Alan Watts - The Game The Universe Plays

now some of you may be unaccustomed to this idea because I see some new faces here uh but it's my fundamental philosophy that the universe is essentially a game but we use the word game or we use the word play in varying senses and it may give the wrong impression because very often people assume that when such a word is used it indicates something trivial as we say it's only in play or only a game and then when you consider what an appalling amount of suffering the universe contains one wants to feel that it's worthwhile you see either you must take the point of view that if there is this deplorable suffering the universe is one hell of a mess and the only response that you can make to it is to do battle or you may say no it isn't really a mess somehow all this suffering amounts to Something in the end it creates energies it's a kind of a process like an oyster suffering to mature a pearl and therefore people who feel bothered about that can't quite emotionally contain the idea that it's all a game because then if that were so I would be the spot of some Cosmic process whether God or whatever that plays with me as a child might torture an insect a butterfly by pulling off its wings or burning it with a magnifying glass with the Sun or something like that only as I will develop it we shall see that there is no system in which somebody tortures and somebody else is tortured in my view of the world which is semi Buddhist semi Hindu uh the Creator and the creature are one and all beings whatsoever are the masks and plays and PLO of the Central Self there is just this self which uh plays itself through all forms through all of us endlessly so if you look upon the different forms of life human animal insect plant or whatever as comparable to mazeras waltz's rers Charleston's twists whatever or to Poker Bridge back gam chess or if you want to get more highbrow to coner symphonies partitas fugues and so on you can see that everything is a way of dancing and so this also applies to people's different religious attitudes there is the Baptist game you see and the Roman Catholic game The Bible Game the ritual game these are all ways of doing a dance but the religious ones have a way of trying to express some sort of fundamental attitude to everything that there is now I was thinking about this in New York recently uh my wife and I attended a very marvelous ceremonial which is held in Holy Week and uh it's called tenra it's really very simple but it's extraordinarily dramatic it goes on for about 2 hours and consists of the chanting of Psalms interspersed with the most gorgeous uh anthems composed by I think Victoria and during the chanting of these Psalms 15 candles on a triangular shaped Candlestick like this standing up so are slowly extinguished until only one is left and this is supposed historically to represent the desertion of Christ by his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane and at the crucifixion then that one candle is taken out behind the Altar and uh the place is totally dark and the choir sings The Psalm misari I have mercy upon me oh God after thy great goodness which is a penitential Psalm the 51st psalm for behold I was shapen in wickedness and in sin hath my mother conceived me then they make an enormous crash and the candle is brought back put on the stand and everybody goes away well we they they this is a church it's a high high way out Anglican Church uh where they do everything to Ultimate Perfection music the ritual is just there's nothing like it in the world and so I began to think about what those people were really doing what are they digging in this rightful penitence repentance about the death and the crucifixion of Christ so this led me to begin thinking about various ways or fundamental attitudes that run through all the religions and I classified them in a scheme under three Rs and I use the r simply as a pneumonic device so that you could remember it easily and we get this scheme so here is the attitude of repentance [Applause] and I question what is its opposite well obviously its opposite is rebellion I won't give him when I was a little boy and I was taught the Lord's Prayer at my mother's knee when we got to this the phrase thy will be done I would never say it because I thought it was saying I will be done and I was damned if I would be done now then over here is another attitude [Music] [Applause] resignation and over at the opposite side I consider what is the opposite of resignation now this is difficult to find a word for and so I'm using an old word in a new sense reincarnation this is not being used exactly in the sense of successive lives but Incarnation means entering into the flesh into life so reincarnation is when uh we don't do it once but we say that was that was something and so we do it again so it's the attitude of a child when a child sees you do something that's amazing the child says do it again and uh an English poet once said that when the Lord God created the world and commanded the the stars and to shine and the planets to revolve around the sun he was so fascinated that he said do it again and it kept on happening so uh I'm using this to express an attitude of what we call slangily getting with it of complete affirmation of life so now the point is this that every one of these can be seen as a way leading to a center at which point they all coales and you can get to the center that is to say to the Transcendence of uh our ordinary sense of isolated individual it you can get to the center by following any one of these ways to an extreme only it's very difficult for a person who follows this way to understand this way uh or for a person who understands this way to get with this or even uh between right angles they're a little difficult to understand and I imagine many of you here you wouldn't be in this kind of a scene if for example you understood the way of repentance and that was the way that you like to follow you would be in church instead so I'm I'm starting out with this way because it's the most difficult for probably most of you to understand and the most repugnant the extreme of repentance you know of course is the penitente cult uh in Mexico and the uh Southwest here uh among the Indians an extreme of identification with Christ and his crucifixion kind of self-torture and the extreme of this way is of course the penitentiary uh the most interesting experiences that many of us have had through uh exploring the prison world the world the Asylum the world of the enemy of society and that as a kind of yoga you know that San Quentin looks like the POA at Lassa the great Tibetan monastries the same almost the same architectural