Alan Watts: Veil of Thoughts – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 10 – Hosted by Mark Watts

thank you [Music] welcome to being in the way the Alan Watts podcast and I'm your host Mark watts and today we've got some special treats we've got some talks from the veil of thoughts about symbolism about money and the mistaking of symbols for reality we're going to start off with that and uh preceding that with a little clip about what do you desire and then in the same seminar from the ferryboat Vallejo in the late 60s my father launched into a unique talk called Divine Madness about love and marriage so appropriate for this upcoming season and a very interesting and pragmatic talk on love relationships falling in love and how marriages can contain the possibility of Falling in Love so it's Alan Watts in veil of thoughts with a little preview on what do you desire and then into the main veil of thoughts on symbolism and money and then on to Divine Madness the intention of desire desire for whatever it is that you want but behind this is a deeper question altogether which is what do you desire how would you really enjoy spending your life what would you like let's suppose I do this often in vocational guidance of students they come to me and say well um we're getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do so I always ask the question what would you like to do if money were no object what how would you really enjoy spending your life well it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system crowds of students say Well we'd like to be painters we'd like to be poets we'd like to be writers but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way or another person says well I'd like to live an out of door's life and ride horses I said you want to teach in a writing School let's go through with it what do you want to do when we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do I will say to him you do that and uh forget the money uh because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing you will spend your life completely wasting your time you'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don't like doing which is stupid better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing then a long life spent in a miserable way and after all if you do really like what you're doing it doesn't matter what it is you can eventually turn it you could eventually become a master of it it's the only way to become a master of something to be really with it and then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is so don't don't worry too much that that's uh everybody's somebody's interested in everything and anything you can be interested in you'll find others who are but it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on doing things you don't like and to teach your children to follow in the same track see what we're doing is we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we're living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing so it never gets there and so there seems to be a fundamental futility therefore it's so important to consider this question what do I desire well now in the first talk I was explaining that the theme of this seminar was the problem of how thoughts protect us from truth and what to do about it showing various ways in which the symbolizing process which we call thinking the use of signs words symbols numbers to represent what's going on in the external world of the world of nature it leads us into a curious confusion that we confuse the symbolic process with the actual world and the temptation to do this arises from the extraordinary relative success that we have had in controlling the world of nature with the power of thought but I don't know if it's ever struck you that we really don't know whether we have successfully controlled it or not uh it could be argued a very strong case could be made that the entire intellectual Venture of civilization has been a ghastly mistake and that we are now on a collision course and that all the vaunted benefits of intelligence technology and all that is simply going to draw the human race to an extremely Swift conclusion of course that might not be a bad thing I've sometimes speculated on the idea that all stars have been created out of planets and that these planets developed High civilizations which eventually understood the secrets of nuclear energy and naturally blew themselves up and in the process these Stars flung out lumps of rock as they blew up which eventually spun around them and became planets all over again now that this is the actual uh method of Genesis of the universe uh which would have called of course with the Hindu cosmology where it is uh where time and the events in time are invariably looked upon as the process of progressive deterioration through the cycles of each caliper in which things get worse and worse as time goes on until it can't stand itself anymore and it blows up and after a period of rest and recuperation begins all over again why do we somehow have a distaste for a theory of time which runs in that direction I mean would you rather have a rhythm that goes yeah the or that one that goes [Music] see I mean which is it [Laughter] or do you you want one that's going up always you see always getting better you you can't you can't even imagine such a state of affairs because um you know it's relative as you succeed in life you simply uh well there was a communist um Russian not a communist a Russian philosopher who accused the Communists in their various five-year plans and Progressive Notions wherein people were always preparing for tomorrow of converting all human beings into carrier tids now you know a carrier