Alan Watts ~ See The Beauty In Everyone

life is spontaneous it happens in the words of the Daoists and Zeron which means of itself so that's their Chinese expression for nature what happens by itself what isn't pushed but it just pops up you see like do you I'll never forget there was a great Zen master I knew once in New York he was giving a lecture one evening and he was dressed in his gold ceremonial robes and he was sitting in front of an altar like was the sort of thing and but he had a table in front of him with very formal the candles on it and the sutra scripture on a little desk and he was lecturing on the sutra and he said dumb fundamental principle in buddhism is no purpose poposaurus nests when you drop fart you don't say at nine o'clock I drop thought it happened of itself you know all these pious Western devotees you know kind of put their handkerchiefs in their mouths and tried not to laugh so but that's the meaning of something that happens of itself like drop drop fart or have hiccups or just you came into being you know it happens in a kind of a plop way like that see now you can't tell that process you ought to happen you must happen because that puts a bind on it in the same way as when you have a little child and all the relatives that come to a party on Thanksgiving and you put the child into the middle of all the relatives and say now dear play see and absolutely bugs the child to do it like that and so this is the problem for every artist because an artist is a man who makes his living by playing but he's dancing or painting or playing music or whatever it is and he has to overcome this problem he has to know how to play in public at a given time on an appointment see and that's not an easy thing to learn but when you catch on to the trick of it you can do it to play on demand that's the hardest lesson of life to contrive what is called by my Japanese artist friend Sabra Hasegawa a control accident the thing is that we have been educated to use our minds in a certain way a way that ignores or screens out the fact that every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out you see it's as if you had a light covered with a black ball and in this ball were pinholes and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out so in that way every one of us is actually a pinhole through which the fundamental light that is the existence itself looks out only the game we're playing is not to know this to be only that little hole which we call me my ego my specific John Jones or whatever if however you see we can maintain at the same time the sense of being this specific John Jones with his role in life or whatever and know also underneath this that we are the whole works you get a very marvelous and agreeable arrangement this is a most remarkable harmonious Ness I mean it gives one's life a great sense of joy and exuberance if you could carry on these two things at once if you in other words you know that all the serious predicaments of life are a game now I want to put it two ways I'm not saying that it's a bad thing something to be condemned to take your own individual life seriously in dead earnest and to have all the problems that go with that do you understand that being that way that being a real mixed-up human being is a manifestation of nature that is something just like them the patterns on the waves out here or like a seashell you know we pick up shells I always keep one around it's a lot of an example for many things and say my goodness isn't that godless there's not an aesthetic Fault in it anywhere it's absolutely perfect now I wonder I wonder if these fish look at each other's shells and say don't you think she's kind of fat oh my those markings aren't really very well spaced cuz that's what we do see we don't realize that all of us in our various goings-on and behavior and so on and just as much in more marvelous much more complicated much more interesting all these gorgeous faces that I'm looking at you know every one of them some does supposedly pretty some are suppose you do not separately but they're all absolutely gorgeous and everybody's eyes is a piece of jewelry beyond compare Buhl

Channel: Wiara

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Id: Il30lFERf9A

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017