Alan Watts - Why the Urge to Improve Yourself?

the title of these talks that I'm giving here is mind over mind and I'm going into all various problems which have to do with the control of the mind and so I might introduce what I'm going to say by saying it from different points of view for example if you're interested in communications it will be the problem of feedback or if I may put it in theological terms how does man follow the will of God if the will of man is perverse the theologians say you cannot do this without having divine grace or the power to follow the will of God how then do you get grace why is grace given to some and not to others if I cannot follow the will of God by my own effort because my will is selfish how will my will which is selfish be transformed into an unselfish will if I cannot do it because I am already the selfish will then grace must do it if grace has not already done it why not because I didn't accept it but by definition I had no power to accept it because my will was selfish must I then become a Calvinist and say that only those people who are predestined to receive grace will be able to live the good life then we come back to the inadmissible position that people who live evil lives and do not get grace because they are not predestined to it out of the infinite wisdom of the Godhead then God himself must be held responsible for their evil deeds and so that is a nice little tangle if I put this in the language of Oriental philosophy and religion it would be something like this the Buddha said that wisdom must come only from the abandonment of selfish craving or desire one who abandons that desire attains Nirvana which is supreme peace liberation Nirvana means in Sanskrit blow out that is exhale the breath the opposite desire is to breathe in now if you breathe in and hold it you lose your breath but if you breathe out it comes back to you so the principle here is if you want life don't cling to it let go but the problem is if I desire not to desire is that not already desired how can I desire not to desire how can I surrender myself when my self is precisely an urge to hold on to cling to cling to life to continue to survive I can see rationally that by clinging to myself I may strangle myself I may be like a person who has a bad habit as a result of which he is committing suicide and he knows that but can't give it up because the means of death are so sweet so it all comes down to this basic question that human beings have for a long long time being concerned about transforming their minds is that any way in which one's mind can be transformed or is it simply a process which is nothing more than a vicious circle I could ask why have you come here this afternoon what were you looking for would it be too presumptuous of me to say that you were looking for help that you hoped you would hear somebody who had something to say that would be of help and relevance to you as members of a world which is running into the most intense difficulty a world beset by a complex of problems any one of which would be bad enough but when you add together all the great political social and ecological problems with which we are phase they are appalling and one naturally says the reason why we are in such a mess is not simply that we have wrong systems for doing things whether they be technological political or religious but we have the wrong people the systems may be all right but they are in the wrong hands because we are all in various ways self-seeking lacking in wisdom lacking in Courage afraid of death afraid of pain unwilling really to cooperate with others unwilling to be open to others and we all think that's too bad it's me that's wrong and if only I could be the right person is this man going to tell me something that will help me to change myself so that I will be a more creative and cooperative member of the human race I would like to improve so in so many people's minds and from so many different angles there is this urgent feeling that I must improve me and this is critically important because it's obvious that the least it's superficially obvious that the way things are we are going to hell fast now in this question can I improve me there is the obvious difficulty that if I am in need of improvement the person who's going to do the improving is the one who needs to be improved and they are immediately we have a vicious circle all right do you want grace well ask God maybe he'll give it you and the theologian will tell you yes God gives his grace freely he gives it to all because he loves all it's here like the air all you have to do is receive it or a more orthodox a Catholic Christian would say all you have to do is to be baptized to take the holy sacrament of the altar the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ and there is the grace right there and it's given by these simple physical means so that it's a very easily and readily available well a lot of people got baptized and it doesn't always take people fall from grace why do them you see we're just talking about the same old problem but we've put it a step up but it's the same problem how can I improve myself was the first problem the second problem is how can I accept grace they're both the same problem because you got to make a move which will put yourself out of your own control into the control are they better if you don't believe in the Christian kind of a God you couldn't believe in the Hindu kind of a God who is your inner self you see you've got a lower self which you can call your ego that's that little scoundrel is fellow that's always out for me but behind the ego there is the Atman