Ways of Liberation - Alan Watts

when I was a small boy I used to haunt that section of London around the British Museum and one day I came across a shop which had a notice over the window which said philosophical instruments even as a boy I knew something about philosophy but I couldn't imagine what philosophical instruments could be so I went up to the window and there displayed were chronometers slide rules scales and all kinds of what we would now call scientific instruments because science used to be called natural philosophy because as Aristotle says the beginning of philosophy is Wonder philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect that is to say his faculty for thinking and thinking of course is a word used in extremely many ways and is a very vague word for most people but I use the word thinking now and Hereafter you must understand this in a very precise Way by thinking as distinct from feeling or remoting or sensing I mean the manipulation of symbols whether they be words whether they be numbers or whether they be other such signs as say triangles squares circles astrological signs or whatever these are are symbols sometimes a symbol is a little bit more concrete and less abstract than that as when you get a mythological symbol like a dragon but all these things are symbols and the manipulation of symbols to represent events going on in the real world is what I call thinking so philosophy in the western sense means generally an exercise of the intellect and the manipulation of symbols is very largely until we come to poetry and music an exercise of the intellect but what philosophy has become today in the academic world is something extremely restricted by and large in the academic world of both the United States and England Germany France to some extent philosophy is falling into two other disciplines mathematical Logic on the one hand and Linguistics on the other and uh the Departments of philosophy throughout the academic world have bent over backwards to be as scientific as possible as William Earl who was professor of philosophy at Northwestern University said in an essay called notes on the death of a culture that an academic philosopher today must above all things avoid being edifying he must never stoop to lying awake at nights considering problems of the nature of the universe and the destiny of man because these have largely been dismissed as metaphysical or meaningless questions so uh Unworthy of a scientific philosopher who arrives at his office at 9:00 in the morning dressed in a business suit carrying a briefcase and does philosophy until 5 in the afternoon at which point he goes home to cocktails and dinner and dismisses the whole matter from his head and William Earl adds he would wear a white coat to work if he could get away with it uh this is of course a little exaggerated but this by and large is what departmental academic philosophy has become and Oriental philosophy is simply not philosophy in that sense these things Hinduism Buddhism and so on are sometimes also called religions and I question the application of that word to them because again I like to use the word religion rather strictly I'm not going to be so bold as to venture a definition of religion which is supposed to be true for all time all I can do is to tell you how I use the word religion and I want to use it in an exact sense from its Latin root uh which really means a bond or rule of life and therefore the most correct use of the word religion is when we say of a man or woman that he or she has gone into religion that is to say has joined a religious or monastic order and is living under a rule of life living a life of obedience for religion if Christianity is a religion if Judaism is a religion if Islam is a religion they are based on the idea of man's obedient response to a divine revelation and thus religion as we understand it in these three forms of religion consist really of three things we will call them the three C's the Creed the code and the cult the Creed is the divinely revealed map of the universe the nature of things the revelation of the existence of God of Allah Yahweh or as we say God and his existence and his will and his design of the universe the Creed to this we add the second C the code the divinely revealed law or Exemplar which man is supposed to follow in the case of Christianity there's a certain variation in this because the principal revelation of the code aspect of things in Christianity as well as the cult is not so much a law as a person God is said in Christianity to be supremely revealed in the historic Jesus of Nazareth and so the code here becomes really the following of Jesus of Nazareth not so much in obedience to a law as through the power of divine grace then finally the cult this is the divinely revealed method or way of worship so that man relates himself to God by prayers by rights and by sacraments which in these particular religions are not supposed to be so much man's way of worshiping God as God's way of loving himself in which man is involved so in the Christian religion say in the mass would say that we worship god with God's Own worship following the saying of Meister eart that great German Mystic the love with which I love God is the same love where with God loves me so too in the when monks in a monastery recite the Divine Office using the Psalms as the basis of it the Psalms are supposed to be the songs of the Holy Spirit and so in using the Psalms the idea is that you worship god with God's own words and thereby become a sort of flute through which the Divine breath plays now now neither Hinduism Buddhism nor Daoism can possibly be called religions in this sense because all three of them significantly lack the virtue of obedience they do not conceive the godhead as related to mankind or to the universe in a monarchical sense for you see there are various models of the universe which men have used from time to time and the model which lies behind the judeo Christian tradition If there really is such a thing is a political model it is based on it is a kind of using the metaphor of the relation of an ancient NE Eastern Monarch to his subjects and he imposes his authority and his will upon his subjects from above by power whether it be physical power or spiritual power and so it is thus that in the say the Anglican Church when the priest at morning prayer addresses the throne of grace he says Almighty and everlasting God King of Kings Lord of lords the only ruler of princes who does from thy Throne