design and uh there are I I lecture at San Quenton about once a year and uh the most extraordinary questions and the most attentive audience you could imagine and lots of them it is a kind of Monastery as asylums for the insane are also kinds of monasteries so I'm just saying these General things to give you an outline of the scheme we're going to follow and then I'm also going to illustrate these moods by playing music appropriate to them uh it's difficult in a short time I've had to prepare this to find the music that is perfectly appropriate but this is suggestive and I'm going to say something about that in general later now then let's go back to the fundamental assumption that all people and this also includes all beings whatsoever but we're talking mainly of course about human beings all people are manifestations disguises of the total reality behind behind this Cosmos and that if that is so there are not any mistakes in the world when you look at patterns on the foam of the breaking waves on the seashore and you look at the outlines of mountains the Grain in wood and the markings on marble you notice that it never makes an aesthetic mistake never also when you study plants and you go into their relationships with each other and with insects the fact that the so-called diseases of plants are the full life of some other kind of organism having a ball and you see this complexly interrelated world and you realize that it all hangs together that everything outside the human world is a system of balances where you couldn't have really any form of life without the others going on too there have to be friends and there have to be enemies because if there aren't enemies the friends get too prosperous and they kill themselves by their excess of exuberant so they are constantly being pruned by various kinds of enemy species and what is when you got down there and you suppose you identify yourself with a certain plant you would thoroughly object to if you were a lettuce to the snails eating you up and also a person who gets identified with lettuces you see say somebody who grows lettuces for his living gets mad at the snails but actually uh Lett uses need snails because there would be too many lettuces if there weren't snails and those lettuces would choke each other now of course a human being comes in and starts organizing the lettuces you see so that the seeds don't propagate in the usual way because he puts them out in rows and that's a different kind of a scene and so he objects to the snails but that's because he's looking at the problem of letting es from a partisan point of view and it's quite right that he should do so what he may not see uh because he's taken the side of lettuces against snails he fails to see that Conflict at one level is Health at another just as conflict going on between microorganisms in your bloodstream is absolutely essential to the health of your organism as a whole but you don't you're not aware of that conflict going on because conscious attention doesn't need to ordinarily to focus upon it and so you don't get involved and you're not anxious about what party is winning and what party is losing they're keeping up a kind of balance now then to take this a step further we are all amazingly involved in the process of being human and playing our game and taking our side and therefore our victories and defeats our sicknesses and our health are things we get Mighty partisan about and therefore we cannot see that human behavior is just like everything else it never makes a mistake only it's never making a mistake must include the feeling that mistakes can be made see that's where uh this point of view would differ somewhat from the point of view of a Christian scientist who uh strives manfully in a way to in assert that evil is really illusory but doesn't quite grasp the point that the illusion of there being something evil is important and good too we're not trying to get rid of it you see because if you get rid of it uh you would have problems it's it's uh I could say for example that a character a historical character like Hitler uh is someone about whom it is very natural for most of us to feel angry and that's perfectly right that we feel angry although he is a as much a natural phenomenon as an earthquake so what we have then is a system of a sort of hierarchy of levels and at the point where you are involved you can't stand aside from yourself and look at it objectively in the same way as you look at the patterns of foam on the seashore or as the life of the fishes in the tide pools but to be liberated is to be able to see human life in the same way as you see all other life and to do that you have to be able to live as it were on two levels the level of involvement and the level of Detachment and therefore uh cultivating the level of Detachment is something that is done through the mysterious human property of self-consciousness to be able to know that you know to feel that you feel and by possessing that faculty which is uh self-conscious is being able to reflect upon one's own life we are able to become uh as it were to go to a a level at which our own life is seen in its total context in the universe that is to say to real realize that yourself is not your ego which is the standpoint at which you are involved in your game and taking sides but yourself is the Eternal immeasurable reality that is what there is only the difficulty here is that this capacity this capacity of self-consciousness although it is that which enables us to awaken is also capable of getting us into perfectly frightful messes into all kinds of uh what must be called feedback snils where you know that you know and you can think about thinking and the moment you can think about thinking you can think whether your thinking was right or not did it come off was it did I do the right thinking then you start to worry then you start to worry about the kind of thinking you are doing about thinking and so builds up our peculiar human anxiety when these creatures that are not self-conscious behave they behave spontaneously they just go zoom zoi and do what they have to do and so if it doesn't work they die but they don't worry about it in advance that's that magnificent you see and human beings have a faint memory kind of archaic sort of collective unconscious Union Style feeling that uh there was a time when we didn't have to worry and when we could never be neurotic and uh most a great deal of religion you see is an attempt to regain the Golden Age The Paradise Lost and so it involves as it were an attitude of surrender be not anxious for the marrow what you shall eat what you shall drink or what clothes you will wear for consider the flowers of