Do you do it or does it do you - Alan Watts

I wonder if it's ever struck you how curious the thing it is that most of the things that we experience we regard as things that happen to us which we ourselves do not originate which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves and if you consider that you realize that what you mean by yourself is rather narrowly circumscribed even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of things that happen to us in the same way as things that go on in the world outside our skins if there's a thunderstorm or an earthquake well it happens to you are not responsible for it but so in the same way when you have hiccups you didn't plan on it if you have belly rumbles you have no intention of doing it and as to the catastrophic the act of getting born well you had nothing to do with that and you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in which you find yourself and this way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood as something that happens to you goes right down to our general feeling about life it goes down to the way in which as Westerners we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in a cosmos that on the whole is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence in other words if you are reared with a 20th century or a shall we say an early 20th century commonsense which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century with its rejection of christianity and judaism you regard yourself as an accident a biological accident in a stupid universe which is mechanical but has no feelings no finer feelings a vast pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur of course if you don't have that point of view and you are more traditional you look upon yourself as a child of God and therefore under Authority in other words there's a big bus on top of all this who allowed you at his pleasure to deign to have the disgusting effrontery to exist and you better watch your P's and Q's because that Almighty is looking after you with the attitude of this is going to hurt me more than it's gonna hurt you and when you look at the world in that image or in the other image that it's a stupid mechanism either point of view you take you don't really belong you're not really part of all this and I could use a stronger word than part only we don't have it in English we have to say something like come connected with it essential to it or to put it in the strongest possible way it is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external world which is defined as something that happens to you and your body itself is something that you've got caught up with it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you yourself because you see we have such a myopic view of what oneself is it's as if in other words we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as me as if you focus your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole panorama of things that you experience and say I will take sides with that much of it now we come here right at the start to an extremely important principle which is the different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification that is to say you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way you can look at it with the naked eye and see it in a certain way you look at it with a telescope and you see it in another way now which level of magnification is the correct one well obviously they're all correct but they're just different points of view you can for example look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass and where with the naked eye you will see a human face with the magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots rather meaninglessly scattered but as you stand away from that collection of dots which all seem to be separate and apart from each other they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern and you see that these individual dots add up to some kind of sense now you'll see at once from this illustration that maybe you when you take a myopic view of yourself as most of us do but you may add up to some kind of sense that is not apparent to you in your ordinary consciousness when we examine our blood streams under a microscope we see there's one hell of a fight going on all sorts of chewing each other up and if we got it overly fascinated with our view of our own blood streams in the microscope we should start taking sides which would be fatal because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle what is in other words conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level and could it possibly be therefore that we with all our problems conflicts neuroses sicknesses political outrages Wars tortures and everything that goes on in human life are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony of will it is claimed you see that some human beings have broken through to that vision that they slipped somehow or other into states of consciousness where they see the apparent disintegration and disorganization of everyday life as the functioning of a totality which at its level is completely harmonious and you can say aha at last I see I got the point I've seen how all this makes sense but what this insight depended upon was your overcoming the illusion that space separates things that is to say the space the interval between your body and mine the interval created by birth at one end and death at the other and then after somebody's death then somebody else's birth these are events with intervals between them and normally we regard these intervals in time in these intervals in space as having no importance no function we tend to see the universe itself as really consisting in all the stars and galaxies that's what it is that's what we notice about the space in which all this happens is sort of written off as something that isn't really there but what one has to realize is that the space is an essential function of the things in the space after all you can't have separate stars unless there is a space around them eliminate the space and you will see you couldn't have this phenomenon at all and vice versa you couldn't have the space they wouldn't be there in any sense whatsoever if there weren't the bodies in it so the bodies in the space and the space are two aspects of the single continuum they're related together in exactly the same way as a back and a front and you just don't get one without the other so the moment you see that intervals that space is connective you can understand at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of consciousness that occurs between to eternal darkness which is the popular common sense view which Western man has of his own life that you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth there was no you and in the eternal darkness that follows your death there is likewise no you and I'm going to discuss these matters not by appealing to any special spooky knowledge as if I had been traveling on the higher planes and knew all my previous incarnations and therefore could tell you authoritative Lee that you are much more than this individuality I'm going to do it on a basis of complete common sense that everybody has access to the facts and that just what you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense