Alan Watts ~ The Difference Between You And Your Ego

now then we have to get on to Buddhism and in order to introduce Buddhism it's necessary to remember the whole background of the world view of India in other words what we're going to study first of all to understand Buddhism is Indian cosmology just as you would have to study the cosmology of the Ptolemaic view of the world in order to understand Dante and in order to understand lots of things about medieval Christianity so the the cosmology of the hindus their view of the universe has come right into japanese life through buddhism but it antedates buddhism buddhism simply adopted it as a matter of course just as now if you invented a new religion you would probably adopt the cosmology of modern astronomy astronomy well now how does the Hindu see the world you know there are really three great views of the world that human beings have had and they go one is is the Western view of the world which looks upon the world as a construct an artifact by analogy with ceramics and carpentry then there is the Hindu view of the world which is dramatic looks on it as a play and then the Chinese view which is organic and looks upon the world as an organism a body but the Hindu view sees it as a drama and it's simply this there is what there is and always was and always will be which is called the self that in Sanskrit is Atman 80 ma N and the Atman is also called Brahman Bronfman from the root bre to grow to expand to swell is actually related to our word breath so Brockman the self according to the Hindu view plays hide-and-seek with itself for always and always and always how far out how lost can you get so here each one of us according to the Hindu idea is the Godhead on purpose getting lost for the fun of it and how terrible it can get at times but won't it be nice when you wake up that's sort of the basic idea and I found it's an idea that any child can understand it has great simplicity and great elegance now in part of this cosmology we must understand another feature of this conception of the universe not only you remember now the calpers the periods of time the UGA's the qualities of the time through which the universe goes but there's the final thing which are called the six worlds or the six paths of life and this is a very important for Buddhism although it comes from Hinduism is represented in what is called the Pavich ARA i want to start by reinforcing the point that what I call the religions of the east and the ones we're discussing Hinduism Buddhism and Chinese Taoism they don't involve that you believe in anything specific and they don't involve any idea of obedience to Commandments from above and they don't involve any conformity to a specific ritual although they do have rituals but their rituals vary from country to country and from time to time their objective is always not ideas not doctrines but a method a method for the transformation of consciousness that is to say for a transformation of your sensation of who you are and I emphasize the word sensation because it's the strongest word we have for feeling directly when you put your hand on the corner of a table you have a very definite feeling and when you are aware of existing you also have a definite feeling but in the view of these methods or disciplines the ordinary person's definite feeling of the way he exists and who he is is a hallucination to feel yourself as a separate ego a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world somehow locked up inside a bag of skin is seen as a hallucination that you are not a stranger in the earth that comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere else altogether but that you in your fundamental existence you are the total energy that constitutes this universe playing that it's you playing that it's this particular organism and even playing that it's this particular person because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide-and-seek that is to say that the colossal reality the energy that is everything that is a unitary energy that is one plays at being many at manifesting itself in all these particulars we call you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and this and that and all around us and it's fundamentally a game and you can say that this goes really for all the systems that I'm talking about it's the basis of Hinduism of Buddhism and of Taoism this intuition now today we're going to talk about Buddhism Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism you could in a way call it a reform of Hinduism or Hinduism stripped for export it originates in northern India close to the area that is now Nepal shortly after 600 BC there was a young prince by the name of Gautama Siddhartha who became the man we called the Buddha now the word Buddha is not a proper name it's a title and it's based on the sanskrit root would be udh which means to be awake and so you could say the Buddha is the man who woke up from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be and found out who he was who he is it's curious that this title was not something new there was already in the whole complex of Hinduism the idea of buddhas of awakened people and curiously they are ranked higher than gods because in the view of Hinduism even the gods or the angels the divers are still bound on the wheel of the the sort of squirrel-cage of going round and round and round in the pursuit of success and the idea is that if you pursue something that you can call success pleasure good virtue which originally of course means strength magical power all these positive things you are under illusion because the positive cannot exist without the negative to be you only know what to be is by contrast with not to be so if we say now there is a coin in the left hand there is no coin in the right and from this you get the idea of to be and not to be and you can't have the one without the other so if you try to pursue to gain the positive and to deny get rid of the negative it's as if you were trying to arrange everything in this room so that it was all up and nothing was down you can't do it you set yourself an absolutely insoluble problem because the basis of life is spectrum I'll consider the spectrum of colors when you think of a