the field they don't work they don't spin they don't gather into bars and yet Solomon in all his Splendor was not clothed like one of those and so if God clothed the grass of the field which exists today and is thrown tomorrow into the oven shall he not much more clothe you faithless ones I'm translating it myself to put it in a way that isn't just so familiar that you don't hear it uh now I mean that's totally subversive these words in the Bible are outrageous everybody says well it's all very well for Jesus and the few Saints things like that for all practical purposes that's ridiculous you can't live that that way after all You' got to plan for your old age you got to have a savings account you got to have insurance you got to have a job you got to do all those things see so you have to think about that why can't I do that so you see in this way the human being comes to reflect upon himself and begins to see that this something wrong now there isn't but it's right that he should feel that something is wrong because it is through this that his capacity for self- knowledge and self-consciousness develops so you see there is the sense that somehow or other at some time there was a fall a point at which we became unnatural there's a great deal of worry going on about this now because of the rise of the computer you know this this is terribly interesting that a new form of uh intelligence you see has come into the world which is in certain directions vastly Superior to human intelligence and people are beginning to worry like anything about whether the machines are going to take us over but we've got to realize that machines aren't see machine is becoming a dirty word just a machine mere Machinery you see but actually there has grown out of us through these things enormous electronic circuits that are new forms of life and the these are all connected with us they're not separate from us they're not something like a a different order of of beings that might come from some other planet and Conquer us the the the whole development of the electronic minds and brains that we have are new cortexes see the cortex overlaps the original uh Central brain and uh as it were when you play this game you know putting hands over hands over hands children like to play you it's game called capping the cortex caps the central brain that is more like the brain of a of an animal and enables us to reflect on it now all this Machinery that we are making is an extension of our brain and is a new kind of life but it worries us and when uh we start to do that we get the feeling something is going wrong there has been a fall there has been a mistake and ex exactly the same sensation you see is anciently connected with the development of self-consciousness in the cortex something went wrong because every time we get that feeling it means that we've taken a new step in controlling things instead of relaxing and letting our wings fly us like a moth or a bird we now have these PLS where we have an elaborate system of anxious people morning noon and night checking it that those things go right and it's marvelous that they do our friend uh Ralph Johnson who often attends these seminars as a American Airlines captain and he saved the jet uh the other day in very dangerous circumstances uh fantastic but um here it is now when you haven't yet discovered that the new development such as self-consciousness is really a new form of nature like a branch coming out of a tree which is a kind of a new development of the trunk and it's something just as healthy and just as Splendid as that then you begin to reproach yourself and say oh dear I am awful you begin to be alienated you see from your own Center but do you understand that being alienated from your own Center is a form of a way of stepping apart so that you can see yourself now that's important that is is resonance see when you sing in the bathtub you find you've got a better voice than when you sing in a non-resonant room because you got a little Echo you mustn't get too much Echo but just a little Echo is resonance and that's more fun because it's more conscious if you're happy and you don't know you're happy you see you're not as happy as if you know you're happy but if you know you're happy you may spoil it by getting anxious about it so this self-consciousness is a kind of resonance but then you see when it gets to the point of this terrible feeling I can't trust my instincts anymore I've got to decide I have as it were taken over the prerogatives of God well that's a terrible thing to do because you can't be genuine anymore you see you know that when you love somebody you also want to get as much out of them as you can you know that when you act as a responsible citizen you do so so as to have a good image in your own view of yourself it's your ego kick only you dress it up so that it's not an ego kick at all but perfectly sincere public service and uh charity and good feelings towards everybody [Applause] haha and so then there begins this awful thing repentance behold I was shapen in sin and in sin hath my mother conceived me and so somehow there comes up the state of mind when you appear to yourself as rotten some people when they take LSD get visions that everything is glorious you see and is light inside it but occasionally people get the the vision that everything is corrupt that all faces are things that are slowly drooling away into into sort of rot and that just everything is falling apart and they begin to get the feeling that life is a disease we originally had here a nice clean planet with nothing but rocks and fire and it was sterile and nice and then all this Dreadful goo developed and the best thing for it is to wipe it out life is a terrible mistake see and a lot of people feel that and therefore want to get away from their bodies to a purely geological electronic state which is called spirituality you know what most people think of as spirituality something totally abstract something mathematical something electronic something uh it has no no kind of pass or blood or goo especially no flesh in it you see that's the spiritual state so that expresses the feeling of these people fundamentally who are at variance with their essential life now this is going to get complicated I warn you they're ambivalent about it you see in uh both Hebrew and Christian and should add Islamic theology sin of which one repents is a spiritual thing it does not arise from the body the author of evil is an angel A Bess being and therefore he is something closer to say eal mc² than to uh a [Applause] roseb but at the same time in practice that's the theory in practice what so many Jews Christians and Muslims regard as evil is the