tid is a pillar shaped in a human form which supports a roof and he said you are turning all men into Charities to support a stage upon which others will dance but of course you know they never will you have one row of carriages supporting a floor and very soon your children are the next Royal carriages supporting another floor uh so that it gets higher and higher and but we don't really know where we began and we're always in the same place always hoping always thinking that uh the the next time will be it and this of course is an eternal illusion it's much better actually one would be much happier to think that the the future is simply uh deteriorating I can explain that very simply human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible you know as the proverb says you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstraps but recently I've heard a lot of references in just general reading and listening where people say we've got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps and you can't and you can struggle and tug and pull till you're blue in the face and nothing happens except that you exhausted yourself all sensible people therefore begin in life with two fundamental presuppositions you are not going to improve the world and you are not going to improve yourself you are just what you are and uh once you have accepted that situation you have an enormous amount of energy available to do things that can be done and everybody else looking at you from an external point of view will say my God how much so and so has improved but I know I I mean hundreds of my friends are at work on Enterprises to improve themselves by one religion or another one therapy or another they're this system that system and I'm desperately trying to free people from this and I suppose that makes me a messiah of some kind but the thing is that you you uh you can't do it one very simple reason which I think most of you are by now familiar with is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved in other words there isn't any real distinction between bad me and good I between the higher self which is spiritual and the lower self which is animal it's all of a peace you are this organism this integrated fascinating energy pattern and uh as Archimedes said um give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth but there isn't one it's like you know betting on the future of the human race uh if I were really smart I would lay a bet that the human race will destroy itself because in Practical politics one realizes that nothing is going to work out right no candidate I've ever voted for ever won the election so uh but the trouble is there's nowhere to place the bird and so since I can't place the BET anywhere I'm involved in the world and um try to see that it doesn't blow itself to pieces but the the thing I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead she was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb now everybody should immediately spring into action and abolish it but she was so uh she was getting so uh Furious about it that I said to her you know you scare me because I think you're the kind of person who will push the button uh in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first and she told me that I hadn't no love for that my future Generations no responsibility for my children and I was the phony Swami who believed in retreating from facts but I maintain my position Robert Oppenheimer a little while before he died said that it's perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell the only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so because you see all all troubles going on on in the world now are being supervised by people with very good intentions uh their attempts to to keep things in order to clean things up uh to forbid this and prevent that possible horrendous damage and the more we try you see to put everything to rights the more we make fantastic misses and it gets worse and maybe that's the way it's got to be maybe I shouldn't say anything at all about the Folly of trying to put things to write but simply on the principle of Blake let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise this is an argument against all kinds of do-gooding in other words it's simply it's it's the I'm what I'm saying is don't take me too seriously uh I'm I'm pitching a case for the fact that the civilization has been a mistake that it would be much better to leave everything alone that uh the wild animals are wiser than we in that they putting it in our crew to not very exact language they just follow their instincts and if a moth mistakes aflame for the signal on which it gets a mating call and flies into the flame so what that just keeps the moth population down and the moth doesn't worry you know it doesn't go buzzing around in a state of anxiety wondering whether this sex call is the the real thing or just the flame it doesn't think consciously about the future at least we suppose this is so maybe it does but we suppose that it doesn't and therefore it isn't troubled and uh but the species of moths goes on and on and on and it's so far as we know it's been around for an incredibly long time and maybe even longer than we have bees ants creatures of this kind they have long sea since escaped from history so far as we can see in other words they live a settled existence which you might consider rather boring because it doesn't have constant change uh in the way that we do they live the same rhythm again and again and again and again but because they don't bother to remember it consciously it doesn't it never gets boring and because they don't bother to predict they never in a state of anxiety and yet they survive now we who