complexity and what you call yourself as a living organism say I am my whole body at the very least now what is that body that body is recognizable and I recognize my friends when I meet them again good luck and you recognize me although the last time any of you saw me I was absolutely something entirely different from what I am now just as the flame of a candle is never a constant a flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant well it is a recognizably constant pattern the spear shaped outline of the flame and its coloration is a constant pattern but in exactly the same way we are all constant patterns and that's all we are the only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being it's the way we behave the way we dance only there's no way that dances that's just the dancing just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas just as a whirlpool in a river is a whirling of streaming water there is no thing that whirlpools there is the whirlpool and in the same way each one of us is a very very delightfully complex undulation of the energy of the whole universe only by our process of mis-education we've been deprived of the knowledge of that fact not as if though there was someone to blame for this because it's always with our own tacit consent because life is basically a game of hide-and-seek because life is pulsation on and off here it is and now it isn't and by being this pulsation we know it's there see you you don't know what you mean by on unless you know what you mean by off that's why when we want to awaken someone we knock at the door not enough to slam the door once with your fist and make a big noise but you keep up a pulsation because that by it's on and off Nessa tracts attention all life you see is this flickering in and out only there are enormous rhythms in it there are very fast flickering ins-and-outs like the reaction of light upon our eyes such that if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark and I spin it you will see a circle of fire because the reflection of that cigarette tip on your retina lasts it endures just in the same way as on a radar screen an image stays a little while until it's revivified by another round so in that way you see you notice continuity and in the same way then you notice the continuity of a light because although I say with an arc lamp an arc lamp is actually a flickering light and that's why they don't allow arc lights to be used in any shop where there's a circular saw moving because sometimes the flickering speed of the arc light so synchronizes with the turning speed of the teeth on the blade that the teeth look as if they're not moving and so anybody who might put his hand on the blade would have it chopped off thinking it was a still one so in this way very fast impulses are looked upon as constant and we see where there are fast impulses a solid thing when you look at it the blade of a propeller or an electric fan the separated four or three blades become a solid disc and you cannot throw an egg through it well so in exactly the same way you can't put your finger through a rock because the rock is moving too fast for your finger to go through that's the meaning of the the whole phenomenon of hardness hardness in nature is immense energy but acting in a very concentrated space restricted space but going to beat health that's why you can't get through it now from those very tiny fast rhythms which give us the impression of continuity there are also in this universe immensely slow rhythms and these are very difficult for us to keep track of and they impress us and depress us as our own life and death as our coming and going which goes for what is to us such a slow pace that we can't possibly believe that it is really a rhythm we think of it as our birth or something quite unique that could never occur again because we're so close to it you see and it's moving so slowly and so with that point of view we are like Marshall McLuhan said he borrowed a metaphor from me which is that we are driving a car looking at the rear-vision mirror that means that the environment in which you believe yourself to exist is always a past one it isn't the one you're actually in the process of growth the the basic process of biology is one in which lower orders are always being superseded by higher orders but the lower order can never figure out or only very rarely figure out what the higher order is that's taking over and may see it as a terrible threat as total disaster as the very end but therefore can never be aware that the principle of growth always has and always will continue well that's what's going on but you never know what the next step is going to be because if you did know you wouldn't take it because it would already be passed do you understand this that any suddenly known future is an event of which we can say you've had and in that sense it's past when we play a games and we say in chess or in bridge or whatever game you're playing the outcome of the game becomes certain we at that point cancel the game and begin a new one because the whole zest of the thing and which takes me back to the idea that this whole thing is a hide-and-seek game is that you don't know what the next order coming up is but one thing you can be sure of it will be an order and it will comprehend you at the moment we stand at a time in history where we're beginning to think of a great countdown on the end of the human race terrifying possibility that through atomic energy we may obliterate this planet and turn the whole globe into a star maybe that's the way all the stars started imagine you know this great thing coming up to countdown on the end 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 where have you heard that before you sit on the seashore and you hear the waves going in and out and you don't stop to think that's what you're doing that's what the whole business is doing and the replay cies where the wave mounts and mounts and it gets too big for its boots or whatever and it spills and breaks and we could do just that but very important to realize that that's what you're doing is then you don't get panicky about it and the person who's going to press that button as a person is going to be in panic so if you realize that that's what it is and that it doesn't really matter if the whole human race blows itself up then there's a chance that it won't do it that's the only chance we have not to do this thing which attracts us like a kind of vertigo like a person who looks over a precipice and is all set to throw himself over or a person who jumps out of a plane when they're skydiving and forgets to pull the parachute ring because he gets fascinated with the target it's called target fascination he just goes straight at it you see so we can get absolutely fascinated with disaster with doom or you know all the news in the newspapers is invariably bad news there is no good news in the newspapers people wouldn't buy a newspaper consisting of good news even the Free Press is full of terrible news except the San Francisco are okay and the fascination you see for this doom might be neutralized if we would say well why bother about that it's just a nother fluctuation in this huge marvelous endless chain of our own selves and our own energy going on