body the physical world and our involvement in it our interest in it and so you see for this reason materialism is a dirty word you shouldn't be a materialist although William Temple uh very wisely said once that Christianity is the most materialistic religion but that is true theoretically Judaism is is an equally materialist religion theoretically and sometimes more so practically than the Christian religion because materialism is the love of material and as we shall see it is fundamental to Judaism that God's creation of the world is not a mistake but a great good thing and a material world at that so then you you can see what I'm pointing out to you is this how ambivalent we are we say that evil is spiritual and yet we treat it as if it were fleshly as if one could escape from this flesh the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak within this wall of flesh there is a soul counts thee her creditor and with advantage means to pay thy love see the Wall of Flesh the image of the prison and the Soul inside I'm quoting Shakespeare um oh that this two to solid flesh would melt and you you see when you get sick when you get old when you find that your body is something tiresome to carry around there grows up this resentment against physical existence and so all of these different moods horror at one's own perverse Soul horror at being involved in a corruptible body will be involved in the penitential mood now I presume that most of you have had personal experience of this at some time in your lives it's always puzzling to children when adults start on this kick I know in the Anglican Church uh they have everybody you know says a general confession at the services and children can never understand it they don't know what all these terrible things that they're supposed to have done are they say Almighty and most merciful father we have heard and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own Hearts we have offended against thy holy laws we have done those things which we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and there is no Health in US think the children think that's the most amazing thing to say or that awful one they have at the Holy Communion um talking about our sins the remembrance of them is Grievous unto us the burden of them is intolerable and then of course it's in the Catholic church it's simpler where they say I confess to God Almighty and all the various saints that have sinned exceedingly in thought word inde Deed by my fault by my own fault by my own most gev's fault in Latin mayaula mea Maxima the story is told of an alter boy didn't understand Latin always saying me a cowboy me a cowboy me a Mexican [Laughter] cowboy but you see first of all there is a wonderful Security in admitting that you're wrong then you're sure to be right see if you know you're wrong and make a great point of it and uh if you're suffering and paying a punishment you see for being wrong then you know it's okay oh I bless the good Lord for my boils for my mental and bodily pains for without them my faith all congeals and I'm doomed to Hell's near ending Flames see so the way of the Cross is interpreted by many people as this way of life lived in chronic frustration and I've read many manuals on this the spiritual advice for example they say when you get a headache don't take ASP Live the pain through and offer it to the Lord in Union with the sacrifice of Christ on the cross uh always arrange your life in such a way that it will be a little difficult that's why some people wear a hair shirt they are always uncomfortable they always itch and uh this this thing they do it to keep them going I mean this keeps you alive you know you're there I was in Mexico last August studying this because I wanted to go down there and find out why their form of C Catholicism is so agonizing and uh I meditated a long time on this in the Cathedral at and here was the main altar no not the main altar the chapel where the sacrament is reserved the central figure behind the altar is a huge crucifix of Christ covered in blood and wounds the sores are all muddled you know and then on either side of the walls facing this there are great paintings one of Christ carrying the cross and being mocked and scourged and the other of uh the agony In The Garden of Gethsemane and all around in the stores where they sell bond in the neighborhood of the cathedral you can buy these agonized faces of Christ with a crown of thorns and every Thorn individually sticking in and little tripples of blood the face is kind of green and ghastly and the people dig this they love it they all go walking into the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe for go for a whole mile on their knees you'll see young girls doing this no and what is this about well you see some people don't really feel they exist until they are sitting on the point of a thorn I may put it that way liar to reality is a measure of pain see pain in this way of looking at things is the most real thing that there is pleasure the pleasures of this world escape and disappear and pass away there's nothing to cling to so don't go after pleasure my dear friends uh that's awful that's a deceit because the real thing in life is pain and so what you do is you train yourself from childhood to deal with pain we were brought up in a school system where it was simply axiomatic that suffering builds character so therefore any time you inflicted pain in on anybody you were perfectly justified in your own conscience because you were doing him a favor you were building his character for him do him good it him hard on the head you know sort of attitude and [Music] uh and so this is based on this philos philosophy of pain is reality is the ultimate penitential philosophy of going down down down into the most awful I am wrong see I'm a mistake I am responsible for this mistake therefore I ought to suffer and I go right into that state of mind and if I've got guts and courage I'll go as far into it as possible and what will I find out at the end now if you go far enough the trouble as a lot of people don't and they stare around mimble mbling about their sins and all that which is sort of disgusting and they never really get down to it they never find out the what I'll call for the moment the hidden motivation behind all this behind self-renunciation behind wallowing in the reality of pain they don't see that it's phoning because nothing can be more egotistical than true repentance as I pointed out you're safe when you're repentant enough therefore you conceal for yourself temporarily what an egotist you are but if you really get down to the bottom of this thing as some of the Christian Saints have done and find out