look before and after as Emerson says and predict and are always concerned whether this generation is going to be better or worse than the one that came before we are tormented and we just don't realize because of this tremendous preoccupation with time we don't realize how beautiful we are In Spite of Ourselves because you see the the conscious radar is a troubleshooter it's always on the watch out for variations in the environment which may bring about disaster and so Consciousness is from one day's end to another entirely preoccupied with time and with planning and with what has been and with what will be [Music] and since troubleshooting is its function we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble and we ignore in this preoccupation with conscious attention how marvelously we get on how for most of the time our physical organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship how our body relates by all sorts of unconscious uh responses to the physical environment so that if you became aware of all the adjustment processes that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism you would find yourself in the middle of great music and of course this occasionally happens well the mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of your true physical relationship to the universe and you are amazed Thunderstruck by the feeling that underneath everything that goes on in this world the fundamental thing is a state of unbelievable Bliss but why not foreign why else would there be anything happening because if the game isn't worth the candle if the universe is basically nothing but a tormented struggle why have one hasn't it ever struck you that it would be much simpler not to have any existence it would require no effort there would be no problems so why is there anything going on let me say not why but how is there anything going on because if it's all fundamentally a drag I just don't see any reason for its being everything would have committed suicide long ago and to be at rest Abu benadham may his tribe decrease by cautious birth control and be at peace [Laughter] [Music] huh so uh we might work on this possibility then that Civilization is a mistake and that uh we've taken completely the wrong track and should have left things to Nature as it were and of course this is the same problem that is brought up in the Book of Genesis actually the the fall of Man in Genesis is his Venture into technology because in the Bible the Hebrew words for the knowledge of Good and Evil are connected with techniques what is technically expeditious and what is not words connected with actually metallurgy and to be as God you see when you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you become as God means you think you're going to control your own life and God says okay baby you wanted to be God you try it but you the trouble with you is you've got a one-track mind and therefore you can't be God to be God you have to have a um infinitely many tracked mind which is of course what your brain has you see the brain is infinitely many tracked but Consciousness is not it's one tract as we say you can only think of one thing at a time and you cannot take charge of the universe with that kind of a consciousness because there's too much of it as I explained before too many variables and our science can take care of a few variables or of an enormous number of variables as in quantum mechanics by statistical methods as we can use statistical methods to predict that most people will live to be 65 years old at least but we cannot say of Any Given individual whether he will live to 65 or not that's what we wanted to know but the problem is that the variables on each individual are too complicated and we have not yet you see developed a science which can deal with say 50 100 or 500 variable systems it's too complicated to think about but computers are going to help us but uh as yet we're either on the low number or the extremely high number and they these are outside the range of the problems with which we're really concerned that's why for example a lot of people have taken to using the eging the book of changes because if you are tossing a coin to make your decisions and everybody does fundamentally make their decision by tossing coins it's better to have a 64-sided coin than a two-sided coin the EJ gives you 64 possibilities of uh approach to Any Given decision instead of just two yes or no it's based on yes or no because it's based on the Yang and the Yin but uh in the same way that computers digital computers use a number system which consists only of the figures zero and one out of which you can construct any number and this was invented by lightness who got it from the book of changes it's amazing how this book is somehow always with us but this then is a a way of arriving of helping your own uh multivariable brain arrive at decisions cooperating with your own mind because then again after you've tossed your 64-sided coin the uh the Oracle that you read that explains each particular hexagram in the book of changes uh is a sort of raw shark plot it it is a very laconic remarks into which everybody reads just exactly what they want to read foreign but that helps you make a decision by the fact that you don't really have to accept responsibility for it see then you can say it told me I consulted the oracle same way when you go to a guru you say my Guru is very wise and he has instructed me to do this this that and the other but it was you who decided on this Guru how did you know he was a good one see you gave him his authority because you picked him out it always comes back to you but we like to um pretend it doesn't but the thing is that uh oneself is certainly not the