the inner self the inward light as Quakers would call it the real self the spirit which is substantially identical with God so you've got to I meditate in such a way that you identify with your higher self how do you do that well you start by watching all your thoughts very carefully watching your feelings watching your emotions so that you begin to build up a sense of separation between the watcher and what is watched so that you are as it were no longer carried away by your own stream of consciousness you remain the witness impassively impartial ii suspending judgment and watching it all go on that seems to be something like progress at least you're taking an objective view of what is going on you are beginning to be in a position to control it but just wait a minute who is this self behind the self the watching self can you watch that one it's interesting if you do because you'll find out of course that this is just as the problem of grace is nothing more than a transposition of the first problem how am I to be unselfish by my own power it becomes how am I to get grace by my own power so in the same way we find that the watching self or the observing self behind all our thoughts and feelings is itself a thought that is to say when the police enter a house in which there are thieves the thieves go up from the ground floor of the first floor when the police arrive on the first floor the thieves have gone up to the second and so to the third and finally out to the roof and so when the ego is about to be unmasked it immediately identifies with the higher self it goes up a level because the religious game is simply a refined and highbrow version of the ordinary game how can I out with me how can I one-up me so if I find for example that in the quest for pleasure the ordinary pleasures of the world food sex power possessions all this becomes a drag and I think no it isn't there so I go in for the arts literature poetry music and I absorb myself in there in those pleasures and after a while they aren't the answer so I go to psychoanalysis you see and then I found out that's not the answer I go to religion I'm still seeking what I was seeking when I wanted candy bars I'm going to get that goodie only I see now that of course not going to be a material goodie all material goodies fall apart but maybe there's a spiritual goodie that's not going to fall apart but in that quest the quest is not different from the quest for the candy bar same old story only you've refined the candy bar made it abstract and holy and blessed and so on so it is with the higher self the higher self seer old ego and you sure hope it is eternal indestructible and all-wise but then the great problem is how to get that higher self working how does it make any difference to what you do and what you think I know all kinds of people who've got this higher self going practicing their yoga but they're just like ordinary people sometimes a little worse and they can fool themselves they can say for example well my point of view in religion is very liberal I believe that all religions have divine revelation in them but I don't understand the way you people fight about it you fight and say that we Jehovah's Witnesses have the real religion others say well we Roman Catholics have it and the Muslims say no it is in the Koran and this is the right way and somebody else gets up and he may be a rather highbrow Catholic and say well God has given the spirit through all the traditions but ours is the most refined and mature and then somebody comes along as well as I said they're all equally revelations of the divine and in seeing this of course I'm much more tolerant than you are you see how that game is going to work the I could take this position supposing you regard me as some sort of a guru and you know how gurus hate each other they're always putting each other down and I could say well I don't put other gurus down see that outwits or he were always doing that we're always finding a way to be one-up and by the most incredibly subtle means so you see them you see then you say I realize I'm always doing that tell me how do I not do that let's say why do you want to know well I'd be better that way yeah but why do you want to be better you see the reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren't so I put it like that we aren't better because we want to be because the road to hell is paved with good intentions because all the do-gooders in the world whether they're doing good for others or doing it for themselves are troublemakers on the basis of kindly let me help you or you'll drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree we white anglo-saxon Protestants British German American have been on a rampage for the past hundred or more years to improve the world we have given the benefits of our culture our religion our technology to everybody except perhaps the Australian Aborigines and we have insisted that they receive the benefits of our culture and even our political styles our democracy you better be democratic or we'll shoot you and having conferred these blessings all over the place we wondered why everybody hates us see because sometimes doing good to others and even doing good to oneself is amazingly destructive because it's full of conceit how do you know what's good for other people how do you know what's good for you if you say you want to improve then you want to know what's good for you but obviously you don't because if you did you would be improved so we don't know beside the problem of geneticists which they face today I went to a meeting of geneticists not so long ago where they gathered in a group