spectrum in what form do you think of it most people think of it as a ribbon whose red at one end and purple at the other but the spectrum is actually a circle because purple is the mixture of red and blue it goes right round and so in this way all sensation all feeling all experience whatsoever is moving through spectra you don't only have the spectrum of color you have a spectrum of sound you have various complex spectra of texture of smell of taste and you're constantly operating through all the possible variations of experience and it implies that you can't know one end of the spectrum without also knowing the other so if you wanted to say your favorite color is red and you wanted only red and you had to exclude therefore blue and purple without blue and purple you can't have red behind of course all the various colors in the spectrum is the white light and behind everything that we experience all our various sensations of sound of color of shape of touch there's the white light and I'm using the phrase the white light rather symbolically I don't mean it literally but there is common to all sensations what you might call the basic sense and if you explore back into your sensations and reduce them all to the basic sense you're on your way to reality to what underlies everything to what is the ground of being the basic energy and to the extent that you realize this and know that you are it you transcend you overcome you surpass the illusion that you are simply John Doe Mary Smith now what have you so then the Buddha as the man who woke up is regarded as one Buddha among a potentiality of millions of Buddhas everybody can be a Buddha everybody has in himself the capacity to wake up from the illusion of being simply this separate individual the Buddha made his doctrine very easy to understand because in those days there wasn't very much writing being done and people committed things to memory and so he put his doctrine or method in various formulae which are very easy to remember and I'm going to explain it in those terms so that you can remember it just as well he of course practiced the various disciplines that were offered in the Hinduism of his time but he found in a sudden way that they had become unsatisfactory because they had over emphasized asceticism had over emphasized putting up with as much pain as you can there was a feeling you see that if the problem of life is pain let let us suffer and this is the root of the ascetics you see who lie on beds of nails who hold a hand up forever and ever and ever who eat only one banana a day who renounce sex who do all these weird things because they feel that if they head right into pain and don't become afraid of it but suffer as much pain as possible they will by this method overcome the problem of pain and they will set themselves free from anxiety there's a certain sense in that as you can obviously see supposing for example you have absolutely no fear of pain you have no anxieties you have no hangups how strong you would be nobody could stop you you would have ultimate courage but the Buddha was very subtle he is really the first historical psychologist the great psychologist psychotherapist he is very subtle because he saw that a person who is fighting pain who is trying to get rid of pain is still really fundamentally afraid of it and therefore the way of asceticism is not right equally the way of hedonism of seeking pleasure is not right so the Buddha's doctrine is called the middle way which is neither ascetic nor hedonistic so it summed up in what are called the Four Noble Truths and the first is called Luca dukhat means suffering in a very generalized sense you could call it chronic frustration and it is saying that life as lived by most people is dukkha is an attempt in other words to solve insoluble problems try to draw a square circle you can't because the problem itself is meaningless try to arrange the things in this room so that they're all up and none of them down it is meaningless such a problem cannot ever be solved so try to have light without dark or dark without light it could never be solved so the attempt to solve problems that are basically insoluble and to work at it through your whole life that is dukkha now he went on to analyze this that there are what he called three signs of being the first is do car itself frustration the second is Anita and this means the the the letter a in sanskrit at the beginning of a word is often the equivalent of our non so nietzsche means permanent anitya means impermanent that every manifestation of life is impermanent and therefore our quest to make things permanent to straighten everything out to get it fixed is an impossible and insoluble problem and therefore we experience dukka dukka all this sense of fundamental pain and frustration as a result of trying to make things permanent the third sign of being is called an attman now you know from my talk on Hinduism that the word Atman means self are not man means therefore non self that there is in you no real ego now I've explained that already I've explained in talking about Hinduism that the idea of the ego is a social institution it has no physical reality it is simply the ego is your symbol of yourself just as the word water is a noise which symbolizes a certain liquid reality so the idea of the ego the role you play who you are is not the same as your living organism your ego has absolutely nothing to do with the way you color your eyes shape your body circulate your blood that's the real you but it's certainly not your ego because you don't even know how it's done from the standpoint of your conscious attention so the idea of anatman is firstly that the ego is unreal there isn't one now then this then is the first truth there is this situation that we have dukkha or frustration because we are fighting the changing 'no son because we don't realize that the ego the AI is unreal the second of the four noble truths is then called Krishna Krishna is a Sanskrit word again and is the root of our word first and it's usually translated desire but it is better translated clinging grabbing or there's an excellent modern American slang e word hang up that is exactly what trishna is a hang up Krishna is clutching as for example what we call