stream of consciousness oneself is everything that goes on underneath that and of which the stream of Consciousness is a mere well it has about the same relation to oneself as the bookkeeping does to a business and if you are selling grocery there's very little resemblance between your books and uh what you move over your shelves encounters there's just a record of it and that's what our Consciousness keeps now supposing then we we work with the argument that we've made an awful mistake in bringing out civilization and we're not going to survive now there are various things that can be said about this just as I made the joke that uh All Stars used to be planets one could say well is it such a good thing to survive you know T.S eliots Wasteland where it says this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper but some people would rather end with a bang in November some people are stingy and they like to burn up their fire very gradually conserving the fuel and just keep enough Heat going so that they get a long time other people prefer a kind of a potlatch situation where they have a huge whiz-bang fire that goes out in a hurry oh who is right do you want to be a tortoise you know the tortoise that lives for hundreds of years but drags itself around all the time very slow slowly slow solid or would you rather be um some Little Hummingbird yeah yeah hummingbird that's the thing see the dances and lives at a terrific pace see well you can't say one is right and the other's wrong and so there may be nothing wrong with the idea of a world a civilization a culture that lives at a terrific increasing pace of change and then explodes that may be perfectly okay my point is that if we could reconcile ourselves to the notion that that is perfectly okay then we would be less inclined to push that button it's the anxiety if you cannot stand anxiety and if you cannot um simply be content for issues to be undecided you are liable to push the button because you say let's get it over with people who have trouble with the law and are manipulating the courts in one way or another always learn to delay everything put it off introduce legal red tape manage to like Ralph Ginsburg who's been in trouble because of the Eros magazine he's got a very smart attorney who's simply the although the case has gone to the Supreme Court he's simply mumbling away and putting up all sorts of things so that he keeps Ralph out of jail and that's life life is simply a way of postponing death and that's that's what we have to do so then uh let's say well civilization wasn't really a mistake it was just as natural as anything else uh a a being that exists under conditions of Illusion that imagines that it's controlling its own destiny that thinks it's capable of improving itself and by virtue of this illusion destroys itself rapidly in an interesting way see let's suppose that's what we are but you still come back to the point that uh you are spending an enormous amount of energy in doing things that can't be done that is to say tugging at the bootstraps and if you find this frustrating if you really don't like it you don't have to do it you can stop and the Paradox is that when you stop you become happier and more energetic people always wondered about the Calvinists because Calvinists believed that from the beginning of time God had four ordained who was to be saved and who was to be done foreign predestination therefore The Logical assumption would be that people who believed in predestination would be uh laissez-faire they're just certain weights there's nothing we can do about it but Calvinists were quite other than that they were very energetic people too energetic very uh very vigorously moral they gave us the Protestant ethic but they believed in predestination because you see they simply had all the psychic energy which Catholics were getting were dissipating upon wondering whether they were saved or not see and being in a state of fear and trembling about have I made the right decision did I act rightly and so on [Applause] so they didn't have as much energy as the Calvinists [Applause] so then in this day and age we say in the line of thought of Psychiatry or of most schools of psychotherapy it's important for you to accept yourself rather than to be in conflict get with yourself but everybody says but because nobody does take that too far there's always a little bit of reservation on the end of it it's like I've never heard a preacher to this day give a sermon on the passage in The Sermon on the Mount which begins be not anxious for tomorrow they do occasionally refer to it and say well that's all very well for Jesus but the the actual putting into practice of this nobody will agree with they say it's not practical to uh not give a damn about how you're going to provide for the next day's meals and all that sort of thing but it is practical it's much more practical than what we're doing if you mean by practical that it has survival value only I want to point out that this is a kind of a two-step way see the first step is not being anxious for tomorrow not dreaming for one moment that you can change anything or improve anything which of you by being anxious can add one qubit to his stature you see but this just like the belief in predestination has an unexpected consequence namely the making of the energy available so that in fact you can take care of the morrow but for the simple reason that you're no longer worrying about it and thus it comes about the people who do not live before tomorrow have some reason to make plans but those who live for the morrow have no reason to make plans for anything because they never catch up with tomorrow because they don't live in the present they live for a future