see here's the problem because of our myopia because of our the way we've as it were restricted consciousness to focus upon just that certain little area of experience that we call voluntary actions that's us and everything else happens to us now that's obviously absurd let's suppose you take in your hand one of those toys at a gyroscopic top and you suddenly notice the minute you get this in your hand that it has a kind of vitality to it it seems to resist you it starts pushing you in a certain way see and sometimes you're with it and following it then sometimes you see it it's just as if you held a living animal in your hand you know you pick up up a hamster no or a guinea pig and you hold this little thing in your hand it's always trying to escape so the gyroscope always seems to be trying to escape your hole now in exactly the same way what you're experiencing all the time all sorts of things are getting out of control and doing things you don't expect it's trying to escape your hole all right then don't grab it so hard and you'll discover that this living thing that you're feeling like the gyroscope top it's your own life because you can see very simply that you would not understand the experience that you call voluntary action and decision being in control and being yourself unless in opposition to that there was something else you couldn't realize self and control and will unless there was something other out of control and instead of will won't it's the two together only that produces the sensation that you call having a personal identity only there is a funny thing about human consciousness which has been worked out very carefully in Gestalt psychology which is that our attention is captured by the figure rather than the background by the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area and by something moving rather than what is relatively still and to all those phenomena that in this way attract our attention we attribute a higher degree of reality than the ones we don't notice that's only because for the moment those are more important to us consciousness you see is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble just in the same way as a ship's radar is looking for rocks or other ships and the radar therefore does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks no other ships so in the same way our eyes or rather the Selective consciousness behind the eyes only pays attention to what we think is important I am at this moment aware of all of you in this room of every single detail of your clothing of your faces and so on but I'm not noticing at all and therefore I will not be able to remember tomorrow exactly how each one of you looked and what you were wearing because what I notice is restricted to things that I think are particularly important if I notice some particularly beautiful girl in the audience then I might notice also what she's wearing and that would be memorable but by and large you see we scan things over but we pay attention only to what our set of values tells us we ought to pay attention to and so in this way we have this rather myopic way of looking at things and we screen out from attention anything that is not immediately important to a scanning system based on sensing danger but quite obviously you as a complete individual are much more than the scanning system you are in relationships with the external world that on the whole are incredibly harmonious going back to this illustration of every living body as something like the flame of a candle the energies of life in the form of temperature light air and food and so on are streaming through you all at this moment in the most magnificently harmonious way and you're all of you far more beautiful than any candle flame just sitting in these chairs just going no only we are so used to it we say about that so what show me something interesting show me something new because it's a characteristic of consciousness that it ignores stimuli that are constant when anything is constant it says ok that's safe it's in the bag you needn't pay attention to that anymore and therefore we eliminate systematically from our awareness all the gorgeous things that are going on all the time and instead only become focused on the things the troubles and things that might happen to upset it which is alright but we make too much of it and become we make so much of it that we identify our very selves I go with the radar with the troubleshooter and that's only a fragment of one's total being so that if you do become aware that you are not simply that scanning mechanism but you are your complete organism then very swiftly in turn as a consequence of that you become aware that your organism is not the way you think about it when you look at it from the standpoint of conscious attention from the standpoint of the ego from the standpoint of the ego your organism is your kind of vehicle your automobile in which you go around but from a physical point of view your organism is again like the candle flame or the whirlpool it is something which is a continuous patterning or activity of the whole cosmos the key idea here is pattern let's suppose I'm going to borrow a metaphor from Buckman's to full up suppose we have a rope and the one section of this rope is made of Manila hemp the next section is cotton the next section is silk the next section is nylon and so on now we tie a knot in this rope just an ordinary one over knot and you find by putting your finger in the knot you can move it all the way down the rope now as this knot travels it's first of all made of Manila hemp it's then made of cotton it's then made of silk it's then made of nylon and so on but the knot keeps going on that's the integrity of pattern the continuing pattern which is what you are because you might you know would be for several years you might be a vegetarian and you might be a meat-eater and so on and you know your Constitution changes all the time but people steel friends still recognize you because you're still putting on the same show it's the same pattern that is the recognizable individual but we are trained in our language the very structure of the language we deceives us into misunderstanding this because when we see a pattern we ask what's it made of like you see a table is it made of wood or is it made of aluminum but then when you inquire into what is wood and how does would differ from aluminum the only thing a scientists can tell you is the different patterns that is to say the different molecular structure of the two things and a molecular structure is not a description of what something is made of it is a description of what dance it is performing what motions what kind of a symphony this is because basically all phenomena of life are musical and Gould differs from lead in exactly the same way that a waltz differs from a mazurka it's a different dance and there isn't anything that's dancing that is a deception we get into because we have two spots of speech in our grammar we have nouns and verbs and verbs are supposed to describe the activities of nouns and this is simply a convention of speech you could have a language with only verbs in it you don't need any nouns or you could also have a language with a nouns only and no verbs and it would perfectly adequately describe what's going