of philosophers and theologians and said now look here we need help we now are on the verge of figuring out how to breed any kind of human character we would want to have we can give you Saints philosophers scientists great politicians anything you want just tell us what kind of human beings ought we debris so I said how will those of us who are genetically unregenerate make up our minds what genetically generated people might be because I'm afraid very much that our selection of virtues may not work it may be like for example this new kind of high-yield grain which is made and which is becoming ecologically destructive when we interfere with the processes of nature and breed efficient plants and efficient animals there's always some way in which we have to pay for it and I can well see that eugenic Leap reduced human beings might be dreadful we could have a plague of virtuous people you realize that any animal considered in itself is virtuous it does its thing but in crowds they're awful like a crowd of ants or locusts on the rampage they're all perfectly good animals but it's just too much I could imagine a perfectly pestiferous mass of a million saints so I said to these people not was the only thing you can do just be sure that a vast variety of human beings is maintained don't please breed us down to a few excellent types excellent for what we never know how circumstances are going to change and how our need for different kinds of people changes at one time we may need very individualistic and aggressive people at another time we may need very cooperative team working people at another time we may need people who are full of interest in dexterous manipulation of the external world at another time we may need people who explore into their own psychology and our introspective there is no knowing but the more varieties and the more skills we have obviously the better so you see here again the problem comes out in genetics we do not really know how to interfere with the way the world is the way the world actually is is an enormous ly complex interrelated organism the same problem arises in medicine because the body is a very complex ly interrelated organism and if you look at the body in a superficial way you may see there's something wrong with it ins chickenpox and those spots that it should come all out all over the place well you might say well spots are there cut them off so you killed a bug well then you find you got real problems because you have to introduce some bugs to kill the bug without bringing rabbits into Australia and that starts going all over the place and getting out of hand well then you think well now wait a minute it wasn't the bugs in the blood there are bugs all over the place what was wrong with this person that his blood system suddenly became vulnerable to those particular bugs his resistance wasn't out there for what you should have given him was not an antibiotic but vitamins okay so we're going to build up his resistance but resistance to what I mean you may build up resistance to this and this in this class of bugs but then there's another one that loves that situation he comes right in see we always look at the human being medically in bits and pieces because we have heart specialists lung specialists bone specialists nerve specialists and so on and they each see the human being from their point of view there are a few generalists but they realize the human body is so complicated that no one mind can understand it and furthermore supposing we do succeed in healing all these people of their diseases what do we then do about the population problem I mean we've stopped cholera the black bubonic plague we're getting the better of tuberculosis we may fix cancer and heart disease then what will people die off well then let's go on living when be enormous quantities office then we have to fix this birthing pills for everybody then we find one of the effects the side effects of those pills what are the psychological effects upon men and women of not breeding children in the usual way we don't know and what seems a good thing today or yesterday by DDT turns out tomorrow to have been a disaster what seemed in the moral and spiritual sphere to like great virtues in times past are easily seen today as hideous evils let's take for example the Inquisition in its own day among Catholics the Holy Inquisition was regarded as we today regard the practice of psychiatry you you see you you feel that incurring a person of cancer almost anything is justified the most complex operation is the most weird surgery people suspended for days and days on end on the end of tubes with x-ray penetration burning or people undergoing shock treatment people locked in the colourless monotonous corridors of mental institutions in all good faith they knew that witchcraft and heresy were terrible things awful plagues imperiling people's souls forever a devil so any means were justified to cure people of heresy we don't change we're doing the same thing today but under different names we can look back at those people and see how evil that was but we can't see it in ourselves so therefore beware a virgin loud sir the Chinese philosopher said the highest virtue is not virtue and therefore really is virtue but inferior virtue cannot let go of being virtuous and therefore is not version translated in more of a periphrastic way the highest virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue and therefore really is virtue lower virtue is so self-conscious that it's not virtue in other words when you breathe you don't congratulate yourself on being virtuous but breathing is a great virtue it's living