which never arrives and that is very stupid but you see all this is said in quite another Spirit than the spirit of sermonizing I'm not talking at all about something you should do all I'm doing is explaining the situation and you can do anything you like about it actually you know you cannot lift yourself up by your own bootstraps however hard you try and I'm merely pointing out that it can't be done I'm not saying that you shouldn't try because it may be your lifestyle to be constantly attempting to do things that can't be done I do this in a way because all poets do it the poet is always trying to describe what cannot be said and he gets close you know he often really gives the illusion that he's made it and that's a great thing to be able to say what can't be said I I'm trying to say to express the mystical experience and it just can't be done and therefore everything I'm saying to you is a very elaborate deception I'm weaving all kinds of intricate nonsense patterns which sound as if they were about to make sense [Music] and they don't really don't you see we could take that it's just life [Music] once I was talking with Fritz pearls at The esselen Institute and uh he said the trouble with you is your old words foreign why don't you practice what you preach so I said I don't preach and furthermore don't put words down because the patterns that make people make with words are just like the patterns of ferns or of the marks on seashells they are a dance and they're just as much a legitimate form of life as flowers he said you're impossible [Music] [Laughter] you see that's very important and that is why um in certain forms of methods of meditation and religious rituals we use words in a way that is not ordinarily in accord with the use of words words are normally used to convey information but in religious rituals words are not used to convey information words are used musically for the sake of sound and this is a method of liberating oneself from enthronement with words when you say any ordinary word just take a word like body see and you say it once and it seems to be quite sensible but say it four or five times body body body body body body body and you think what a funny noise isn't that curious or apple dumpling Apple Dumpling no it's kind of a nice sound [Laughter] and uh so in in one of the the great methods of meditation which is called Mantra yoga the use of sound for liberating consciousness is precisely that you take all sorts of nonsense and chanted and you concentrate on these sounds quite apart from anything that they may mean see this is why the Catholic church has made a ghastly mistake in having Mass celebrated in the vernacular now everybody knows what it means and it really wasn't so hot after all today whereas while it was in a tongue that was completely incomprehensible he had this sense of mystery to it and uh furthermore if you knew how to use it as a sadhana a method of meditation uh you could do very well by all monks were trained when they recited the Divine Office they would explain to a novice don't think about the meaning of the words just say the words with your mouth and keep your Consciousness on the presence of God they used it that way see so it's a very good thing then to use words in this way to overcome slavery to words I've just written a book of um nonsense ditties which are to be used in this way to get the to get the rhythm going which is an incantation which is uh a way of getting Beyond The Bondage of thought because you see you cannot think without words you can use numbers and a few things like that but if you preoccupy your Consciousness with meaningless words that very simply stops you from thinking and then you dig the sound do you know what it is to dig the sound of anything anybody who's had a psychedelic experience knows exactly what this means that you you I can only call it you go down into sound and you listen to that vibration and you go into it and into it and into it and you suddenly realize that that vibration that you're listening to or singing is what there is that's the that's the energy of the cosmos that's what's going on and everything that's going on is a kind of a of a um pulsation of energy which in Buddhism is called suchness or thatness and that's what we're all doing only uh we we look around and you know here we all are we're people we've got faces on and uh we we talk and we're supposed to be making sense but actually uh we're just going down very complicated ways you see and and playing this this life game okay and uh the thing is that as if we don't get with it it passes Us by that's all right you can miss the bus it's your privilege you see but um it really is a great deal to go with the dance and know that that's what you're doing instead of agonizing about the whole thing this morning I'm going to talk to you about a particularly virulent and dangerous form of divine Madness which is called Falling in Love which is from a practical point of view one of the most insane things you can do all that can happen to you because in the eyes of a given woman or a given man an opposite who though to the eyes of everybody else are perfectly plain and ordinary person can appear to be a god or goddess incarnate to be such a an enchantment that one can say in the words of an old song which probably dates me every little breeze seems to whisper Louise and this is an extraordinary disruptive experience a subversive experience in the conduct of human affairs because you'll never know when it will strike or for what reason it's something like Contracting very chronic disease once you get into it and we try to resolve it sometimes by making it the basis for a marriage which is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do