smother love when a mother is so afraid that her children may get into trouble that she protects them excessively and as a result of this prevents them from growing or when a when lovers cling to each other excessively and have to sign documents that they will curse and swear to love each other always they are in a state of Trishna and this is the same thing as holding on to yourself so tightly that you strangle yourself now so the second truth in about Trishna is that the cause of dukkha is Trishna clinging is what makes suffering if you don't recognize that this whole world is a phantasmagoria and an amazing illusion a weaving of smoke and you you try to hold on to it you see then you start suffering seriously suffering Krishna is in turn based upon a Vidya the same- ah Vidya from the root vid means knowledge as in the Latin video and the English vision a Vidya therefore is ignorant goon osis guna means of course - no - knowledge is the same thing as Geonosis in Greek - no so this is not - no - ignore - overlooked and I explained in the first talk in this series how we ignore all kinds of things because we notice only what we think noteworthy and therefore our vision of everything is highly selective we pick out certain things and say that's what's there just as we select and notice the figure rather than the background sometimes I draw this on the blackboard and ask the question what have i drawn what would you say what have i drawn the circle any other suggestions yeah you're getting the point I've drawn a wall with a hole in it you see but ordinarily you've been reading my books so but ordinarily people see the ball the circle the ring or whatever and never think of the background because they ignore the background just as one thinks that you can have pleasure without pain you want pleasure the figure and don't realize that pain is the background so avidya is this state of restricted consciousness restricted attention that moves through unaware of the fact that to be implies not to be and vice versa so now the third noble truth is called nirvana this word means blow out Neera is a negative word again like ah vana is blowing so it's a kind of out blowing now in breathing you know that breath is life the Greek word you may pronounce it Ponemah or plasma is the same as spirit and spirit means breath in the book of Genesis when God had made the clay figurine that was later to be Adam he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils and it became alive because life is breath but now if you hold your breath you lose it he that would save his life will lose it so breathe in breathe in breathe in get as much air as you can and trishna cling and you lose it so Nirvana means breathe out what a relief that was the sigh of relief let it go because it'll come back to you if you let it go but if you don't let it go you'll just suffocate so a person in the state of Nirvana is what we might call a blown out person like blow your mind let go don't cling and then you're in the state of Nirvana and I reinforced eyes the point this is not I'm not preaching see not saying this is what you ought to do I'm simply pointing out a state of affairs that is so there's no moral ISM in this whatsoever it's simply pointing out like if you put your hand into the fire you'll get burned you can get burned if you want to it's ok but if you so happens that you don't want to get burned and you don't put your hand in the fire so in the same way if you don't want to be in a state of anxiety all the time and again I emphasize if you'd like to be anxious it's perfectly all right if that's see Buddhism never hurries anyone on they say you've got all eternity through which to live in various forms and therefore you you don't have just one life in which you've got to avoid eternal damnation you can go running around the wheel and the rat race and play that game just as long as you want to so long as you think it's fun but if there comes a time when you don't think it's fun you don't have to do it so I wouldn't say to anyone who disagrees with me and who says well I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle and this world too right and so on and so forth and arrange everything in this world so that it's all up try it please it's perfectly okay go on doing now [Laughter] but if you see that it's suitable then you can let go don't try to cling relax and if you do that you're in the state of Nirvana and you become a Buddha and of course it means that you become a rather astonishing person you may of course will be subtle about it and make like you a very ordinary person so that you don't get people mixed up and so in Buddhism the Buddha explained that his doctrine his method was a raft it's sometimes called a Jana the word why a na Jana means a vehicle a conveyance and when you cross a river on a raft and you get to the other Shore you don't pick up the raft and carry it on your back you leave it behind but people who are what I would call hooked on religion are always on the raft they're going back and forth back and forth back and forth on the raft so that kirdamon tends to turn into a ferryman who's always on the raft and never gets over to the other Shore himself now something to be said for that because how are we going to get the raft back to the first Shore to bring over the other people see somebody has to volunteer to take the back journey but he must be awfully careful to realize that the real objective is to get the people across and set them free if you dedicate yourself to ferrying people across don't ask them to come back on the raft with you because you'll get overcrowded and people will think that the raft is the goal rather than the other Shore so when I find this in in actual practice that when clergymen do not ever ask for money and it's alright you know like a doctor who simply charges a fee says you come to me you pay me so much but the clergyman says he doesn't say pay me so much he says we would like your pledge your voluntary contribution see and then nobody knows what to give that's the idea of the raft now then the fourth noble truth is called Moraga this word means path and the way of Buddhism is often called the Noble Eightfold Path because there are eight phases I won't say steps because