Alan Watts - Sudden Enlightenment

we'll begin by refreshing memories as to what went before in discussing the theme of the Joker I have been talking about a point of view the Joker's point of view from which not only our social institutions but also all the formations of the natural world are seen as games be careful of the word game it doesn't mean as trivialities because when we say it's just a game this often means it is just trivial there can be important games as when we play the piano or musical instruments we are not necessarily doing something frivolous but we are playing and there is something in the nature of all play that is not serious but at the same time may be sincere and I tried to give you the picture of the multiplicity of natural forms on the one hand and of human social institutions and all the things that we do and consider important and busy ourselves with as human beings I tried to give you the point of view from which these can be seen as games as things being done as it were simply for themselves and not for some ulterior motive and therefore these games are in a way best played when they are played as games although it's really alright for people to take them seriously except that they are a little bit deprived they're missing something and so when the Joker sees a person taking his life seriously and regarding himself as extremely important there is something a little bit funny about it and he is inclined to get the giggles and it's all he knows that the very intensity of seriousness with which the individuals concerned are taking these games will be a kind of foil for the subsequent bursting into laughter when he sees that it wasn't serious after all you see that you might say there are these classes of people there are the very far out people and the very far in people now ordinarily we say someone's very far out when they are oddballs when they are exceedingly unconventional but I want you to turn the picture round and look as a conventional person look at a square as a person who's very far out that is to say he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost he doesn't know where he started from and he thinks he's there but he's completely lost because he is actually under the cover of his assurance of his status of his position in society he's really a very anxious person I said a lot yesterday about the way in which our society shows anxiety because it cannot permit the existence of people who don't belong and it cannot really permit the criticism of laughter it cannot permit the presence of the old-fashioned court jester because these people are so far out they are so involved and one from a certain standpoint you see from the Joker's standpoint he doesn't condemn such people he rather congratulate them on their heroism for getting so lost and involved but to keep the far out people from going quite insane there have to be far in people and the far in people are those who who keep contact with the original the goings on behind the scenes they are like the prompter in the theater where there are the actors out on the stage relying on their memories etc and they're supposed to get completely involved in the play but there's a concealed prompter with the script in front of him and he is the connection of the actor on the stage with the greenroom behind the stage and you see in in this dramatic analogy of the universe the green room is the central point for Stillpoint of the turning world the green room is how God is when he's back home not involved in all these games and takes off the mask see on the Hindu theory that everybody is the mask of God the like wonderful line in one of Chesterton poems and now a great thing in the street seems any human nod we're moving strange democracy the million masks of God the million masks of the Joker because the Joker is the player the trick player who plays ultimately the great trick on himself so really there can be no resentment about this nobody to blame nobody to turn around during the end and say you you bastard you do this to me because it's always you who are ultimately responsible so this prompter you see keeps the actor on the stage in touch with the greenroom and so there are certain people in the world who might be a kind of a priesthood sometimes although priesthoods are apt to become corrupt and square but a kind of people in the know there always has to be somebody around in the know so that are as it were the wheel of society and of existence the wheel of the squirrel cage the wheel of the rat race can have an actual firmly planted and at the center then there has to be the far in people so this is the domain of jokers now having developed that side of the Joker the person who sees through the social institutions of games I went on in the second session to discuss another aspect of the Joker as the slime app in comparison with the monk the fakir and the yogi who undertakes all those three undertake in certain different ways disciplines which have the intent of releasing them from their karma the individual in other words challengers his involvement his attachments his limitations his fine a tude and endeavors to overcome it but in each of these three cases the individual involved stirs up an immense opposition because he serves notice upon the devil or shall we say upon his karmic creditors that he is about to leave town and so all the creditors come rushing to the door all his past sins catch up with him and the devil lays his temptations in the way all the more thoroughly so that the sly man is the one who when he is going to leave town does so instantaneously without any prior announcement and so in this way there is shall we say a cunning manner of becoming a Buddha and that is to become one instantly without any preparation or warning whatsoever this is why Zen is called the sudden school and why Satori is a sudden awakening because it has to be done without the slightest warning now but then I pointed out that the moment you have any idea about doing this you've already ceased to be sudden that is to say the moment you seek for some spiritual attainment which is becoming a Buddha becoming awakened becoming release getting