and this is because in western civilization we have a tradition of the family which is very curious and which would seem to be the most ridiculous composition of disparate ideas imaginable when we go back to the origins of Western civilization in the Hebrew and Christian traditions we find that the idea of marriage and the experience of falling in love are really rather separate things because in those earlier times in agrarian cultures and nobody ever chose their marriage partner there are certain exceptions to this that in ancient Greece you occasionally find a woman who is called hypothenos which has been mistranslated virgin the correct meaning of parthenos is a woman who chooses her own husband and there were very few of them and in that passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah where it says Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name Shall be Called Emmanuel that is in Greek parthenos a parthenos shall conceive and it therefore has nothing strictly to do with the Virgin although a woman who chooses her own husband might conceivably be a virgin but by and large a marriage was an alliance of families and it was contracted not simply for the purpose of raising children yes but also to create a social unit smaller than a village a village therefore being a cluster of families and these families were rather large so families Allied the ulsters the grandpa and grandma who had an enormous voice in who their children were going to marry used to as you know I suppose this is no news to any of you used to Dicker and use go-betweens and they considered not only whether this girl was suitable for their son and vice versa but also what kind of a diary she would bring whether it would be advantageous to the two families to form such an alliance and of course these things almost up to quite recent times were always important in the marital Affairs of royal families but as is notorious all royal families and kings and queens kept concubines and uh had outside Arrangements uh when and if they should happen to fall in love and even if they didn't they had Mistresses simply to prevent monogamy from becoming monotony so see and that is why to this day marriage is a civil and or religious ceremony the basis of which is a contract a legal contract which one signs on the dotted line and therefore there are all kinds of laws as laws relate to contracts that this contract is very difficult to get out of the rationale for that being quite obvious that society believes that it requires a secure environment for children but also just the general stability of things because when people break up a marriage it's sort of unnerving for everyone you see a couple and you think for a long time that they're the happiest and best adjusted couple you ever met the next thing you know is that they've split up and you begin to think now what goes on here are all my friends crazy because you see people breaking up all around because you call it breaking up that's a put down phrase to break up especially it sounds like smashing something as if something precious had been smashed whereas it may be something quite different altogether depending on how you evaluate it but now into this kind of feudal conception of marriage there came in very largely I think as a result of the poetic movement that was centered in southern France in Provence in the Middle Ages what is called The Cult of courtly love this is something about which Scholars dispute according to one Theory the nightly or courtly lover who was also a poet would select a lady to be his heart's desire preferably a married lady and he would yearn for her and sing songs under her window and send messages to her and little tokens of his devotion but according to this particular theory he must never go to bed with her Not only would that be adultery but it would spoil the state of being in love that it should always be an unfulfilled State and an unhappy state this is the theory of Dennis De guzema in his book love in the western world or passion in society it has two titles and the other theory is probably more realistic that um this was first of all the the the great ladies of uh the noble families we're awfully bored because their husbands were always out hunting and making war and wenching and so on and therefore they had to have lovers too and so they did indeed have adulterous Affairs on the side and a great deal of poetry Rose out about this because you see it's a the my friend jankovada always says that laws about sexual relationships should never be liberalized there should always be strict disapproval of adultery and fornication because if there is not that strict disapproval and if it's not difficult to attain it's less fun and I have worked out uh those of you who've read my book beyond theology I've worked out a whole theory of the Christian repression of sex that the secret intent of this was to make people more interested in sex because if there is complete liberality and promiscuity in every direction it all becomes so easy that it might indeed be in danger of becoming a boar and then people would seek other dissipations of perhaps a lesser healthy kind so then as a result of the gradual Fusion of these two approaches to the relationship of the sexes we have arrived at the idea of the Romantic marriage in which the two Trends are misaligned to say the very least you are supposed therefore to fall in love with someone and of your own choice naturally it has to be that way if you're going to fall in love if that is a choice and then enter in to that relationship with a legal contract in which you get up before a magistrate or a priest and do solemnly curse and swear that you will be faithful to each other