they're not sequential I mean the samyak is a very curious phrase doesn't mean right in our sense of correct some is the same really as our word some total complete all-inclusive we might say we might use the word integrated as when we say a person has integrity a person who has integrity we mean he's all of a piece he's not divided against himself so in this sense of samyak darshan this is related to the word darshan which means the point of view or viewing when you go to visit a great guru or teacher you have darshan you look at him and you offer your reverence to mrs. darshan many senses of it but it means simply to view look at the view so the some have darshan is the complete view for example let's take the constellation called the Big Dipper we look at it from a fairly restricted zone in space and it always seems whatever the season of the year because we are so far away from it that the stars in the Big Dipper in the same position but imagine looking at it from somewhere else in space altogether and those stars would not look like a Dipper there'd be in another position now then what is the true position of those stars don't you see there isn't one because wherever you look the position alters you could say that the true situation of those stars is how they are looked at from all points of view all possible points of view inside the constellation looking outwards outside the constellation looking inwards from everywhere and everywhere but you see there is no such thing as the truth the world in other words is not existing independently of those who witness it because the world is precisely the relationship between the world and its witnesses and so if there are no eyes in this world the Sun doesn't make any light nor do the stars so what is is a nation ship you can for example prop up two sticks by leaning them against each other and they will stand but only by depending on each other take one away on the other falls so in Buddhism it is taught that everything in this universe depends on everything else that we have a kind of a huge Network and this is called the doctrine of mutual interdependence all of it hangs on you and you hang on all of it just as the two sticks support each other and this is conveyed in a symbol which is called indras net imagine a multi-dimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops and every Dew Drop contains the reflection of all the other new drops and in each reflective dew drop the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection and so ad infinitum that is the Buddhist conception of the of the universe in an image the Japanese call that GG muguet a G means a thing event a happening so between happening and happening mu there is no gay separation GG mu gay now so the first phase of the Eightfold Path has to do with one's view understanding of the world the second phase has to do with action how you act Buddhist idea of ethics is based on expediency if you are engaged in the way of liberation and you want to clarify your consciousness doing that is inconsistent with certain kinds of action so every Buddhist that makes five vows five precepts and you may perhaps have heard the Buddhist formula of taking what is called pancasila the five precepts and they take what are called t solana the three refuges and the Five Precepts the refugees are the Buddha the Dharma the doctrine and the Sangha the fellowship of all those who are on the way so the priests of the big who the Buddhist monk and the laypeople will chant the formula would hum Salonga Tommy Tong Saarinen Tommy sungchung Saarinen Tommy those are the three refuges the Buddha the Dharma and the Sangha then they take the Five Precepts varna dupatta Germany sakaram Samadhi Amina Donovan ISA carpet um Samadhi army kami Sumi cha-cha Romani sakaram samadhi army Musa manisa cop Adhan Muhammadi army karma Sumi Tahara Romani no surah maryam etapa madonna vera manisa kappa dom samadhi an army so they take these five precepts vanity pata I undertake the precept to abstain from taking life Edina Donna I undertake the precept to abstain from taking what is not given karma submit Sahara I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting the passions Musa vada I undertake the precept to abstain from falsifying speech surah Maryam a a Madonna I undertake the precept to abstain from being intoxicated by surah Maryam and much of a Madonna whatever they were I presume toddy which is alcohol I don't know I don't know what else it was nobody does know because you see if you start killing people or taking life you're in trouble you set up an opposition and you've got to become involved in taking care of it if you start stealing you worry people you upset people's orientation in life because if you suddenly come into the back home for dinner and find somebody is still in your table where you're going to serve dinner if you exploit your passions it means that when you are when you feel bored and somehow that life is a little bit empty you say well now out of what are we going to do this evening let's go and get stuffed a lot of people who suffer from obesity trying to simply fill their empty psyche by stuffing themselves with food what's the wrong cure so likewise Musa vada if you start telling lies to everybody you know what happens when you start telling lies you have to tell extra lies to cover up the first one and you get into the most hopeless misunderstanding speech collapses and of course the intoxication is the same problem as the exploitation of the passions so there's a purely kind of practical expedient utilitarian approach to morals there's another side to this which doesn't enters into the into the Capricia precepts which I will explain later so that's the third phase of the Eightfold Path then you know the second phase then the third phase has to do with your mind with your state of consciousness and this has to do with what we would ordinarily call meditation there are the two final the seventh and eighth aspects of the path are called samyak Smriti and some young Samadhi sweetie means recollection that's the best English word for it now do you understand the word recollect is to gather together what has been scattered what is the opposite of remember obviously dismember what has been chopped