behold all the Dwellers upon Earth Earth most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to Behold our Sovereign Majesty Elizabeth the queen and all the royal family now what are these words this is the language of Court flattery and the title King of Kings as a title of God was borrowed from the Persian Emperors the Cyrus of Persia the Kiros hence kir on Lord have mercy upon us is a kind of image drawn from things Earthly and applied to things Heavenly God as the Monarch and therefore between the Monarch and the subject there is a certain essential difference of kind what we might call an ontological difference so that God is God and all those creatures whether Angels or men or other kinds of existence which God has created are not God there is this vast metaphysical Gulf lying between the two domains that gives us as citizens of the United States some problems because as a citizen of the United States you have beli believed and do believe that a republic is the best form of government how can this be maintained if the government of the universe is a monarchy but surely in that case a monarchy will be the best form of government and many of the conflicts in our society arise from the fact that although we are running a republic many of the members of this Republic believe or believe that they ought to believe that the universe is a monarchy and therefore they are above all insistent upon obedience to Law and Order if there should be democracy in the kingdom of God that would seem to them the most subversive idea ever conceived now I'm exaggerating the standpoint a little bit just for effect because there are some subtle modifications which one can introduce theologically but I won't go into them at the moment now now there are at least two other models of the universe which have been highly influential in human history one is dramatic where God is not the skillful maker of the world standing above it as its artificer and King but where God is the actor of the world as an actor of a stage play the actor who is playing all the parts at once and this is essentially the Hindu model of the universe everybody is God in a mask and of course as you know the our own word person is from the Latin per Sona that through which comes sound and this word was used for The Masks worn by actors in The Greek Roman Theater which being an open air theater required a projection of the voice so the actors wore masks with megaphonic mouths and so the word person has however in the course of time come to mean the real you there was a very serious mistake made in translation from Greek to Latin when uh one began to talk about the three persons of the Holy Trinity the three masks of God wasn't quite the right idea because the Greek word was ostasis not a word prosopon which would have meant properly translated person ostasis is a very difficult word to translate you could say that ice water and steam were three ostasis of the same thing and that would be a little better analogy not too good but in Hindu thought every individual as a person is a mask but fundamentally a mask of the godhead a mask of a godhead who although the actor behind all parts the player of all games is indefinable for the same reason that you can't bite your own teeth for the same reason that you can't look straight into your own eyes you could never get at it because it's the middle of everything the circle whose Center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere then a third model of the universe which is characteristically Chinese is that the world is an organism and a world which is an organism has no boss even no actor because you see in any organism there isn't really a boss or top organ we are accustomed of course in our culture to think of our heads as ruling the rest of the body but there could well be an argument about this I'm going to put up a case that the stomach is Chief because the stomach uh the sort of elimary tract with a digesting process in it is surely anterior to brains uh there may be some sort of rudimentary nervous system attached to a stomach organization but it's the the the more primitive you get the more you get a little creature that eats see it's a sort of tube and Ino things at one end and out the other and that because that wears the tube out the tube finds means of reproducing itself to make more tubes so that this process of in andout can be kept up but in the course of Evolution at one end of the tube is developed a gangon which eventually develops eyes and ears and has a brain in it the better to scr around for food and so the stomach point of view is that the brain is the servant of the stomach to help it scrouge around for food but the other argument is this true the brain is a later development than the alementary tract but the elementary tract is to the brain as John the Baptist to Jesus Christ the Forerunner of the big event and the reason for all this cring around and uh stomach and stuff is eventually to evolve a brain and man shall eventually live primarily for the concerns of the brain that is for Art and Science and all forms of culture and the stomach shall be servant our cynical people like dialectical materialists say that's a lot of hogwash it's really all history is a matter of economics and that's a matter of the stomach it's a big argument and you can't decide it because you can't at this stage have a stomach without a brain or a brain without a stomach they go together like a back and a front so the principle of organism is rather like this an organism is a system of a differentiated system but it has no parts that is to say the heart is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor is part of an automobile engine because although surgeons are trying to treat the body as a machine with replaceable Parts but the difficulty is that these are not Parts in the sense that they are screwed in in other words when the fetus uh arises in the womb uh there are not a lot of mechanics in there who are lugging in hearts and stomachs and things and fitting them together and screwing them uh to each other an organism develops like a crystal in solution or a photographic plate in chemicals it develops all over at once and there isn't a boss in it because all of them act together in a strange way it's a kind of orderly Anarchy and this is the Chinese view of the world fundamentally this principle of organic growth they call Dao that's pronounced Dao if it had an apostrophy after it it would be pronounced Tao but Dao is more or less the right pronunciation