what that repentance is all about and you suddenly see why it's dear old sin all over again what I thought was good uh was as a matter of fact evil it was the same self-seeking and self-righteousness and ineradicable pride and irreducible rascality which the Hebrews call the yetaha which means the evil inclination but they say that the evil inclination was created by the Lord God and probably the Lord God has a yet himself that the Lord has his own element of irreducible rascality and that is of course what you might call the dark side the left hand of God the left hand that doesn't know what the right hand doeth because that mustn't be let out that's the secret you see if the game of the cosmos is of the fundamental pattern of hide and seek then when hide turns up and it's the time for hide to happen then Darkness has its day hide in the dark but when it's time for seek then light has its day and we find out what was hidden in the dark and the right hand suddenly discovers what the left hand is doing at first it shocked what that what is that by the way what is the fundamental taboo the thing you really mustn't do Freud said it was sex but because he said that you see we've recovered from it the epoch BF before Freud and the epoch AF are very different sex isn't the taboo maybe it's incest why is incest taboo it's getting kind of close to home going back to Mama going back but uh not going back in the ordinary ways going back as an adult not as a baby and you mustn't do that because why because this is simply a biological analog of the great Tabo is to discover who you really are going back to Big Papa and that that's out but that's what is discovered when you discover you are a phony you see what is a phony a phony is a mask and the masks used as I've told most You In classical drama were megaphones they had mouthpieces so that the voice would be projected in an open air theater so we get the phone and the mask was the Persona that's the Latin for that through which the sound passes so the Persona is the mask the phony so to discover that you are a phony through and through and through is to discover that you're a big act that you're a game and when you discover that then you wake up to find out who's the player now I have been discussing four fundamental attitudes that are found in the various religions of the world towards the human predicament and as you see still on the black backboard uh they are given to be four RS instead of the three Rs repentance opposite rebellion and resignation opposite reincarnation the latter word being used in a special sense not in the ordinary sense of rebirth but of an affirmation of the human predicament of getting with life and this morning I discussed the attitude of repentance the frame of mind in which it is felt that there is something profoundly wrong about being a self-conscious isolated individual human being and I tried to show that when this attitude is carried to an extreme point it results in your discovering that you are a total phony and I said that the difficulty of the repentance attitude is that people don't carry it to an extreme point and they use the attitude of repentance and the Indulgence in punishment for whatever they think is wrong about themselves as a kind of Lifestyle which assures you that you're in the right because you hurt and because you insist that you're wrong I have sometimes suggested that the statement I am a sinner is logically equivalent to the statement quote this statement is false unquote because you see if that is a true statement it's a false statement and if it's a false statement it's a true statement and so on forever and to say I am a sinner is really the same thing because it implies that the statement itself since it is the statement of a sinner is a sinful statement and it's a a trap called a double bind and so uh I've often tweeted my clergy friends about this and uh to their great Amusement because the clergy aren't as bad as you might think uh at least a good many of them they have trouble in making it with their congregations and they expect that their congregations will uh want the good old religion of wallowing in sins because many congregations I found out love to be scolded and if you make everybody feel uh temporarily guilty but also make each individual feel assured that everybody else is more guilty than he is this is an extremely uh much sought after emotional experience but the point that I was making was that if you pursue this idea of being sinful of being phony of being insincere to its ultimate point where you discover that all you do and all you are is a big act then this raises the question you see of what is reality what lies is behind phoniness and so then and there you have an initiatic experience because it leads into uh the discovery that the upanishads call tasi that art thou that the real you is not the isolated conscious ego that is only a game being played all over the place by what there is T and what there is is coextensive with the whole Cosmos and uh is the imperishable reality and everyone is that but the game since uh we started on the premise that existence is a game the game is Hide and Seek the game is pretending that is not so we then move on you see to another possible response not repentance but resignation I quit the game I won't play it there are all sorts of ways of doing this uh but basic Al this is an aristocratic posture you ordinary Mortals with all your desires and all your uh involvements are deluded you get attached to things but there are a certain minority of us who are above it all and uh we simply resign we're not going to follow this now this as I say is aristocratic but it may be aristocratic in two ways uh there's the aristocracy of the Hindu sasin the people who are outside and above cast and there's also the aristocracy of the actual Aristocrat I get so mixed up with my British and American pronunciation on this word uh the Aristocrat who comes on with a pose of always being Brad who has complete s who is imperturbable kisling's study of this mentality is marvelous in his book of Europe the essay on Hungary uh portrays the type he calls the grandor and he always identified himself with this type and this role the Granda who cannot be phased who can always be can always rise to the occasion under any social circumstances whatsoever without trying to do so or without apparently trying to do so in other words if he goes to the Opera wearing blue jeans he will somehow make it apparent that everybody else else is improperly addressed uh this is a very interesting type of person you know there was an essay written by someone whose name I can't remember in the Centennial review which contrasted the