on in the world so if you were used to speaking with a part with a language that had one part of speech you could say just as much as we can with two and be a lot clearer only at first it would sound awkward but you'd soon get used to it and then when you got used to it it would be a matter of common sense that the patterning of the world is not some kind of stuff that's patterning you don't have to seek for a substance underlying the whole thing is this patterning and we're all that and so in this way there is to a person who really wakes up you very soon realize that your existence is not something that is just the hopeless little creature that suddenly confronted with a great big external world that goes guy I didn't know and eats him up every tiniest little thing that comes into being every mind new little fruit fly or gnat or bacterium I will go so far as to say is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends this thing goes both ways it's not only that every little organism which exists depends on its total environment the reverse is also true that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms so that you could say this universe consists of a an arrangement of pattern in which every event is essential to the whole thing now we screen that idea out of our consciousness in exactly the same way that we screen out the perception of space as an important reality just as we pay attention to the figure and ignore the background so we see one way of looking at things mainly that the organism is very frail against the environment it lasts a long time the environment but the organism only lasts a short time what do you mean the environment lasts a long time what is the environment consists of just a lot of little things and yet there is the environment just as the same way as there is the face in the newspaper photograph behind all those little dots when you get far enough away from it you see the face when you get far enough away from all the organisms and the little bits of things you see the environment in another scale of magnification but actually the whole thing is arranged in a polar system where the enormous depends on the tiny and the tiny depends on the enormous and you get a relationship between these extremes which can be called a transaction that is to say a transaction when is buying and selling it's impossible to have buying without selling and selling without buying so you you always wherever you are looking at the general panorama of sensory experience try switching try shifting your attention to all the things you thought were unimportant to the constants to the background and begin looking at the spaces between people all painters have to learn this because especially if you are working in oils you actually have to paint in the background weavers know this because when they're making patterns in weaving they've got to weave the background as well off you do needlepoint with embroidery think of the hours you spend putting in the background over the canvas in wool and you become aware of it same where the people who made the great oriental carpets they're much more aware of the background as constituting an essential part of the total experience so as you become aware of this you'll see the same thing that you notice in music namely that it is only as a result of hearing the interval between tones that you hear any melody if you don't hear the interval you're tone-deaf and all notes are the same noise all you hear is rhythm you don't hear any melody you've got to hear the interval so then watch the intervals between people the things that aren't said the things that are tacit the things that are implicit rather than explicit in all life and then you begin to get connected now it's very important to have a connection in life and it'll be in the know and this is the way it ate it fundamentally comes out of seeing the thing you forgot you know you can always bug people in a beautiful way and a very helpful way by just saying to them what did you forget well I don't know was I supposed to remember oh I'm not I'm really not trying to put you on I mean it's not difficult this is something completely obvious that you forgot you would easily remember it because it's so obvious well that's the hardest thing in the world to think of what's the most obvious thing I forgot yeah what's that well who do you think you are well how do you answer that question who are you well you give a name you say I'm Joe Dokes I'm Alan Watts that's not true that's what people told you you were they put that name on you and they taught you to identify with it and to behave as it was expected to behave but that's not who you are you know very well go back in your memory go back into your infancy before they started telling you all this stuff who are you and if you get with that you know very well who you are the Jolly Old Ancient of Days only there's a conspiracy that you mustn't let on about that because everybody is and if one person realizes it the others a little bit offended and they say well how come you're so great we worked it in Christianity by a very clever thing of allowing just one individual to be recognized as the God incarnate and nobody else therefore could be and since he had been safely crucified and whisked up to heaven he wouldn't bother us anymore so everybody therefore who gets an intimation of who they really are and ever comes out with it in Christian civilization people say who the hell do you think you are you Jesus Christ oh you can say Jesus Christ said he was Jesus Christ and everybody put him down for it and that's what you're doing to me oh let's say forget that one because it's like somebody comes out and composes some perfectly terrible music and the critics say this man is a cacophonous he is completely incompetent and he said did you ravit read the reviews of Beethoven's first symphony when it was performed at Vienna now the thing is we allowed one person you see one human individual to be the Incarnate God because we have all been living in a theory of the universe in which the individual is simply involved in something that happens to him and we feel that this thing that happens to us is reality it is facts that we have to face and accept and cope with see it's always something other than you you don't recognize it as an integral part of your own being without which you cannot know what you mean by the word I but in the truth of the matter is though that if you will face it out every single one of us knows that that isn't true there is a and as it were a recess of the soul of the psyche where everybody knows perfectly well that you are not justice responsible little mouse that's been shut down into this world but that you are really doing this work you're running it only you can't admit it just in the same way as you can't admit that you're responsible for the way your own heart beats you say oh that's not my doing I've no control over my heart do you have any control over being conscious do you know how you will and you say I intend to take my hand down from my face and put it on my leg I can do that but I don't have it how it's done so that what we mean by the capacity of voluntary control in the ordinary sense of the word is isn't it we don't understand it at all so you might say in in a funny backwards