when you come out with beautiful eyes blue or brown or greens the case may be you don't congratulate yourself for having grown one of the most fabulous jewels on earth so it's just eyes and you don't account it a virtue to see to entertain the miracles of color and form you say others but that's real virtue virtue in the sense the old sense of the word of strength as when we talk about the healing virtue of a plant that's real virtue but the other virtues are stuck on there are such there are imitation virtues and they usually create trouble because more diabolical things are done in the name of righteousness and be assured that everybody of whatever nationality or political frame of mind or religion always goes to war with a sense of complete rightness the other side is the devil our opponents whether in China or Russia of Vietnam have the same feeling of righteousness about what they're doing is we have on our side and a plague on both houses because as Confucius said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue which is the form of our own proverb the road to hell is paved with good intentions so in a way the moral or the immoral of these considerations is that if you are really aware of your own inner workings you will realize there's nothing you can do to improve yourself because you don't know what better is in any case and you who will do the improving are the one who needs to be improved and this also goes for society we can change society we can get enormous enthusiasm going out of the idea that there is a revolution the foot and that this revolution is going to set everything to right do you know a revolution that ever said anything to right whether the revolution came from the left wing or from the right wing the best forms of government that have ever existed in the world others which muddled through well they didn't have any very clear set up of control but they muddled along a kind of what I'll call controlled anarchy seems to work out better than anything else when we have a great system and great power to put it into effect there is always more violence more bloodshed more trouble it makes no difference whether it be Chairman Mao Adolf Hitler so what instead therefore if we see that you can't outwit yourself you can't be shall I say self unselfconscious on purpose you can't be design Italy spontaneous and you cannot be genuinely loving by intending to love either you love someone or you don't if you pretend to love a person you deceive them and build up reasons for resentment you say well I ought to be honest that that's the beginning of oh so many lies you can't imagine like when I hear a lot said about love the big love thing on the way everybody's got to love everybody but it sings songs about love do you know what I do I buy a gun and bar my door because I know there's a storm of hypocrisy brewing so let's look at this thing from another point of view which you will at first think highly depressing that's supposing we can't do anything to change ourselves suppose we're stuck with it now that is that the worst thing an American audience can hear there's no way of improving yourself because every kind of culture in this country is dedicated to self-improvement their sake jogging that deplorable practice it's a very nice thing to run and to go dancing across the kills at a fast speed are these joggers right shaking their bones and rattling their brains with running on their heels and because there's a grimness about it it's determinately good for you see why do you go to school hello now wait a minute you may not clap when I'm through the only one reason for going to school and that is that somebody's got something here whether it's a professor or a library that you want to find out that you are incredibly interested in how to write Chinese characters or how to understand botany and you would like to know you're just interested in flowers and you would like to find out everything there is to be known about them that's the point of coming here or you might like to know how to practice yoga the course is now being offered at UCLA on Kundalini Yoga for credit pretty funny when I think back 10 years but the whole point of coming to school is that you're interested in something you don't come to improve yourself but the trouble is that the school's got the wrong idea they gave people honors for learning and the reward for studying French should be the ability to speak French and enjoy reading French and having fun with French people but when you get a degree for it then the degree becomes the point in a game of one-upmanship and of course one-upmanship is the main business of the educational community today you learn all the rules of how to be a good professor it's instructive to go to a professional professors meeting in my field which is philosophy you go to a congress of philosophers and you'll find when they all get together in the bar or in the restaurant and somebody's room the one thing they don't talk about is philosophy it is very bad form indeed to show interest in philosophy and among your colleagues the same is exactly true in clergy gatherings they would don't talk about religion while they both talk about is politics church politics and academic politics because it's bad form to be brilliant on a faculty because it outclasses your colleagues there for faculty people tend to cultivate a studied mediocrity and you've got to watch out for that it means if you get mobs of students coming to your lectures you get pretty black looks from your colleagues and then of course there's a whole world of one-upmanship been research and publication of learning papers