Alan Watts ~ The Most Important Lesson, Everyone Should Learn

so if I may start by insulting your intelligence with what is called the most elementary lesson the thing that we should have learned before we learned 1-2-3 and ABC but somehow was overlooked now this lesson is quite simply this that any experience that we have through our senses whether of sound or of light or a touch is a vibration and a vibration has two aspects one called on and the other called off vibration it seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs and so life is a system of now you see it now you don't and these two aspects always go together for example sound is not pure sound it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence and that's simply the way things are only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests just as you don't encounter in life people with fronts but no backs this is you don't encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails and although the heads and the tails the fronts and the backs the positives and the negatives are different there at the same time one and one has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things and be inseparable that what is explicitly - and at the same time be implicitly one if you forget that very funny things happen if therefore we forget you see that black and white are inseparable and that existence is constituted equivalently by being and non-being then we get scared and we have to play a game called or black might win and once we get into the fear that black the negative side might win we are compelled to play the game but white must win and from that start all our troubles because you see the human awareness is a very odd mechanism that is to say we have as a species specialized in a certain kind of awareness which we call conscious attention and by this we have the Faculty of examining the details of life very closely we can restrict our gaze and it corresponds somewhat to the peripheral field not only the central field of vision in the eyes we have central vision we have peripheral vision central vision is that which we use for reading for all sorts of close work and it's like using a spotlight whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight our civilization and civilized human beings or maybe 5,000 years maybe much longer have learned to specialize in concentrated attention even if a person's attention span is short he is as it works wavering his spotlight over many fields the price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention his ignorance of everything outside its field I would rather say ignorance and ignorance because if you concentrate on a figure you tend to ignore the background you can therefore to see the world in a disintegrated aspect you take separate things and events seriously imagining that these really do exist when actually they have the same kind of existence as an individual's interpretation of a Rorschach blot they're what you make out of it in fact our physical world is a system of inseparable differences everything exists with everything else but we contrive not to notice that because what we notice is what is noteworthy and we notice it in terms of notations numbers words images what is notable noteworthy notated noticed is what appears to us to be significant and the rest is ignored as insignificant and as a result of that we select from the total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction and this causes us to believe that we are separate beings isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the rest of the world you see this is also the mechanism involved in not noticing that black and white go together not noticing that every inside has an outside and at the inside what's inside goes on inside your skin is inseparable from what goes on outside your skin you see that for example in the science of ecology one learns that a human being is not an organism in an environment but is an organism - environment that is to say a unified field of behavior if you describe carefully the behavior of any organism you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment and by that you know that you've got a new entity of study the organism is not the puppet of the environment being pushed around by it nor on the other hand is the environment the puppet of the organism being pushed around by the organism the relationship between them is to use John Dewey's word transactional the transaction being a situation like buying and selling in which there is no buying unless somebody sells and they're selling and that somebody buys you [Music]

Channel: Wiara

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Id: CVpj7WWC-nw

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018