way that the only kind of control you really understand is that way you're not using your will because you just do it so easy like you open and close your hand you know how to do it sure you know how to do it but you can't put it into words and explain to someone how to do it say well come on aren't you human don't you know I don't know close your hands do it silly but we don't realize you see the justice we know how to do this we know equally well how to turn the Sun in the light how to blue the sky how to blow the wind how to wave the ocean how to digest food and I might add to be digested by bacteria and transformed as we transform our steaks we will in turn be transformed but the pattern keeps going and it's always you only you see you have this marvelous capacity to transform yourself without knowing that you're doing it therefore you keep surprising yourself and therefore you keep on doing it because if you didn't surprise yourself you wouldn't go you wouldn't go on doing it it's just the very fact you see that you seem to be the victims of the thing you don't understand and that you seem to conclude your life every time in a wipeout called death where all your control goes is just exactly that opposite condition to what you call being alive that allows you to be alive only every time it happens it's like it's new it's like every time you're born it seems like it was the only time but of course if it wasn't like that you wouldn't do it when Hindus and Buddhists used the word karma the basic meaning of it is action from the Sanskrit root tree to do and therefore there is some error in the common translation of karma as a law of cause and effect or of cosmic retribution as a Manso's so also shall he reap has a Western flavor which is a little causal the way the Buddha put it was slightly different this arises that becomes because between this and that there is a polar relationship and the full explanation of the Karma in Buddhist philosophy is called pratityasamutpada which means the inter dependent origination of all the forms and phases of life pratityasamutpada and there are twelve links shall we say in the chain of inter dependent origination constituting a circle and the existence of the circle depends on the presence of every one of the links from one point of view in Buddhism the chain of inter dependent origination is looked upon as a chain that is to say as a form of bondage the constituents as it were of the vicious circle in which most people and beings are living which they call samsara sa MSA RA samsara the round of birth and death the Pavich accra the wheel of bhava which is becoming and so going round and round and round in the endless game of hide and seek is from one point of view bondage bondage to karma and if you study the bhagavad-gita which is not a Buddhist book but a Hindu scripture Krishna the spokesman of the Gita explains that the wise man is one who does what is called nish kama karma nish kama ni sh kam a meaning passionless activity in the sense that he acts without seeking a result without being motivated by the fruits of action and therefore is not bound by his own action you can be bound to samsara the wheel of birth and death by iron chains or gold chains the chains are I mean I'm talking in a more or less the language of popular Hinduism that if you do bad deeds in this life you will get bad result next time if you do good deeds in this life you may be reborn as an angel or as a in which you'll get a better chance of liberation but still so long as you're looking for results be they good or evil you are still bound now the way in which one becomes as it were free of karma involves another Buddhists point of view which is a kind of a different way of looking at the chain of inter dependent origination it's the way which the Japanese called GG muguet that is to say the mutual interpenetration of all things and events so that you could say that actually in fact deep the deepest level of reality this entire cosmos is a completely harmonious and blissful manifestation of everything in a state of total enlightenment and mutual compassion and therefore the task of the Buddhist or the Hindu discipline of meditation the sadhana the way of spiritual development is to realize that for everybody to realize it effectively in his own life and therefore cease from the illusion that the universe is a fragmented process of conflict but first of all we have to be clear about karma that it is not to be understood in the Western sense of a law of cause and effect or of a sort of retribution system or a law the word law is most unsuitable for concepts in eastern Indian and Chinese philosophy the word Dharma DHA RMA sometimes meaning the Buddhists doctrine or a certain way of life when you talk about a person's father Amma you mean their own function we would translates for Dharma as vocation service the same as the Latin suus one's own herma function in this case operation way of life style of life profession trade role means all those things and the one thing that Dharma really never means is law although it's often translated that way because you see you don't get the idea of law until you move to a culture where order is based on the idea of obedience or in in the West you see are the origins of law spring from where the laws of the Medes and the Persians the laws of Hammurabi the laws of Moses and later Roman law the only healthy legal tradition we have in the West is British common law which proceeds in an entirely different way from code law because you see the difference between code law and common law is that code law is laid down by the wisdom of an all-powerful ruler who tells everybody how they must behave and they must obey Him but common law is evolved by discussion of particular cases rather than referring all the time to abstract principles which are put down in words and the judge the good judge is a wise man the man with a sense of equity and fair play who arbitrates an issue which is debated in front of him and from the precedent which he creates by his decision common law evolves you see that's a more organic way of producing law the code law system which we inherit from our most ancient theological backgrounds is a tyrannical method of law by imposition and so you must understand that in both Hinduism and Buddhism there is really no fundamental idea of obedience to a personal ruler certainly not in Buddhism a little bit sometimes in Hinduism but even then we get terribly mixed up because for example I was talking of the bhagavad-gita this is often translate the Lord Seung now for bag Avenue bhagavad in Sanskrit Lord era is an English equivalent is quite inappropriate because the Lord is one who Lords it over you Raghavan is a title of reverence and respect and love of the bill the song of the beloved would be much better in a way although it's not quite correct from a strict point of view we don't really have an equivalent for this word the Bhagavad so the the although you see there how that has been in India itself tyrannical rule and although the arthashastra as a manual of politics gives directions to a parent as to how to govern by absolute power going along with this exposition of this very Machiavellian point of view to government is the constant advice of the sage yes this is what you have to do