in there you've already served notice upon your creditors so that somehow or other you find that you have to do it without intending to do it and that is a double bind where would you impose upon yourself when you say I must find a way of doing this spontaneously that's the old old basic double bind you must be spontaneous you are commanded or you command yourself to do something which is acceptable only if it happens spontaneously then you think about that and say well well well what a fix that is here am I saying I must be surprised and I'm going to lay plans to surprise myself so by going through this you discover of naturally that that can't be done you can't surprise yourself on purpose yet that's what you have to do so what about it you come to a state of total paralysis you're stuck the one thing that is terribly important to be done can't be done it has to happen it really does if you're earnest about this you want to get out of the trap but you can't do anything about it either actively or passively but then as you begin to see what you are doing all the time you notice the very odd fact which is that you can't help being spontaneous if I say to you good morning and you say good morning what is that did you plan this answer did you make preparations to grow your hair do you make decisions about having blue eyes you see about breathing is this all planned about beating your heart and what about your thinking even if it's very blocked thinking even if you feel from a certain point of view that you're all mixed up what is going on anyway you see you can't stop it it's like trying to we were discussing a good Jeff thing yesterday the self remembering exercise the attempt to live completely in the present well that's not only good Jeff idea that's a very ancient yoga and Buddhist discipline to be completely here and now but of course as you pursue this you discover you can't do it because you couldn't even you know know where to go shopping unless you made plans and started thinking about the future because you couldn't move but then you discover you see that in the long run there's nothing to think about except the here and now there isn't anything else because even when you make plans for the future and you remember the past you're doing it all in the present your memory is the present activity there's no way of not being self remembering and present and having presence of mind so when you discover that there's nothing left to you but to have a good laugh well now I want to develop to a greater extent something I only touched on yesterday afternoon when we were discussing anxiety and laughter and the relationship between the two I suggested that anxiety and laughter are really the same phenomenon but seen from different points of view as we all know we can have shadows of horror and shadows of delight tears of grief and tears of joy and it's the same shadows and the same tears in either case that they have a completely different meaning now life set life is a matter of oscillation light is vibration it's the young iiiiii the whole time and all the way through question is how are you going to interpret that is it tremble tremble tremble or is it laughs laughs laughs that's the that's the great thing and sometimes it's one sometimes it's the other so that the the whole thing of the Joker is the book that he comes into being as it were at the point when the anxiety interpretation of the trembling becomes the Laughing interpretation we were talking about monks who had skulls on in their cells to remind them of mortality and we think a grim thing of the skull is a grim thing but Chesterton had the poem about the skirt of the skull chattering Finch and water fly are not merrier than I here among the flowers I lie laughing everlastingly no I may not tell the best surely friends I might have guessed death was but the good Kings jest it was hid so carefully so you can see the skull not as a grim thing but as the laughing thing it's all that's left of a human being and all the the surface is peeled off and nothing but this beautiful bone remains it lasts now why what is it about death being a jest we discussed the problem of the zebra you remember whether a zebra is the yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes and of course you can see it either way and you can argue to all this blue about which side is right and let's suppose that a black horse is the horse of ill-omen even though striped with yellow and a yellow horse the horse of joy and good omen even though striped with black this is our eternal problem we are in the state of egocentric consciousness firmly convinced that death is a threat we are so convinced of this even though individuals may say well I'm not really afraid of death what I'm afraid of is dying in an unpleasant way nevertheless since almost all spare moralists and people concerned with ethics seem to agree whatever their differences of opinion that survival is a good thing in some sense if not survival in this body the even the most I mean the people who would rather be dead than red firmly believe that that is true because they believe there is the hereafter where they can go and where they can be rewarded for the courageous stand against evil which they have taken you see so that's still some kind of insistence on the valley the value of survival and we all cling to this idea of survival with tremendous passion but we have been fooled because survival is an important ideal only so long as you have bothering you the bugbear of death that the world might stop altogether and that your death so far as you are concerned is curtains forever and that is really the bogey you see that's all very well to rationalize and say no it's not death I'm afraid of its the pains of death but if you think about it deeply there are several stages in thinking about it deeply the first stage is the real horrors of endless night of the futility of the whole conception that one's own life or indeed the whole life of the cosmos might be nothing but a flash and beyond that nothing nothing nothing in all directions when for example we think of the physicists idea that the universe is running down that all energy