attitude to time of the aristocracy the Bourgeois and the proletariat I said the Aristocrat lives in the past because his ancient forbears have achieved everything and is very by the fact of his birth and his existence he has nothing to strive for and he somehow uh never need overdo it he's always cool the bis on the other hand feels that it's necessary to arrive and he's always striving for the future whereas the Aristocrat lives in the past on the other hand the proletarian lives in the Pres because he doesn't care about his reputation and he just lives and so of the two the bouris of the three the bis is the sucker because the poor bourgea is always cheated because well it's going to come someday see you're going to get it even your money when you pull it out of your pockets is on it promised to pay watch out for that it's promises and the Bourgeois you see lives on promises the whole the whole economy the United States being the great Bourgeois country is in a state of expectancy of feeling happy not on what you have but on what is going to come the Aristocrat is Happy on what has happened these great achievements of the past there's nothing left to do except uh sort of uh glory in it proletarian wants it right now see and very often gets it but the poor bouris as my uncle said the poor have it given to them the rich have it anyway that the middle classes do without so both the Aristocrat and the sasin have resigned now the more interesting of the two types is of course the sasi who resigns from the world game let me review for you the role of the sasin in Indian culture you know there are four casts the cast of priests or brahans the cast of uh Warriors and rulers called chhatria the cast of merchants called visha and the cast of workers called sudra and to belong to a cast means that you are in the state called gasta which is householder that is to say you are one who is involved in the world you are engaged in what is called locaa and Loca means the world sangraha means upholding upholding the going on of the great illusion and so you are playing for money for position for status for success and hoping above all that you can win you can beat the game but it's supposed in this same culture that every man who attains the age of 45 or so who has now a grown son to take over his work will quit the game will resign and so when you become uh at that age you're supposed to move from the state of gasta householder to Vana prasta which means Forest dweller you give away all your possessions to your son you change your name you take off your clothes and go more or less naked because you have abandoned status so the sasin has no status he is however respected in the culture for being an upper Outcast whereas the Aborigines of the Indian Peninsula are Untouchables the lower outcasts and the upper Outcast always mimics the lower for example Buddha had his disciples wear ochre robes because ochre robes were worn by convicts so in the same way if today uh in San Quentin they all wear blue jeans espe special kind pants and a kind of blue denim jackets this could well become the uniform of a new kind of sasim in the western world and to some extent this is happening so this guy says the game is not worth the count the Richer I get the more miserable I get you know how this is you think that your problems may be monetary and you get more money what do you do then when you've got enough money you start worrying about your health and you can never never stop worrying about that or if you are not worried about your health you worry about politics if somebody's going to take your money away from you you worry about tax about Who's Cheating you and so the person who goes through all that sees finally I don't think the game's worth it I'm going to resign and so resignation or renunciation is different from repentance it hasn't it hasn't got the same kind of passion in it at all the repentant person feels he's wrong has made mistakes has committed sins and wants to get better but the renounced person isn't concerned with that kind of thing he knows that better progress whether moral or material is an illusion and you have to understand this when you approach for example the study of Buddhism I think one of the most withering remarks I ever heard from an oriental he was Japanese he said once you must never forget that whereas Jesus was the son of a carpenter Buddha was the son of a king you know wow take that and it's true you see there is something always of that about it that this is not the there's a sense you see in which Christianity historically was the protest of the slave class against the Roman establishment Buddhism was different it was the abandonment of position by an aristocracy so we've done it we've seen it all we've had it and so now we check out and we will be there we will resign from all games and if you follow this attitude to an extreme you're going to make because it all goes to the center the same discovery that is made by the person who follows repentance to an extreme just as the repentant person discovers that his Contrition is phony the person who tries to resign will discover but he can't that there is no way of not playing games let's go a little bit then into this game theory there are a lot of games that we play and uh it's not only the game of can I get one up on the universe of uh pretending that I'm me this ego with its name and its role The Mask but also we have what I call Meta games for example the game My game's better than your game I won't play with you because your game is vulgar stupid bu now inferior and uh or one of the most therefore effective games in saying my game is better than your game is that I'm not playing games at all you are now at the lowest level we find that in the form of you're not sincere I am sincere you are fooling me as I'm not fooling you I'm being honest with you you see now that's a great game and this game of resignation is a form of it as to say you are children playing with toys and you haven't ever really woken up to the important concerns of life you haven't reached the dimension of ultimate sincerity or or that is to say ultimate reality and in order to reach it you have to resign from distractions you hear a great deal in the literature about meditation of getting rid of distractions wandering thoughts well I you might ask when you think about all that what are wandering thoughts what are wrong thoughts what shouldn't I be doing with my mind well they all say actually every day you think about this and then you think about that and your thoughts run on in an undisciplined way from one Association to another and you can't keep your mind fully on the job or whatever it is so you see you you