for that word this Chinese word um is uh usually translated the course of nature or the way the way it does it the process of things and that again you see is really very different from the Western idea of God the ruler of the da laer says the great da flows everywhere both to the left and to the right it loves and nourishes all things but does not Lord it over them and when merits are accomplished it lays no claim to them and so the Chinese expression for nature becomes a word which we will translate self so or what happens of itself like when you have hiccups you don't plan to have hiccups it just happens when your heart beats you don't plan it it happens of itself when you breathe you can pretend that you are breathing but most of the time you're not thinking about it and your lungs breathe of themselves so the whole idea of nature is something happening of itself without a governor is the organic theory of the world so you see we have these two others that we're going to consider in this course on Oriental philosophy the dramatic Theory and the organic Theory and therefore I feel that ways of life which use these models are so unlike Christianity Judaism or Islam that we cannot really use the word religion of these things now what is there in Western culture that resembles the concerns of Buddhism and Hinduism and Daoism because the trouble is from the outside they look alike uh in other words you go into a Hindu temple or especially a Japanese Buddhist temple and you'll be pretty convinced you're in church in sort of a Catholic Church at that because the incense chants bowings gongs candles rosaries and all the things that one Associates with a theistic monarchical religion and yet that isn't what's going on there isn't the factor of obedience even though the image of Buddha may be sitting on a throne covered with a canopy and Royal honors being done there's still something different well I suppose that at a long shot probably the nearest thing to these ways of life in the west is perhaps Psychotherapy in some form not all forms of psychotherapy because the objective of psychotherapy is as you might say to change where your heads at is to change your State of Consciousness if you in other words you are horribly depressed if you're terrified if you're under hallucinations you see a head shrinker and he tries to change your State of Consciousness and so fundamentally these disciplines these Oriental ways are concerned basically with changing your state of Consciousness only here we part company Psychotherapy is largely focused on the problems of the individual as such the problems peculiar to this individual or that individual these Asian ways of life are focused on certain problems peculiar to every individual on the understanding that the average human being and the more civilized he the more this is true that the average human being is hallucina that he has a delusive sense of his own existence and it is thus that the very word Buddha in Buddhism is from a root in Sanskrit Bud which means to awake to awaken to awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change of Consciousness with regard to one's own existence it is to cease being under the impression that you are just poor little me to find out who you really are or what you really are behind the mask but we saw didn't we you can never get to see what the self is basically it's always and forever Elusive and so if I ask you who are you really and you say well I'm I'm I'm John Doe oh you think so John Doe tell me um how do you happen to have blue eyes well says I don't know I I I didn't make my eyes oh you didn't who else well I I have no idea how it's done you have to have an idea how it's done to be able to do it after after all you can open and close your hand perfectly easily and you say I know how to open my hand I know how to close my hand because I can do it but how do you do it I don't know I'm not a physiologist well the physiologist says he knows how he does it but he can't do it any better than you can so you're opening and closing your hand aren't you you don't know how you do it maybe you're bluing your eyes too you don't know how you do it do it because when you say I don't know how I do it all you are saying is I do know how to do it but I can't put it into words I cannot in other words translate the activity called opening and closing my hand into an exact system of symbols into thinking that's all and actually to translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols would take forever because trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsier process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a pint beer mug you can only take it one mug at a time and so when thinking about things you can only think one thought at a time one after another in series thinking is a linear process like writing one thought after another as we say you can only think of one thing at a time but that's too slow for understanding anything at all much too slow and our sensory input is much more than any kind of one thing at a time and we respond with a certain aspect of our minds to the total sensory input that's coming in only we are not consciously aware of it but nevertheless you're doing it but what kind of you is this certainly isn't John Doe isn't that little ego freak so there's something a lot more to you than you think there is and that's why the Hindu would say that the real you is the self capital S the self of the universe because at that level of one's existence one is not really separate from everything else that's going on so you see we have something here which I will call not philosophy except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity I prefer to call these disciplines ways of Liberation ways of Liberation from Maya and the following of them does not depend on believing in anything in obeying anything or on doing any specific rituals although rituals are included for certain purposes it is a purely experimental approach to life it is something like a person who say has defective eyesight and is seeing spots and all sorts of Illusions going to an opthalmologist to correct his vision Buddhism is therefore basically a correction of Psy PSC Vision to be disenthralled by the game of Maya not incidentally to regard the Maya as something evil but as a good thing of which one can have too much and therefore get spiritual and psychic indigestion

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Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2024