those things time for example is a social institution because it is a matter of convention that is to say of coming together to agree to measure time in a certain way and we have international agreement about that likewise obviously money is a social institution so are weights and measures so uh uh ideas of value what is the good life who is contributing to society and who is working against it so you see we were discussing this morning among other things uh excuse me the idea of survival and uh that's that survival is a good thing and to survive as long as possible is a very good thing but that is a form of social institution it is something we have come to agree about it isn't necessarily true in the sense that shall I say the French language is not a truer language than the English but so long as people agree to speak a certain language they can communicate and they've decided that communication is a good thing so any language that makes communication possible is a good language and the in a way the more people who agree about it the better but it is a matter of agreement you see same way the lines of latitude and longitude are conventions they are they don't exist you can't tie up packages with the equator but it's a very useful idea and so in the same way the ways in which we have shaped the constellations that we all agree that the Stars call the Big Dipper look something like a Dipper and uh though you know there aren't any strings tying them together the constellation is not there as a constellation so in a sense we project our institutions onto the world in rather the same way that psychiatric patients project images onto a raw sharkblot and what interests the psychiatrist is what sort of images this person produces that tells him something about the person in the same way our social institutions tell us something about people and furthermore as I also explained this morning people are also members of the external world and therefore they tell us something about the external world man is something nature is doing and is not a stranger as these two great myths have made us believe so it's uh the the physical facts of the matter are not that we are confronted with note that word confront with a world that cares nothing for us and that is has nothing in common with our kind and style of intelligence it is rather the very opposite that the fact that we are intelligent is symptomatic of the intelligence of the world as a whole we live in a highly intelligent environment and uh intelligence you see is really a kind of complex Behavior when we see some very Exquisite pattern we look at it and say my isn't that wonderful isn't that intelligent looking I wonder who did it because we associate all intelligence with a Who and when you look at a plant it's obviously intelligent it's its shape it's rhythm all its wonderful tubes inside its complex relationship to bees and birds and to the surrounding atmosphere and Light this is a very intelligent affair now in in just the same way we are related to the external world as plants are in amazingly complicated ways and by and large we don't notice them because the the aspect of our Consciousness with which we notice things is very limited it notices what it calls facts things and events and pinpoints them it pulls them out as significant you see when you remember coming here and what you saw and who was here you only remember very tiny bits of the whole scene you will not remember what very many people wore unless you happen to be interested in clothes you won't really remember how they did their hair what their styles were unless you are peculiarly interested in hairstyles you probably won't notice their shoes at all and goodness knows what else that nobody has ever thought to notice but when under certain circumstances our Consciousness becomes expanded as in mystical vision you begin to become aware of things that you don't notice one of the most important things that we don't notice is space most people regard space as nothing it's just a void uh in which we move around but actually space is terribly important it has properties we are all something happening in space in rather the same way that a Whirlpool occurs in water space has turns in it it has ripples in it it has places where it's denser than at other places and this is all becoming clear in physics but it's certainly not impinged upon the consciousness of the average intelligent person so the space in which we live and move and have our being is an intelligent Continuum it isn't just nothing at all there's one little lesson about this that I will that you must excuse me for repeating if you've heard it before but it's very important and it's a lesson in the value of space and it's showing you that space and energy are the same thing let us suppose that we have a universe in which there is only one ball and that's all there is there isn't anything else nobody can say of this ball whether it's moving or not therefore it doesn't appear to manifest any energy you can't say it's moving and you can't actually say it still there's no way of thinking about it now introduce into our universe a second Paul and we notice that they get further apart now one of them is moving all both are moving but we can't decide which we only know there is energy here there is motion why do we know this energy because the space between them Alters either increases or decreases now let's have three balls and you'll find two of them stay close to each other and the other one gets further away now which one is moving the majority is going to decide the two that stay together are going to say we are moving away from that one or else if they want to argue it differently they say we are standing still and that one is moving away from us do you see all these views are equally true but if an argument starts up the majority is going to win but the point is you see space and energy are fundamentally related there is no manifestation of energy without space also we can drag in time but I don't want to make it complicated I want to make this little image as simple as possible so as to understand the importance of space that is to say of the surroundings of things of the background and the background is ignored in ordinary Consciousness but in mystical Consciousness the background becomes important you become aware vividly of the fact that you as a an individual imply