in order to fulfill your office as a ruler but never forget that you'll never succeed the more you try to rule things by force the more you will stir up violence against you and so you could never hold on to your power in your possessions it will always flow away from you so there was one of those great roger's of ancient india who asked a jeweler to make him a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity and the jeweler wrote on the ring it will pass but when we come to the deep cosmological and metaphysical ideas we don't have law in the Western sense and therefore nature is not looked upon as something which is an orderly system because it is obeying a commandment in the West we inherit the idea of law from those ancient conceptions of God and it is even passed down into science where we discuss laws of nature but one recognizes more and more in the sciences that what we call laws of nature are simply observed regularities in the way things behave and you in order to observe regularities you must look at things through something regular that is to say you must lay a ruler alongside them or compare their behavior with the regular behavior of a clock the clocks and rulers are human inventions they are regular measures which we use for comparing the rates of change say a clock is a measure of the rate of change it's quite arbitrary but we very easily compare our regulation measuring devices with what makes things happen as if the Sun rises because it's 6:00 in the morning now that's being completely backwards in one's thinking and we get into the same confusion when we imagine for example that money is wealth here we have fantastic wealth you know and we have the technological possibility of making everybody on earth the enjoyer of an independent income we can't do it because people say where's the money going to come from because they think money makes prosperity it's the other way around it's it's it's physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it but people think money has to come from somewhere like hydroelectric power or lumber or iron and it doesn't money is something we invent like inches so you remember the Great Depression when there was a slump and what did we have a slump of money there was no less wealth no energy no less raw materials in the web before but it's like you came to build work on building a house Monday and they said sorry you can't build this house today no inches you mean no inches not just inches we don't mean that we got inches of lumber yes we've got inches of metal we've even got tape measures but there's a slump in inches as such you see and people are that crazy but they they can have a depression because they've got no inches to go around no dollars it's all a lot of nonsense but you see because we get thinking backwards and making the metaphysical tale met wag the dog making the law rule things whereas it doesn't it smithy a way of measuring what happens and so you see when you get into ballistic thought you don't get that confusion the other way or the other way around so you're looking at a system where to go back to the Buddha's words this arises that becomes which is a way of saying you can't have this without that you can't have here without there you wouldn't know where here was unless you knew where there was and they come into being together you don't get first here and then there or first there and then here these arise interdependently that's the meaning of inter dependent origination and to grasp the idea of inter dependent origination is as important as the idea about seeing how things are related by space and intervals and seeing therefore that you you tend to look at life from a myopic point of view and see details see the trees and not the forest see yourself as something loosely related to everything else that's going on and not integral to it you see the the figure but ignore the background but the figure on the background arise mutually they are to each other as this is to that and so we really have to rid our brains of the notion of causality the notion of causality being that present sets of circumstances are the result of past sets of circumstances and that therefore certain events which are called causes are responsible for following events called effects and all this is an enormous piece of mumbo-jumbo because what is not seen and what is not clear in thinking that way is that in physical nature there are no separate events so startling to people but it's really quite easy to see that there are no events in nature because you can ask very simply let's take something called an event how do we Demark it from other events at what point shall we say were you born were you born at parturition or when the doctor slapped you on the bottom or cut the umbilical cord or when you were conceived or when your father and mother were first attracted to each other when was it when did you begin there's no way of deciding except arbitrarily and for legal purposes we say you were born at parturition and that's when the astrologer casts your horoscope accept that other astrologers disagree and want the conception time and say that's the real beginning there isn't a real beginning it goes back and back and back in an inseparable continuity when are you dead that's another big argument and you couldn't all you can get all kinds of ideas about that so what once you see that an event is a term in an intellectual calculus Calculus being the way of measuring say curved formations by reducing them to point instance and Counting it you see but actually the point instance our imaginary the curve Wiggles along and it doesn't start out from point to point but in calculus you make it do that so just as there are no point instance in the curve so there are no events in nature nature is a constantly fluctuating pattern you can only designate particular Wiggles in a pattern arbitrarily you can count a convex formation as one wiggle or a concave formation as one wiggle then you decide if you call it one way well if you give the convex properties the title of wiggle you have to deny it to the concave properties and vice versa so when you see that what we call separate events don't exist it becomes nonsense to speak of one event causing another what you really mean is that the two events which you speak of as being causally related are simply two parts of the same event they go with each other in the same way as this with that the relationship is not causal it is mutual and it works two ways in time because future so-called future events are not merely passive to past events but you could easily see when for example any biological process goes on you can reason just as well from the future to the past is from the past of the future why do two mammals have sexual intercourse well it isn't just that they enjoy it it's also that they're a very complex system which does this because it makes babies and the prospect of baby works in Reverse and creates desire you can reason that way oh it's silly because the whole process is one and when we speak humanely and purposively I am going downtown to buy groceries then your future event could be said to be the cause of why you're now starting out to get into the car buying groceries and the the difficulty we have in seeing this to be so is that we think in an