how many what's the relative quantity of footnotes to basic text footnotes on footnotes and the various ways of making your bibliography painfully accurate in its endless but you see what it is it's scholarship about scholarship and not scholarship just as learning because learning is good for you is irrelevant to learning the whole idea of improving yourself by learning is irrelevant to the learning process and in the same way doing business is doing business doing business such as manufacturing clothes is a very good thing to do I could conceive that it would be extremely enjoyable something one could be very proud of to make good clothes course you need to sell them because you need to eat but to make clothes to make money raises another question because then your interest is not in making clothes it's in making money and then you're going to cheat on the clothes and then you would you get an awful lot of money and you don't know what to do with it you can't you know you can't eat ten rows of beef in one day can't live in six houses at once can't drive three Rolls Royces at the same time what do you do well you just go make more money you put your money back invested in something else and it'll make more you don't give a damn how it's made so long as they make it you don't care if they follow the rivers put oil fumes throughout the air everywhere kill off all the fish so not so long as you see these figures happening you're not aware of anything else so you see you went out to do a self-improvement thing making money you see is a measure of improvement a measure of your economic Worth wildness at least that's what it's supposed to be it isn't anything of the kind but you went out in other words for the status instead of for the actuality so if in other words you you do an art you're a musician why do you play music the only great reason for playing music is to enjoy if you play music to impress an audience to be read about yourself in the newspaper you're not interested in music so in the same way why do I come and talk to you because I enjoy it I like the sound of my own voice I'm interested in what I'm talking about and I get paid for it and that's smart in this life is to get paid for what you enjoy so here's the situation you see there is no that the the whole idea of self-improvement is a is a will of the wisp and a hoax that's not what it's about let's begin where we are what happens if you know if you know beyond any shadow of doubt that there is nothing you can do to be better well it's kind of a relief isn't it now you say well now what will I do see there's a little fidgety comes up because we're so used to if making things better leave the world a better place than when you found it sort of thing I want to be of service to other people and all these dreadfully AZ ideas and so we think does that little it's still but supposing instead of that seeing that there isn't really anything we could do to improve ourselves or to improve the world if we realize that that is so it gives us a breather in the course of which we may simply watch what is going on watch what happens nobody ever does this you know and therefore it sounds terribly simple it sounds so simple that is almost looks as if it isn't worth doing but ever just watched watch what's happening and watch what you are doing by way of reaction to it just watch it happen and don't be in a hurry to think you know what it is in other words people look at the say oh that's the external world oh how do you know the whole thing from a neurological point of view is a happening in your head that you think there is something outside the skull is a notion in your nervous system the may or may not be but it's a notion in your nervous system you think this is the material world oh that's somebody's philosophical idea or maybe you're you think it's spiritual that too is somebody's philosophical idea this real world is not spiritual it is not Material the real world is simply so could we look at things in that way without as it were fixing labels and names and gradations and judgments on everything but watch what happens watch what we do now you see if you do that you do at least give yourself a chance and it may be that when you are in this way freed from busybody myths and being out to improve everything that your own nature will begin to take care of itself because you're not getting in the way of yourself all the time you will begin to find out that the great things that you do are really happenings for example no great genius can explain how he does it yes he says I have learned a technique to express myself because I had something in me that had to come out I had to know how to give it out so if I were a musician I had to learn how music is produced that means learning to use an instrument or learning a technique of musical notation or whatever it may be if I want to describe something I have to learn a language so others can understand me I need a technique but then beyond that I'm afraid I can't tell you how it was that I used that technique to express this mysterious thing I wanted to show you if we could tell people that we would have schools where we would infallibly train musical geniuses scientific miracle minds and there would be so many of them we wouldn't know what to do with them geniuses would be a dime a dozen and then we would say well these people are after all not very ingenious you know PhDs how many of them other because what is fascinating always about genius is the fellow does something we can't understand he surprises us but you see just in the same way we cannot understand our own brains neurology knows relatively