Alan Watts - Outwitting the Devil

existence already includes non-existence you could say being and non-being constitute existence just as we know physically sound is constituted by sound silence in very rapid alternation so a being nam being constitute existence and existence is something of which you may say the game is worth the candle if it weren't it wouldn't be it's like that some people try to say there is good and bad with small G and small B can theyi together constitute good capital G or one might say that humanity is and the good of humanity is a curious combination of beneficence and rascality of reason and passion and if human beings didn't have those two sides they would be less than human man is in a certain sense redeemed by his passions redeemed by being something of a rascal because if he weren't he would be like a stool with no salt in it the salt somehow is something that in a large quantity is horrible but in a certain small quantity delightful and so everybody has to be salted with a certain amount of unrespectable 'ti otherwise they're impossible and intolerable the only thing is as a as a as a as a fervent cook don't overdo it it is in that respect you know that it's said of great gurus in India they'd have a very funny thing they say people Westerners go over and they meet this man who's supposed to be extremely holy and they're all agog you know and then after spending a few days with him they begin to wonder they find he smokes cigarette they find that he occasionally loses his temper and they begin to think well is this man so holy after all I mean he surely should not be dependent on these little habits and luxuries and so on and then they find he has a girlfriend and then they leave because they're so scandalized well then they the Hindus say now you shouldn't get so upset about this because if this man didn't have a few little vices he would cease to manifest he would simply disappear he has to have these things to keep him grounded to keep him in the world or if suddenly you know he gets terribly angry with a certain student and seems to lose his temper it say oh no no no he's that's a tactical anger that he did on purpose to wake you up to something it was for your own development if your own good he didn't really feel angry at all oh dear but do you see the point in that there is something in the fact that if he didn't have these little attachments he wouldn't be manifesting he'd simply disappear there's something in that only don't take it to piously I think you get the point so then we now have to explore a very important aspect of the Joker as equivalent to good Jeff's sly man you see he points out the four ways the monk the fakir the yogi and the sly man and all the first three ways are ways of great difficulty they involve very very strenuous discipline and of course as we get it through the books about grrrrrr Jeff the way of the sly man involves the discipline too but I think there's more to be said about the way of the sly man then appears in any of those writings because this is very closely connected with the whole approach of taoism a Chinese philosophy of a wool way on non-aggression and with what is called in Buddhism the middle way when the Buddha first discussed the middle way he put it like this he said to try and solve the problem of suffering by immersing yourself in pleasure only leads to a hangover to try and solve the problem by asceticism also brings no liberation you merely get tied up in a kind of masochism where you say I know I'm right just so long as I'm hurting and all that is doing is expiating you're kind of infantile guilt sense so he said there is a middle way between asceticism on the one hand and hedonism on the other but actually the middle way is more subtle than that and it's beautifully discussed in Professor Baum a book called the philosophy of Buddha that's BA hm professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico and he gives a very very fascinating analysis of the middle way in the form of a dialogue whereby the it works simply like this the student brings a problem to the teacher and he says I suffer and it's a problem to me and the teacher says you suffer because you desire if you didn't desire you wouldn't suffer so try not to desire and the student goes away and says I'm not very successful in this I can't stop desiring it's terribly difficult and furthermore I find that in trying to stop desiring I'm desiring to stop desiring now what am I to do about that and the teacher replies do not desire to stop desiring any more than you can and so the student goes away and practices that but he comes back to the teacher and said I still find myself desiring excessively to stop desiring and it doesn't work so the teacher says do not desire too much not to desire to stop desiring how do you see what's happening step by step almost like Achilles approaching The Tortoise the student is being brought together with himself to the point where he catches up with his own inner being and can't accept it completely and that is you see the most difficult thing to do to accept oneself completely because the moment you can do that you have in effect done psychologically what is the equivalent of saying in philosophical or theological terms you as you are now are the Buddha just as I was explaining a few minutes ago that's unbelievable because we are always trying to get away from ourselves as we are now in one fashion or another and it's only we would be we will only stop doing that through a series of experiments in which we try resolutely to get away from ourselves