either/or way which is what is called dualism in Hindu Buddhist thought and that liberation is being free from dualism so when you think in an either/or way you see the figures in the background as moving and therefore being responsible for their action but if somebody argues the other way around say the figures are just following lines of force in a field gravitational principle say we're all human beings you see we're all concentrated on our fact that we're individually rushing around and doing this and that but we don't see that we're equally sucked and that we move around in response to all sorts of stimuli but neither position is adequate you have to see that our being sucked by all sorts of stimuli is exactly the same thing as our apparently voluntary and deliberate action because what we're looking at is not this Newtonian game of billiards where balls roll because they are hit by cues what we're involved in is a dance where for example watch a snake when a snake swims there's nothing more beautiful than watching a snake swim in water lovely motion but you see it Wiggles along and it's wiggle is conceivable you see as convex or was it concave this way and that way and this way and that way now which side of the snake moves first when it Wiggles so it's very easy to see there now when we Bay act interact with the world what moves first who starts it the objective world or the subjective world but they are related as this to that you can't have an object without a subject or a subject without an object kind of something known without the knower and that gives the show away there isn't any real distinction between the knower and the known there's two ways of looking at something yes two poles of a single process but the knower and the known are subsumed as the knowing and all life is knowing being becoming and it isn't something in other words that works by the idea of all this happens because someone shoves it now you see the idea all this happens because someone shoves it is basic to western thinking there is the Lord God who's the boss and he sloshes this universe into being and shoves it and sets it going and you better obey that shove because he's introduced into it some recalcitrance by giving to human beings what the Hebrews called the yet Sahara the wayward spirit so that they shall be able to play certain games on their own because nothing very interesting would happen if everybody obeyed God the whole world would be like a lifeless thing so they had to reason that into it in order to save face for God practically because otherwise he could be blamed for all the pacifists that happened instead of our being able to say to each other well it's our fault [Music] this concludes CD number one but do you do it or does it do you with Alan Watts our program continues with CD number two [Music] you [Music] but you see then once we are up against this the possibility that the distinction between what we do and what happens to us is obliterated and therefore we would say with Hindus and Buddhists that if I run into a catastrophe it is my karma you see that means far more than that it is a punishment for something I did wrong in the past there is a legalistic view of karma but a naturalistic or organic view of karma is in fact that what happens to me is what I do and that in a certain sense I want what happens to me we can use one to notice how we use this word it means the desire and it means to lack or to need we say to somebody your wanting your deficient in something that you need so it's rather alarming really when you consider it that you always get what you want invariably even though you may think that it's entirely opposed to your wishes but if it's your karma everything that happens to you put it in another way everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you yes obviously that's absurd if you confine the definition of yourself to your voluntary conscious behavior that's a ridiculous definition of oneself oneself by any any stretch of the imagination must involve far more than the conscious and voluntary aspects of our behavior and if we see that it involves intimately and inescapably the behavior of what we call the other the not self the environment and see that these two are moving together like the two sides of the snake when it swims then you get a very curious feeling you have to be careful of it if you've got a Western background because and this is what happens to a lot of people who play around with psychedelic chemicals there are many many cases of inflation among these people that is to say when you get this sensation that the two sides of the world the inside and the outside are moving together you may think I am ruling it I am God in the Western sense of the word therefore your ego instead of being as it were integrated and transcended with all this process merely assumes vast dimensions has megalomania is blown up by the mystical experience and so you get the holier-than-thou people going around who seem to think that they're above all human conventions and have no obligations to anyone or anything because they're divine and they can do as they damn please what they haven't realized is that doing as you will isn't a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and stay in from now on I'm going to go around doing as I will you have to realize first that that's what you've always been doing and you could look at this from a very simple point of view it's not a complete point of view but you can say well now what about the people who who did good and who did the things that they didn't want to do you know everybody's mother said to his darling sometimes we have to do things we don't like what about that well you can always say the kid obeyed the mother and did the thing that it didn't like because that was the better part of wisdom in other words if he'd hadn't done that something worse would have happened and we choose the lesser of two evils and when you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose the lesser of two evils then you say I wanted out of here and you take the easiest way you take the line of least resistance so that's your doing now you you can pursue that more profoundly when you stop thinking about human behavior as something that responds to the compulsion of an environment and you can get out of that when you see the behavior of the environment as an essential aspect of you so it isn't as it were the environment starting something which you are therefore compelled to follow it's the whole system moving together so then you get in the state of liberated or mystical consciousness you very often feel that a hill is lifting you up as you walk up it the ground seems to heave beneath your feet and up you go and you get this strange feeling of lightness of effortlessness walking on air never occur you know this wonderful sense that there are no obstructions anywhere there's nothing as it were banging you and making you do that it all flows together and that's a very common sense that's you are actually in that state of consciousness you are perceiving the goings on the DAO the course of nature in the way it's happening but in the ordinary way you've been conditioned to resist it to fight it and to use those sensations of resistance to create a sensory basis for what you describe as