Alan Watts - The Joker Pt. 3 Full Lecture - Alan Watts Organization Official

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 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 try 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 it's all he knows that 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 want 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 keep contact with the original 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 are 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 greenroom is the central point the still point of the turning world the greenroom 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 a mask of God the like wonderful line in one of Chesterton's 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 do in the end and say you you bastard you did 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 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 axle firmly planted and at the center then there have 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 as games I went on in the second session to discuss another aspect of the Joker as the sly man in comparison with the monk the fakir and the yogi who undertake 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 attune and endeavors to overcome it but in each of these three cases the individual involved stirs up in 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 released 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 [Laughter] 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 a 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 the good Jeff thing yesterday the self remembering exercise the attempt to live completely in the present well that's not only a 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 when to go shopping unless you made plans and started thinking about the future where 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 really isn't anything else because even when you make plans for the future and you remember the past you are doing it all in the present your memory is a 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 shudders and the same tears in either case but they have a completely different meaning now life said life is a matter of oscillation life is vibration it's 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 and sometimes it's the other so that the the whole thing of the Joker is the book the 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 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 a 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 laughs now why what is it about death being a jest we discussed the problem of the zebra you remember whether a zebra is a 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 - Lal is blue about which side is right and let's suppose that a black horse is a horse of ill omen even though striped with yellow and a yellow horse a 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 seemed 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 a 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 via the 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 bogie 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 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 and 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 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 in this way just as you can't have just one vibration I mean it's like the saying the greatest strength of mine is to eat one peanut and and so you 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 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 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 the 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 but look here I'd 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 I don't know if anybody in this room has it's always possible but and 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 threat 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 it's a very tough one but let's go back to a simpler one let's take sounds now if you lie down and listen to all the goings-on in this area and you will hear 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 compel 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 discordant musical noises and find them extremely interesting if you listen carefully enough you can listen to a score in Bratz and find it musical that this child I'll never forget waking up one morning and listening to a child whining which I wasn't saying anything were no words in it it was just a plaint and it wasn't exactly crying it was a kind of [Music] and there was something marvelous about it this child's wonderfully articulate protest against some sort of musings and so listening into those things without interpreting them listening to one's own interior frustration and pain in the same way without interpreting it as being on one side or the other on the good side or the bad side on the black side on the white side is what makes it possible you see to transmute these things but you you can't do this you can't really honestly transmute paying into a form of play a form of weird far-out sensations that are basically just that so long as you fail to see the inner unity of the opposites so long as you fall for the idea that you are nothing more than this particular life than this particular ego which came from nowhere and is going nowhere while you remain under that illusion you see you you first of all you don't see your identity with everything else that exists now if death then is a joke I remember the biggest joke on death I ever saw I mentioned this in my book we visited the Capuchin friars crypt in the Via Veneto in Rome some of you may have seen it where there are three underground chapels where everything is made of bones and the altar is made of bones the pedestals of the altar are all shin bones and then there are piles of skulls and the decoration of flowers on the ceiling our ribs alternating with vertebrae and the vertebrae of the flowers and the ribs curl this way curl this vehicle this way of the twining stems and our whole thing is bones and they have even a fuse full intact skeletons dressed in monk's robes standing on either side of these altars it's the craziest thing you ever saw and then when you have seen it and you come out there is a little friar with a beard taking your offering at the top of the steps and he had a funny wicked gleam in his eye and one could see that this was a joke the whole thing was a joke it was constructed by people who would somehow overcome the fear of death would possibly have such a thing as that and so I I was fascinated by it because I thought but on the day of the resurrection there's gonna be a tremendous scuffle forfeiting all those bones together and everybody getting up the stairs for the Last Judgement well so if if it is seen the death is suggest but the question is you see we are so tormented by the bugbear of it being the real end by the imagination of the possibility of being in the dark forever now you really must think this through because it is a pure delusion if you think first of all seriously about annihilation of consciousness you will realize that an isolation of consciousness couldn't possibly be an experience but being in the dark forever could be an experience in supposing you were buried alive and somehow you were immortal that you had to stay shut up in a tomb for always and always and always that would be pretty grim but the annihilation of consciousness is not an experience at all there isn't anything there to be afraid of so if that's what's going to happen there's nothing to worry about I'll show you but on the other hand if you think about it longer about a state of eternal just not being at all you know you realize that nature abhors a vacuum and that since just as it the universe happened once it could happen again since you were born once you know it did happen really well it can happen again only the the next you won't remember the one now just as the one now doesn't remember the one before not because you've forgotten but because memory is transmitted along certain channels it requires the vehicle of brains for example it requires books and other records to maintain it but as I pointed out yesterday the fundamental what-have-you that underlies all this doesn't need a memory doesn't need to store memories and so just in the same way as you don't need to be conscious of the inner formations of your brain also I mean here I'm talking speculatively also there are curious connections where we don't see any that is to say the interval between events is not insignificant just as you don't hear melody unless you hear the interval between tones it's the interval that counts so in the same way blank intervals between successive manifestations of the universe and blank intervals between you're forgetting who you are altogether and dying and someone suddenly becoming a baby the blank intervals are not insignificant every painter knows every architect knows that the space around an object or inside an object is just as important as the object that again is the fact if you don't notice the importance of intervals and you don't notice the importance of space it is as if you had settled on the carpet here for the black design being the thing and the white background is having no no significance so what about the inside of this room what about the shape of space that it encloses we would say this is nothing more than a certain quantity of air but don't you see the distance the the the the space between that wall and this window is life room that is not nothing that it's just as important it comes into being at the same moment as the walls come into being it connects them and so likewise the space between our planet and other planets is not insignificant so once you see that intervals of apparent nothingness are significant intervals that their size makes all the difference to what's happening when the intervals between dits are short the note is high when the intervals between the dates are long the note is low or large the high being little see why do we say high and low as distinct from little and big big instruments make big noises little instruments make tiny noises but at any rate it's the interval that's important so then once you see the importance of the interval you have seen that the Whitis is important as the black or the other way round if you want to change your analogy do you see how you can switch these analogies in one case the white can be the nothing the unimportant whereas the black is the mark somebody made with a with a crayon or the other way round the black can be the darkness and the white is the flash of lightning that appears in the darkness change your analogies like saying once we used to say about high matters you know high matters lofty thoughts but now we don't it's more fashionable to say deep matters and profound thoughts so I was telling me yesterday in the group here that they will going to an Indian village in New Mexico where they had Christianity but when the speaker referred to Jesus and God and so on he pointed down all the time because you see he felt that things grew up like this from below whereas it costs the ancient cults out of which the Jewish and Christian religions grew had the idea that the life of the Sun and the rain came down from the heavens and fertilized the feminine earth which then responded but these things keep changing because you can keep switching your point of view you can see the black as the design against the white background and the white as the design against the black background and you can flip back and forth back and forth back and forth and the more you do that the more you realize that the pairs go together anxiety is the state of trying not to flip all life is flipping it's called its flip-flop ability is the condition of life this way in that way when you are trying to resist flip-flop ability you're anxious you see when you push against it it throbs in a way that you interpret as fear and all rigid personalities people who can't swing who have no movement in their hips as it were in psychologically they are resisting flip flop ability but when you understand flip flop ability and that this is the way things are there you laugh because that is the big flip-flop you

Channel: Alan Watts

Views: 22,340

Keywords:

Id: Kc_wDMb7AcA

Length: 45min 8sec (2708 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2019