as we are so that is the middle way but ordinarily in these other ways the way of the yogi the fakir and the monk the individual makes a big thing out of the work of liberation and especially likes the kind of teacher who will put in through the most severe paces it's interesting how there arise from time to time schools in the West where someone comes along offering people say look it's all very well to go to discussion groups and talk about these things but that's not the real thing what you need is really to get down and do some work and often these teachers are very rude and very stern but people love it and such a person will always attract a great following because people get the feeling now we're it's serious business here this is really something you see and this you see though can be an awful problem let's suppose that you have some difficult and distressing habit like drinking too much and you're assured that once you've become the victim of this habit it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to get rid of it and it requires intense willpower and so that kills you right off you're a dead duck from then on it's as if you see you had said to the devil one morning look I'm going to get rid of you I'm not going to have anything to do with you anymore so the devil who is an archangel and his terribly clever is all set for you and because he knows that you are getting out of his way he surrounds you with greater temptations than you ever imagined if you are going to outwit the devil it's terribly important that you don't give him any advance notice and this is where the work of the sly man comes in put it in other terms in Hindu or Buddhist terms in the popular terms of popular Hinduism and Buddhism liberation is getting out of the toils of karma it's like this during your many past lives you've done all kinds of deeds good and bad and you are reaping the consequences of these deeds today and also today you are setting up future consequences now before you can be liberated you've got to pay off your karmic debts and so the moment you set your foot on the path of liberation you are apt to find that all your karmic creditors will come to your door and that's why it's often said that people who start out on a serious work of yoga suddenly gets sick and lose their money and their best friends drop dead and all hundred ghastly things happen that's because you see they serve notice that they will go to do this and so all the creditors came around if you're going to leave town and you owe lots of money you know you mustn't announce that you're leaving or give a farewell party to your friends because the grocer will find out so the art of the sly man is to make no contest but simply to leave without one word in other words though that's the meaning of Wu Wei in in the technical vocabulary of Taoism Wu Wei not to interfere not to force things that's the best translation of Wu Wei not to force things but so he just drops it like that but you are here in this respect to see you your own worst enemy because even if you serve notice privately on yourself that suddenly you're going to drop it all already the devil knows because who do you think the devil it is now this lies behind the whole problem that is discussed in the book Zen in the art of archery the necessity of letting go of the bowstring without first deciding to do so another way of putting it is that the decision to release the bowstring and the action of doing so must be simultaneous not to decide and then act but to act decide all at once now why is this if you are going to be an expert Archer you must shoot before you think otherwise it'll be too late you don't aim and then shoot it's all one action and this is true likewise of any sort of shooting pistol shooting as well that if you aim if you if you decide and then fire you're apt to do things like pulling the trigger instead of squeezing all kinds of wrong things are done and you're always a moment too late if you decide first you have to act and decide simultaneously so what does that do you see that puts up a very curious problem which in its own turn becomes a bind to try and act quickly enough so that you overtake the preliminary decision to try not to decide first and that is an impossible problem I wonder if you ever read von Kleist story about the fighting bear the this is included in Nancy Wilson Ross's book the world of Zen as a kind of Western Zen it's a story about a man who has a fight with a circus bear and the the bear reads his mind and always four stalls any attack that he makes on it there's absolutely nothing he can do to get past the bear and so in the same way you might imagine a guru who is a mind reader and he always knows if you decide before you act and if you do you see the devil will catch you instead you see of deciding that you won't be an alcoholic anymore the only thing to do is not to drink without any previous decision on this matter but how can anyone do that you see that's the question how can I decide not to decide how can I announce that I won't make any announcement without making an announcement you see there is no way out of that bind try as you may you go on and on and on trying as Harold did to release the bowstring without thinking first to release it but then strangely enough one day the thing happened he did it and this is involved in our learning of almost all techniques that we work and work to achieve that final point of perfection and it doesn't come it doesn't come and then one day it happens now what is the reason for that is it simply and this is really you know