up and scattered becomes remeber so in the Christian scheme do this in remembrance of me you see the Christ has been sacrificed chopped-up but the mass is celebrated in remembrance one of the old liturgies says the wheat which has been scattered all over the hills and grows up is gathered again into the bread remembered go back to your Hindu bases the world is regarded as the dismemberment of the self the brahman the Godhead the one is dismembered into the many so remembrance is realizing again that each single member of the many is really the one so that's recollection you can think of it too in another way and it's really the same way if you think it through I'm going to leave you with a few puzzles so that you can think them through and I won't to explain them but another way is to be recollected is to be completely here and now are you here now are you really here there was a wise old boy who used to give lectures on these things and he would get up and not say a word that he would just look at the audience he had examine every person individually and they're all start feeling uncomfortable he wouldn't say anything you'd look at them all and then he had suddenly say wake up you're all asleep and if you don't wake up I won't give you any lecture are you here recollected see most people aren't they're bothering about yesterday and wondering what they're going to do tomorrow and aren't all here that's a definition of sanity to be all there so to be recollected is to be completely alert available for the present because that's the only place that you are ever going to be in yesterday doesn't exist tomorrow never comes there is only today a great Sanskrit sort of invocation says look to this day for it is life in its brief course lie all the realities of our existence yesterday is but a memory tomorrow is only a vision look well then to this day such is the salutation of the dawn so the shriti means then recollected this in the sense of being all here in the sense that this is the only book only where there is then beyond that comes Samadhi again notice the presence of this word sa m some Samadhi is integrated consciousness in which there is no further separation between the knower and the known the subject and the object you are what you know now we think in the ordinary way that we are the witnesses of a constantly changing panorama of experience from which we as the knowers of this in a way stand aside and watch it we think of our minds as a kind of tablet upon which experience writes a record and the tablet is always there although the experience goes by and eventually the experience by writing so much on the tablet wears it out it's all scratched away and you die see but actually if you will investigate this and you have to experiment on this because I cannot explain it to you in words you can only find it out for yourself there is no difference between the knower and the known when you say I see a sight I feel a feeling you are using redundant language I see implies the sight I feel implies the feeling do you hear sounds no you just hear or you can say there are sounds either one will do so you will find if you thoroughly investigate the process of experiencing that the experiencing is the same as the experiencer and this is the state of Samadhi I put it originally in this form that the organism and the environment are a single behavioral process so likewise is the NOAA and the known so you as someone who is aware and all that you are aware of is one process that is the state of Samadhi and you get to that state by the practice of meditation every buddha-figure practically is seen in the sitting posture of meditation which is sitting down quietly and being aware of all that goes on without comment without thinking about it and when you stop categorizing verbalizing talking to yourself inside your head but naturally the separations between for example Noah unknown self and other simply vanish can you point to the difference between my five fingers where will you put your finger if you want to point to the difference you see the idea of difference is an abstraction it just isn't there in the physical world of course that's not saying that the fingers are joined like a duck's claws with a web but that it's just that they're not the same that's an idea they're not different that's an idea and these ideas I just aren't here see you can't point to it can't put your finger on it get then to the state of affairs where you see the world free from concepts that's what Buddhist mean by void and they say the world is basically they use the phrase Shunya that has a meaning of like empty void everything is shown young this has certainly also the meaning of anita of transience but basically it means you can't catch the world in a conceptual net just if you try to catch water in the net it all slips through if you try to tie up water in a paper package or grab it in your hands it all flows through so soon yeah it doesn't really mean that the world itself that the energy of the world is nothing at all it means that no concept of it is valid you cannot make any one idea or belief or doctrine or system or Theory tie the thing up so if you go through this and you get completely blown out and released and are in the state of Nirvana for no reason that anybody can explain they're just as for example you as I pointed out when you see that you can't change yourself you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstraps you then get a new access of psychic energy so in exactly the same way when you get to this state of Nirvana there Wells up from within you what the Buddhists call Karuna or compassion the sense that you aren't different from everybody else everybody else is suffering is your suffering and so this tremendous sense of solidarity with all other beings arises so that he who reaches nirvana doesn't as it were withdraw into a sort of isolated peace but as always coming back into the world into the difficulties into the problems of life in compassion for everyone else

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Keywords: Alan, Watts, The, Difference, Between, You, And, Your, Ego

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Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2018