little about the brain which is only to say that the brain is a lot smarter than neurology yes yet there is this which can perform all these extraordinary intellectual and cultural miracles but we don't know how we did it but we did we didn't have some campaign to have an improved brain over the monkeys or whatever maybe our ancestors it happened and all growth you see is fundamentally something that happens but for it to happen two things are important but and the first is as I said you must have the technical ability to express what happens and secondly you must get out of your own way but right at the bottom of the whole problem of control is how am I to get out of my own way and if I showed you a system let's all practice getting out of our own way it would turn into another form of self improvement see here's the dynamics of this thing and we find this problem you see repeatedly throughout the entire history of human spirituality been the phraseology of Zen Buddhism you cannot get this by thinking you cannot attain to it by not thinking it is only you see as you as getting out of your own way ceases to be a matter of choice when you see that there's nothing else for you to do when you see in other words that doing something about your situation is not going to help you when you see equally that trying not to do anything about it is not going to help you where are you where you stand your nonplussed and you are simply reduced to watching now you may say I need some help in this process and therefore I am going to find someone else to help me it may be a therapist it may be a clergyman it may be a guru it may be any kind of person who teaches a technique of self improvement now how will you know whether this person is able to teach you how can you judge for example whether a psychotherapist is a effective or just a charlatan how can you judge whether a guru is himself spiritually wise or merely a good chatterbox well of course you ask your friends you ask her his other students or patients and they're all of course enthusiastic you have to be enthusiastic when you bought something expensive if you bought an automobile which turned out to be a lemon it's very difficult to admit that it was a lemon that you were fooled and it's the same when you buy a religion or an expensive operation but what people do not sufficiently realize is that when you pick an authority whether it's a psychotherapeutic one or a religious one you chose it in other words that this fellow of this book of this system is the right one is your opinion and how are you competent to judge after all if you are saying to this other person or other source I think you are the authority that's your opinion so you cannot really judge whether an authority is a sound Authority unless you yourself are a sound authority otherwise you may just be being fooled you may say for example I believe that the Bible is the Word of God all right that's your opinion I know the Bible says it's the Word of God but it's your opinion that the Bible is not lying the church says the Bible is the Word of God but it's your opinion that the church is right you cannot escape from that situation it's your opinion so you see when you select an authority who will help you to improve yourself it's like hiring the police out of your tax money and putting them in charge of seeing that you obey the law I mean can't you take care of yourselves you mean is this the land of the free in the home of the brave or isn't it but you see nobody seems to want to be in charge of themselves because they feel they can't do it listen Paul said to will is present with me but how to do good I find not for the good that I would I do not and the evil that I would not that I do so there at once we are in difficulty because trying to improve yourself is like trying to lift yourself up into the air by tugging at your own bootstraps and it can't be done now there are all sorts of ways in which religious people try to explain that it can be done I referred already to the grace of God and say no you can't do the job yourself because the improving you is the one that needs to be improved therefore you have to say God help me now of course that God exists is your opinion that God will answer your prayer is your opinion and your idea of God is your idea of God if you bought somebody else's script you bought it maybe your mother and father talk to you about God in a very impressive way but basically you bought their idea and if you're a father yourself I'm a grandfather now got five grandchildren and I know I'm as stupid as my own grandfather must have been now I am one I sit there in the position which they look at hey blue why are we does an important man I know the heads are just like anyone else so I hope my children are not believing things on my authority because it's always their authority if I look impressive and make big noises at them they've just been taken in

Channel: U.G. Krishnamurti

Views: 602,305

Rating: 4.8714557 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Watts, Philosophy, Inspiration, Psychology, Mind, Consciousness, Faith, Zen Buddhism, Metaphysics, Meditation, Self-Improvement, Human Soul, Human Mind, Wisdom, Enlightenment, Zen Mind, Best of Alan Watts

Id: vlNVQ-_y4-0

Length: 51min 50sec (3110 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/CheckeredGemstone]

Because doing what I like to do naturally leads to catastrophe and profusely suffering sages in the distance.

[u/ludwigvonmises]

Anxiety exists, but none who are anxious.

[u/[deleted]]

Usually don't watch an hour long videos... but ayy its Alan Watts so why not :D

[u/amtracdriver]

Vanity.