you're supposed to renounce that because that's triviality all those wondering thoughts they're not about the important thing now what's important what should you keep your mind on well something just so long as you keep your mind on in an instruction one of the Buddhist scriptures says uh about concentration one may concentrate on a yellow Square on the ground on the burning tip of an incense stick on your navl on the the tip of your nose on the center between the eyes or anything and in a foot note the commentator adds but not on any wicked thing you know that's commentators the world over they never have any humor uh so anything will do just so long as you keep your mind on it don't wander stick to it so wondering is involvement in games by this kind of definition so then you try to get out can you now get out can you stop competing with other human beings in ancient Greek society there was a place in the center of the community called the agon AG o n and this was a place for contests where they had wrestling matches and other athletic events because all the men were constantly trying to show who was the better and from this word the agonia which means the the contest itself held in the agon we get our word agony the struggle and striving to be superior and a lot of people that you meet among your you recognize this among your friends all the time are not happy unless they are involved in the contest it doesn't matter what it is so long as they're trying to beat something they're happy and you may say oh for heaven's sakes you know can't we just sit around and talk instead of having to play a game or bet or do coming to prove who's the stronger I was once married to a girl who was never happy unless she was engaged in some kind of contest well of course I had a game that didn't look like one and so it was a very Superior game just because it didn't look like one but it was a form of the game my game is better than yours so you you can't really not play you may go through the motions of not playing but you still are now one of the most marvelous examples of this is the uh Buddhist s the s means the order of Buddhist monks or monks isn't quite the right word because the basis of Buddhist monkhood is a little different from Christian but I don't want to go into that technicality here are these people living in say Burma Salon Thailand and so on who go around in yellow robes and have renounced the world but of course they've become as a community very prosperous and powerful and everybody you know makes a Bas to monks and feeds them and uh they don't they don't feed just on uh rice gr important monks get called into the houses of wealthy Ley and get given uh fine dinners because the Layman feels he's acquiring Merit by being so generous to the monks and you should see the scene in Japan although today uh the monks have lost their power to a large extent you can see the traces of the power they once had in the city of Kyoto the Buddhist uh orders Zen um tendai and especially Shinu sect have the the best parts of time if you stay a night in a Zen Monastery as a guest and go into one of the rooms there you're not in any H you're in a palace you live differently from the way we are accustomed to but you're liable to get shown in into a room where the walls are entirely covered in Gold Leaf and painted by the greatest masters of Japan you'll say sit down to sleep by a Koo motonobu scream and the landscape around you the gardens The View are gorgeous beyond belief this is the life of resignation now it's true uh I know most about Zen monks rather than the other orders Zen monks live a pretty rough life but it's extremely Tony it's healthy it's um it's absolutely non-m masochistic uh they have studied the art of enjoying poty now this is a terribly important thing in the understanding of Far Eastern culture when a man in Japan if he sort of inherits an oldfashioned tradition makes a killing in business he doesn't go around showing off how much he possesses he goes around showing off how little he possesses even though he may drive to his office in a Mercedes or a Rolls-Royce his house is relatively Barren and he chooses objects of Art and paintings that look uh extremely simple and he will as likely as not have a separate house from his main huge establishment where it's like a Hermitage I mean it's almost as absurd in its own way as Marie Antoinette playing shepardus after reading Russo and having a little uh Cottage rustic Cottage in the grounds of Vera but it's not quite as absurd as that because even the main house has an austerity about it and they learn you see to love that austerity to them it has the feeling of great comfort now you see what happened was this that long ago the best part of Kyoto the hills that ring the north side and east of the city being so beautiful were by a bunch of brigands who were later the noble Dao or Lords of Japan the great feudal Barons and these people were as tough as orar they were always fighting and so the Buddhist monks moved in and decided they would take this property away from the Danes by out competing them by playing the game our game is more interesting than your game so they said to all those briads so what uh you've attained all these conquests you have your castles you have your great EST States but then what it all falls apart you know especially when the brigand is getting a little elderly and has stomach troubles and uh dizziness and uh so on and uh this monk comes along and says and furthermore the monk says you can't scare me and the Brion say and he pulls out his sword and this monk but now the point is he can't kill the monk then and there because if he does that he won't find out whether the monk was scared or not and so the monk looks straight in the eye and uh nothing happens he doesn't Flinch and the brigon has now in a contest he thinks and he puts the sword point right against his throat well the monk has it right there which is see how in a way easy the game was because the monk knows that he wins his point if he doesn't if the brigan kills him before the monk flinches he's obviously cheated now since there is honor among Thieves uh the chances are although there will sometimes be a brigad who will feel put down by this contest and therefore kill the monk the chances are that he won't but look what the monk stands to gain if he wins brigon says wow would I like to have that courage because if I had that courage I would be that much better a warrior so the monk says I'll teach and as a result of that the monk does teach him he teaches him the practice of Zen zazen meditations and all this kind of thing and puts him through the the works and so he comes to understand what the monk did