by your existence everything else that exists or ever has existed or ever will exist you can't exist as the kind of person you are without all that now that's the secret to the connection between you and the cosmos just as a back doesn't exist without a front in just that sort of way all of it doesn't exist without you and you don't exist without all of it even if you die you see and disappear totally nevertheless the fact that you have existed is still a fact and a universe in which there has been a person like Socrates is quite a different Universe from a universe in which there hadn't been a person like Socrates Socrates having existed is a symptom of the way things are so fundamentally we get a picture of the cosmos in which the self the real eye is the whole thing just as we say of an individual human body you are John Doe and that's all of you although if we look at you very carefully under an electron microscope we will find that molecules in your blood are further apart than the Earth and the Sun what makes you think you're a Unity it's quite a thought well it's space and so in the same way as such a relationship exists between our our galaxy and other galaxies and so on it's obvious so uh then by various conventions and social institutions we developed the impression that this isn't so we learn to ignore we learn not to notice certain things and do you know not noticing is very very important in the Hindu theory of politics all the what are spiritual virtues have political counterparts for example in the spiritual domain the word upaya u-p-a-y-a means merciful techniques for awakening people whatever devices used by a teacher in the politics in the political domain the word upaya means cunning deceit likewise in the spiritual domain of upeksha means equanimity in the political domain upeksha means overlooking when for example the boss of a big concern finds that one of his employees is taking out a little bit of the petty cash now he figures out is this man worth it are his Services uh really worth it and shall I merely ignore the fact that he's doing this that would be upeksha now in our whole society we do an enormous amount of upekshaq the things we overlook there are obvious things that we don't talk about there is a taboo side to life that we don't mention it's we're supposed to overlook it you know when Silk Stockings were first invented with the fine mesh type a present of several dozen of them was sent by uh important American businessman to the queen of Spain and they were returned by her Chamberlain with a letter which said you should recognize that her majesty the queen of Spain has no legs in other words those legs don't officially exist so only what exists officially is what is noticed unless we say noted noteworthy make a note of it in your mind in your date book uh noting and noticing notation you see they're all based on the same idea what we attend to but there are a lot of very attention-worthy things that we ignore but part of the whole game you see of a cosmos is played in this way imagine the cosmos as a great harp do you know the angels are supposed to play Harps in heaven well the actual harp they play is the total possibility of vibrations now you know about the spectrum of light that is a series of vibrations so is the spectrum of sound then beyond light there are other vibrations which are not picked up by our senses but instruments pick them up and then there must also be many vibrations as yet not picked up by any instruments that we have now what is uh you see what we call a nature is a system of picked up vibrations some vibrations aren't picked up and therefore nothing appears that's why it seems that the space around things because the vibrations there aren't picked up they're not noticed and this is why there is a whole domain of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy called Tantra Tantra refers to the idea of weaving and so when you have a warp and a woof the the Weaver decides what threads are going to be picked up and appear on the front which is what everybody's going to look at and what threads will be overlooked repressed put behind the scenes they'll be behind and so it will appear that we have a birdie here and a birdie there and a birdie there and no connection between the birdies actually if you look on the other side you will see that the red threads which made the bird is against the white background continues only that's not noticed so in this way we are taught from childhood we are indoctrinated in a system of social institutions that are simply rules about what is to be noticed and what is not to be noticed that's why children are sometimes very odd questions about things that adults don't notice the famous story of the the little boy who's been taken to a concert of where a lady is singing and he says mama why does she scream when she yawns [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] so and and in the same way it inventive poets put together images that people never thought of before it's like yates's famous phrase the be loud Glade you know it is a beautiful idea for a a nice Glade to be be loud and everybody says wow think of that we never thought of that before we never thought of it in just that way we didn't notice that then you see we don't notice the most obvious thing of all that's of course the last thing that we would notice what is most obvious and the question the fundamental Quran as it would be called in Zen is it what is it you haven't noticed you've been listening to Alan Watts in another offering from the being in the way podcast I hope you'll visit us at Alan watts.org and there you'll find a great selection of recordings including previews from our new streaming Channel along with biographic materials and links to these podcasts in video form program has been produced in conjunction with the ramdas be here Now podcast Network and our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records for more offerings by moment please visit momentrecords.com is Mark Watts thank you for listening foreign

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 16,792

Keywords: alan watts, dharma talk, dharma talks, bhnn, be here now podcasts, be here now podcast network, bhnn podcasts, spiritualty, buddhism, G. K. Chesterton, GK Chesterton

Id: Of6Yt5Ku7TE

Length: 29min 34sec (1774 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023