as is seeking a stable state supposing for example to give an illustration of what they mean I have a jar of black pepper and a jar of salt and I pour them together into another jar and I can see the white salt and the black pepper fairly well delineated then I start shaking the jar and slowly slowly slowly the black and the white disappear into a grey that can never be sorted out again into black and white in this sort of way as things go on the universe they say it tends to attain a stable state to run down run down run down until that's the end and nobody knows how it could possibly start all over again but I always say and I feel it's in a sort of funny intuitive way that what happened once can happen again if this world started at some time supposing there was a colossal explosion which set all these galaxies flying out then what existed before that explosion must surely have been something like the stable state to which we shall run down in the end and if it went bang once there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't go bang again I suppose there are temperaments in logic I have a temperament whereby I just cannot it mean it seems to me absolutely basic that what happened once can happen again but there are other people who so cherished the unique that they can conceive the idea of something like existence happening only once but you see something that happens only once doesn't happen at all what happens if you a given sound consists of only one vibration what is the up crest of a wave apart from the down crest can you conceive that that's the same Cohen as what is the sound of one hand you see it always takes two you can't have a purely left-sided person imagine so in this way just as you can't have just one vibration Mina psyche was saying the greatest strength of mine is to eat one peanut and as though you which can hardly be done so there isn't just one vibration and add it but no da sort of thing you you have to have it do more so in the in just the same way when you magnify this principle there isn't just one cosmos a one big explosion that starts and stops all stopping implies starting if someone just wrote to me we haven't parted because we never met so the whole point of saying this is the realization that existence is eternal they're going out of existence implies the coming in and some Thomas had some points here when he said there could never have been a time when there was not being because if there had been a time when there was nothing there was nothing in nothing to produce something but he didn't quite have the point because what he didn't see was that nothing is productive in the sense that you can't have nothing without something they go together and all this thing is an argument again about whether the zebra is yellow stripe black or black stripe yellow and what we see is that the black and the yellow the darkness and the light are simply two phases of the same and that realization is exactly what transforms anxiety into laughter suddenly to see that you just after all this anxiety that you don't have anything to worry about now that doesn't mean that there will not in our future lie some extremely painful experiences or experiences that we would ordinarily interpret as horribly painful we may all die of ghastly diseases or of radiation burns or of unimaginable things that looks here I very briefly touched on pain yesterday and the way pain is interpreted if if you interpret pain as something that is destroying you and is going in the direction of total death then it's very serious indeed and it's perfectly terrifying but I've been investigating experiences of people who've undergone torture uh I don't know if anybody in this room has it's always possible but and then then if so you can correct me but the worst part of torture is the beginning when of course you're full of all your illusions and all your fears about black and white and the terror that black may win but it's said that as torture proceeds it slowly changes the state of mind of the victim to a kind of drunken masochistic giving in to the torture so that it becomes something that he cooperates with and that if the the torturer notices this he knows he's through and has to kill him so in other words there is a point at which pain becomes an experience without having a negative interpretation put upon it becomes in other words converted into ecstasy it simply becomes you see a way of going through extraordinarily far out sensations which have no meaning if they have meaning the meaning of threats the meaning of death looming at the end and you know this is the tearing apart and the destruction of you then you see it is absolutely horrendous but if it has no meaning at all just transpose yourself into another dimension to illustrate it because what the dimension I'm talking about very tough one but let's go back to a simpler one let us take sounds now if you lie down and listen to all the goings on in this area and use your planes moving in cars and foghorns and all kinds of crazy sounds you see people this way and that song and you can listen to that and find it very interesting very beautiful but if someone were to do what John Cage does and put you in a concert hall with the expectation of hearing music and by having a purely silent playing of the piano compared you instead to listen to all the sounds going on around you you would be shocked and feel that some kind of avant-garde hoax had been perpetrated you see it depends on the set on the way you approach the experience now you can listen to sounds that are ordinarily considered unpleasant in a totally unprejudiced way you can listen to the discordant musical noises and find them extremely interesting if you listen carefully enough you

Channel: Ambient Life

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Keywords: Alan Watts, Philosophy, Million masks of god, God, Joker, Spirituality, Death, Opposites, Wisdom, Knowledge

Id: LlAQaakSEzE

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/ShutYourShithole]

Thanks, I'm suddenly enlighten'd.

[u/tim_oud]

i really like Alan Watts.But dislike the music you put with it.

[u/[deleted]]

There are no games.