understand anyway which was that uh it really doesn't matter if you live or die because the thing goes on it's perfectly indestructible if you happen to die it just goes on in a new way because you are the works so fine but the monk is playing a game and so as a result uh all these Zen uh communities got given the old palaces the brins all moved to Tokyo and set up there in business and uh all around the great court and the gorgeous temples and ground PS went to the monks where although none of them owns anything personally which is a great idea you know because you don't have any responsibility then the community owns it and you don't have to pay it in taxes and since you're a nonprofit organization you're not taxable [Laughter] anyway oh it's a great setup and they they really did it beautifully but what they did in effect was to con those brigands out of the best land in Kyoto by resignation by playing a higher game but you see any one who goes through that goes through the Buddhist process of resignation will come to a point where he knows that he didn't resign at all and this is what makes the difference between pedestrian Buddhist monks who think they've resigned and have feel a little bit guilty because it's such a prosperous affair to resign because you live in the best places so on and those ones who know who go right through who constitute a small uh residue of great Buddhist Masters who discovered that they can't resign at all let's consider an extreme example of resignation the life of a hermit Far Eastern literature is full of the idealization of the hermit's life the wonderful idea of an old man somewhere in the mountains far off in the forest hakuin's books uh describe such an individual who can't be found nobody knows where he is he leaves no trace and they consider that is admirable the poem you know which says I asked the boy beneath the Pines he said the Master's gone alone herb gathering on the mount Cloud hidden whereabouts unknown and that idea of the far off man way way way off in some forests but what does a Hermit discover if you try this and get as lonely as you can get you become vividly aware that you can't get away from it because when you get very lonely and very quiet you become extremely sensitive and everything that goes on that's ordinarily unnoticed comes to your attention first of all you will find there's a community of insects and they are tremendously interested in you and not necessarily hostile they may be sometimes but but alone in the forest when you get really quiet you'll notice Little Creatures will come and inspect you look you all over and they'll go away and tell their friends and they'll come and look and see what it is and you become aware of every single sound and you realize that a alone you're in the midst of a vast murmuring crowd may not be human but it's everything else so that the the point of being a Hermit the the discipline leads you to understand that you can't resign the lonelier you are the more you're joined together with everything else cuz you get more sensitive so then I find then I cannot give up playing the game look at it too from another point of view supposing I say everybody's playing the game uh me first now I'm going to play the game you first to use the phrase of uh Bon Herer who called Jesus the man for others now let's let's see if we can play that game instead of me first you first after you please you know will you please you know what a way this is putting everybody down see I'm the one you see who's so generous I'm the one who so loving so self-effacing and all you inferior brats can go first you can play play me first I'll play you first I'll try and convince you to play you first but uh the success of convincing you on that is relatively small and therefore the ingroup will always be the people playing you first and therefore they will get the honors so when you think that through and you see I cannot stop playing me first there's no way of not doing it I well now what does it mean when I'm in a trap that I can't get out of there's no way of getting out of this trap well what it means is that you and and the trap for the same thing you're not caught because when there's nobody in the Trap there's no trap see that as long as you think you're in a trap then the trap's got you but when you know you are the Trap then what do the Trap got if you're trying to get out of the game you're trapped there's no way out but when you have found that you and the game are the same there's no game to get out of there's no one to get out of the game and that's true resignation and then you can take the point of view of the Bodhi SATA as distinct from the arhat the arhat in uh Buddhist terminology is the person who escapes from the wheel of birth and death the ssara and gets out of the game so he stands here the bodh satra is the arhat plus he's the arat who's gone on to find out that you can't get out of the game at all the bodh SATA is found over here in other words he goes back into the cycle of reincarnation and that doesn't bother about escaping anymore so in just the same way as repentance leads to the understanding that you're a phony even in repenting resignation leads to the understanding that even in resigning you can't resign it isn't as if someone were saying You must play this game and you felt yourself under some sort of compulsion it's rather discovering that the game is what there is and to to if you got out of it would be to be nowhere you don't have to play this is the point I'm going to repeat this because this is crucial it isn't that you have to play because that would make you feel a victim of some process Beyond yourself that was compelling you it is that the playing is you and nobody is shoving you around because you and the universe which seems to constrain you are not two things if you play the game that you are only here then you'll feel pushed around but when through trying to resign from either pushing around or being pushed around you discover that it can't be done you then become very much aware there is no point getting away from anything where is a way and so it said a true Zen monk has a mountain Hermitage in any place that he stands on so let's have intermission we

Channel: AwakenYourMind

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Keywords: Alan watts, Alan watts speech, best of Alan watts, spiritual, wisdom, philosophy, spirituality, Eastern philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, consciousness, self-discovery, mindfulness, meditation, counterculture, metaphysics, existentialism, lectures, books, Alan Watts quotes

Id: RGFZ04z21UA

Length: 93min 10sec (5590 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024