until death do you part which leads off into murder has to be perfectly obvious that two young people who are extremely anxious uh to get into each other's Embraces and the only way of doing so under the circumstances is entering into this contract will naturally be ready to promise anything to fulfill this desire and while there are indeed many many married legally married couples who have a very very happy Alliance that goes on all their lives and we don't hear about them because uh good news is never news it's only the unhappy couples who make the newspapers and there are enormous numbers of them but they are mainly I think people who were lucky there is no way of making a marriage work so far as I know because every attempt to make a marriage work is is secretly within the rest of each partner builds up hostility you can I know all this I'm speaking from a certain amount of bitter experience you can work very hard to keep a marriage together and as you do so the you may fail to recognize you see that you are being untrue to your own emotions and you think well I must control my emotions for the sake of children for the sake of society for the sake of everything like that and so you work and work and one of the ways of working is to try to convince yourself that you're in love and you go through the pretenses of love you hypnotize yourself with loving language towards your partner you uh go out of your way you make little lists to remember the tensions you must pay you keep a diary in which you remember your wedding anniversary because you were very liable to forget it and all these things and you really work it now the more you work it the more you're building up promises and expectations for something that you are probably not going to come through with at the level of deep feeling and everyone is well aware of that you know it in the back of your mind and so you build yourself increasingly into a wall-to-wall trap and so uh the mutual hostility grows worse and worse and worse so that one psychologist was recently known to ask a patient with whom are you in love against the most awkward course form of falling in love is uh between people who are already married to someone else and because you see this is a cataclysmic and disruptive experience in our present social order and uh we know of I mean Victorian novels a lot of people are still living out Victorian novels uh but in Victorian novels the great thing is uh where a couple madly in love with each other say to each other well it's best for us that we don't see each other anymore this is becoming bigger than either of us and so uh this uh this fantastically mad experience is denied swept under the rug and strangled what should one do well as I've often said I'm not a preacher and therefore I don't know what you should do but I would like to make some Reflections on this particular form of Madness and to raise again a very disturbing question and this disturbing question is as follows is it only when you are in love with another person that you see them as they really are and in the ordinary way when you're not in love with people you see only a fragmented version of that being because when you're in love with someone you do indeed see them as a Divine being and suppose that's what they are truly and your eyes are have by your beloved been opened in which case your beloved is serving to you as a kind of Guru an initiator and that is why there is a form of sexual yoga based on the idea that man and woman are to each other as Mutual Guru and student and through a tremendous outpouring of psychic energy in total devotion and worship to this other person who is respectively the goddess or The God You Realize by total fusion and contact with the other organism uh you go down to the Divine Center in them and it bounces back and you discover your own or you could put it in this way which is another aspect of it that by Falling in Love and uh regarding falling in love not just as a sort of um sexual infatuation because it's always more than that isn't it uh I mean you you can have a great sexual enjoyment with a pleasant friend you know but you may do so simply because he or she appeals to your aesthetic senses but when you fall in love it's a much more serious involvement you just cannot forget this person you feel miserable we're not in their presence you're always yearning let's see more of each other let's get together let's uh we're completely entangled then you see you've actually a kind of what I will call spiritual element has been introduced and the Hindus were sensible enough to realize that this was a means of Awakening enlightenment and therefore it was surrounded with a sort of religious ritual meditative art with a form of sexual yoga that is designed to allow the feeling of mutual love to the extent of Grand Passion to have an extremely fitting fulfillment and expression Falling in Love is a thing that strikes like lightning and is therefore extremely analogous to the mystical vision we don't know how really people attain the mystical vision there is not as yet a very clear rationale as to how it happens because we do know that it is opened to many people who never did anything to look for it many people especially in adolescents have had the mystical Vision all of a sudden without the slightest warning and with no previous interest in that kind of thing on the other hand many people who have practiced yoga or Zen disciplines or what you will for years and years and years have never seen it and uh in both classes there are of course exceptions there are those who have never had the spontaneous experience and there are those who through yoga or Zen have attained this insight but as yet we are not clear as to why it