a way it's usually explained but this is an oversimplification it is not that we have practiced it so often but it suddenly becomes perfect it is much more subtle than that what happens is that we've practiced so often that we find out we can't do it and it happens at the moment you know you can't do it when you reach a certain point of despair when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim at that moment you're swimming because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call don't care you stopped trying you stopped not trying trying to get it that way you just have arrived at the insight that your decision your will doesn't have any part in the thing at all that's what you needed to know you've overcome you see the illusion of having a separate ego there is no way of telling anyone that that's an illusion and getting appropriate action because we are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that it's real and if I say well I'm going to get rid of my ego that's what the Daoist call beating a drum in search of a fugitive he hears you coming so we the the ego that is to say the illusion of having a separate will and a separate eye center that can be an effective agent that cannot be overcome by a decision which seems to be centered in the ego you might as well put out fire with fire it can come only when an attempt to act from the ego Center has been revealed to be completely futile then the thing happens because you've really discovered that it was after all an illusion now be very careful how you formulate this sort of thing philosophically this could of course correspond to the kind of person who feels unafraid and who feels very free because he's a complete fatalist a lot of people are and are very happy in their fatalism they really feel that they they don't do anything it just happens and that it's all life and that when they win they won't die until it's their time to die and so why worry everything they have the sense of everything is this happening to them and this is a kind of a floating feeling it's as if you didn't have to push things at all they just float along well now that state of affairs that's a feeling of you don't have to push anything it just floats along is very similar to the experience I'm describing if not the same thing but this person has interpreted it as a fatalist in a rather passive way that is to say he has felt that there still is some kind of a little differentiation between himself as the experience on the one hand and that force or set of forces called fate on the other he is pushed around but he witnesses being pushed around now in this state this person still has a little fragment of impurity left there's still one fly left in the ointment and that is the sensation of being pushed around there is still a fundamental division between the Noah and the known and in this case the case of the fatalist the Noah seems to be the passive thing and everything known the objective world or the goings-on of his own physiology they appear to be the active end and the Noah just has the experience of himself being moved moved moved moved by the tides of life the important thing to find out is this that the sensation of being the knower and the experience of all this is not as it were aside from everything else that's going on that's part of it just as you although you experience your own existence subjectively you are nevertheless part of the external world you are in my external world just as I am in your external world so in this way the final barrier between the Noah and the known has broken down there is nobody as it were being carried along by fate there is just the process and all that you are is part of the process then there is a curious flip the individual who has always felt himself to be the tiny little thing on the end of the big determining process suddenly goes bloop have you watched sometimes a tiny little piece of mercury coming nearer nearer to a large piece of mercury the sudden moment when they touch each other and put the little thing vanishes into the big one almost more dramatically than a drop into the ocean in this case that I'm talking about it isn't that the individual organism vanishes the individual human being doesn't vanish but here he experiences no longer a passive relationship to the world he simply sees that all that he is and all that he ever was was something that the entire process was doing at the time in other words when he felt himself to be separate he sees that that is in a certain way just what he should have felt because that was what the process was doing in him in exactly the same way that it was giving him bla brown or blue eyes or blonde or brunette hair and that's going through the door and turning round and seeing there wasn't a door a finding that you aren't fated that you're not trapped because there's nobody in the trap and it takes something trapped to make a trap

Channel: Ambient Life

Views: 939,681

Rating: 4.8502922 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Watts, Outwitting the devil, Suffering, Philosophy, Spirituality, Knowledge, Wisdom, Ambient, Ambient Wisdom, Ambient Music, Meditation, Ambient Life

Id: wAGdinXZjSc

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/hagenbuch]

A positivist thinks she can change the world for the better. A fatalist does not touch anything because he thinks it’s futile. The middle ground is to act as if there were no actor but still sometimes perceive, sometimes act. And there is no thing that acts, only consciousness.

To do or not to do: Alan might point out the „or“.