comes about and if there is any method of attaining it the best one is probably to give up the whole idea of getting it [Applause] but you see it is completely unpredictable and so it is in that way like Falling in Love capricious and therefore crazy but if you should be so fortunate as to encounter either of these experiences it seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it and what we therefore have to admit in our society so that we can contain this kind of Madness we must be far more realistic about the marriage arrangement so that it can contain the possibility of Falling in Love when you base marriage you see unfalling in love and you go into a pseudo-love affair which is simply hot pants and set up a rigid family in which you expect of the other person that they will uh always be in love with you and then in that context you go and fall in love then you're falling in love is of necessity disruptive of the marriage and of the family but you see it could only disrupt it because the love relationship between the two partners was false was pretended but if uh marriage were based more on the old idea of the the reasonable contract between two people to bring up children who are maybe expected at the best to be good friends and to allow each other to be persons that is to say in the ordinary sense of the word person to have their own freedom then if love strikes uh it is tolerated within this arrangement provided you're not going to be so unreasonable as to go on to say well I've since I've fallen in love with somebody else I must marry them they're ridiculous foreign you see in this way we can think about and structure the necessary stable social institution of family of some kind without it being constantly threatened of foundering on the rocks of love now you see this this then means that when when people marry if they take any vows at all to each other instead of saying that they will always be true to each other in the sense of meaning I Will Always Love You it means I will be true to you in the sense of I will always be truthful to you I will not pretend that my feelings towards you are other than what they are because I marry you because I think that you are a reasonable person to live with and therefore I want you to be you I don't want you to be someone else I want you to be a rubber stamp of me how boring that would be so it is really an arrangement not of us the we always say jockey did you get the ball and chain on him but an arrangement in which people set each other free and make an alliance to cooperate with each other in certain ways now if it should so occur that they are of immense sexual attraction to each other so much the better but this should not be a primary factor in entering into marriage admittedly you must be to a certain extent attractive to each other otherwise uh there will be no progeny but um but this is a this seems to me to be a sensible and reasonable View and uh just because it is sensible and reasonable it can accommodate what is not sensible and reasonable which is falling in love we should regard then a marriage is if especially if it should possibly be called holy matrimony as a mutual setting free of two people to live together in Freedom and therefore in responsibility because the present situation although it's pretending to be responsible is in fact extremely irresponsible because it is dishonesty with respect to the way you feel towards another person well now really when we go back then to Falling in Love and say it's crazy falling you see we don't say rising into love there is in it the idea of the Fall and uh it is goes back as a matter of fact to extremely fundamental things that there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life you see for all life is an act of faith and an act of Gamble the moment you take a step you do so on an act of Faith because you don't really know that the flaw is not going to give under your feet the moment you take a journey what an Act of Faith the moment you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship what an Act of Faith you've given yourself up but this is the most powerful thing that can be done surrender see and love is an act of surrender to another person total abandonment I give myself to you take me do anything you like with me see so that's quite mad because you see it's letting things get out of control all sensible people keep things in control watch it watch it watch it security vigilance watch it please watch it Gods watch it who's going to watch the Gods so actually therefore the the course of wisdom what is really sensible is to let go is to commit oneself to give oneself up and that's quite mad so we come to the strange conclusion that in Madness lies sanity our podcast today was produced in tandem with the ramdas be here Now podcast Network our sponsor is Eaton hemp our theme music today was by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records and it's from the Zakir Hussein and the Rhythm experience album thank you for joining us and all of the materials in today's podcasts are from the philosophy and Society album which is available at Alan watts.org these are two of the talks from the center of that collection but there are other remarkable ones and we invite you to join us for further information and many selections at the Alan wattsorg website [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 238,151

Keywords: alan watts, alan watts podcast, be here now network, mark watts, being in the way podcast, karma podcast, alan watts talk, alan watts lecture, be here now, daoism, daoist way, being in the way, ram dass podcast network

Id: uI7UNr-ij4o

Length: 72min 32sec (4352 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022