the ego the ego in practice is a sense of strain when you are aware of eye you are aware of a disk basic discomfort which is located basically between the eyes somewhere in here a sort of tightness also it's in other centers to its own in the solar plexus and there are various physical centres in other words where this constant tension or distance against it is going on and that's what you feel when you talk about I when that tension ceases you discover immediately that the separate ego has disappeared and that what I refers to is simply the total panorama of experience everything that's happening that's I and I'm not obviously I don't know all of it because I can't inspect all of it with my radar with my conscious attention that would be a ridiculous undertaking to know everything in that sense we know it in a much better way as we know how to grow hair and open and close our hands so this point of view can be understood if we clarify the initial problems we have about it and I suppose the first problem is if we accept the notion that everything that happens to us is our own karma our own doing then we have to be very careful of shall we say the devil of omnipotence of inflation of feeling that your ego is what is in control of all this and the second thing is if you think then that everything that happens to everybody is what they really want to happen then you can absolve yourself from any qualms about being unkind to someone because you could say well the unkindness I did you was what you really wanted wasn't it you know that business about the responsibility of the person who gets murdered for getting murdered there is a curious sense in which a lot of people go around looking for trouble Freud powerpoints have pointed out quite correctly the psychology of accident-prone individuals they seem to be attracting trouble like lights attract moths and we're all doing that but we managed to remain unconscious of it so that we can praise and blame and play the game which says that's not my fault that's your fault and so we go around apportioning faults to everybody because if we're going to apportion praise for what the good things people do you can't make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming praise and blame go together supposing everybody was acting in a praiseworthy way and we praised everybody for everything then get tired of it they wouldn't even notice it anymore so so long as you're going to get a kick out of being praised you've got to go around blaming - it's very simple but if you see the folly of that that praising and blaming are just creating each other then you don't praise and you don't blame you just dig the whole thing and that's why when we encounter very great sages you never hear them blame people and they very rarely praise anyone you try to start gossip in the presence of such a person and you make a derogatory comment about someone it's as if you had thrown a rock into a well and heard no splash and a funny feeling because that you get no response you get no agreement and if you praise somebody there's also likely nothing to be said except perhaps some remark that of course you're praising the beloved in all its manifestations and this this disconcerts some people terribly I've always noticed that real sages never gossip never criticize person's and because they understand so well the French saying to compensate to pardon a to understand all is to forgive all is so true if you are experienced in just the ordinary way of dealing with human problems if you've been a counselor or psychotherapist or minister or anything like that you very soon get to realize how vastly complicated people are and to see that they really are in the message they're in not because of anything but that's the way it is and you stop blaming people and because you don't blame people you have open ears and people come seek your advice because they don't want to come to someone who is a counselor who will ball them out it's like dentists who simply accept the fact that people really don't take care of their teeth and realize that the job of a dentist is precisely to look after people who can't be bothered to take care of their teeth that's why he's in business so a good dentist doesn't ball his patients out because they didn't do this that and the other just accept it same with doctors they know perfectly well that nobody's going to live by the rules of health and they're very vague as to what they are [Laughter] there's every kind of theory about how you ought to live and what is healthy but they've changed in fashion and well you ought to eat this kind of diet in 1921 when either time its 1930 they've changed their ideas altogether and by the time it's 1960 its back again to a mixture between 1921 and 1894 something like that it's always changing so while the rules that then are not so you see if they were all absurd it would be easy but they're not all absurd there's some truth in it always but nobody's ever quite sure so the function of healers and doctors and so on is just to do what can be done to stop the mess getting too messy and they must accept it as that that's their job if I were healthy say to the doctor I wouldn't need you so you're in business now what about it then we have difficulty in seeing this mutuality of our relationship to the rest of the world because it's contrary to common sense contrary to the way we've been brought up and therefore we have out what I would call an initial intellectual block to understanding it quite apart from any emotional blocks or anything of that kind but obviously we must overcome that intellectual block if we're going to go any further and actually realize and feel this way of life's working in this relationship between what you do and what happens to you then the question arises then what do I do do I go around saying to myself all this that's happening to you is what I wanted I am inside and outside I am the subjective and I am the objective EDI might mean to go around thinking thoughts about this so as it were to talk yourself into this way of feeling well that's very superficial because this new sense of relationship to nature is something much more than an idea see ecologists and physicists have the idea that this is so but they mostly in their private life and in their ordinary human behavior just like other people who don't feel it and who feel themselves in a Newtonian billiards game even though they've gone on to quantum mechanics so that there may be a transition from our ordinary way our feeling how things go on to the new way we have to do something other than think because actually thinking is causing the trouble it is by thinking that we divide the world into separate events and separate things that is calculus and under Kumaraswamy once described the life of the liberated being as a perpetual uncalculated life in the present and you say wow I don't think I could do that that's saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount I'll be not anxious for the morrow the uncalculated life if God so clothe the grass of the field will he not much more clothe you faithless ones and I've never met a preacher yet who would really take that up they all say well of course that's too hard a saying for most of us it's not practical everybody has to take thought for tomorrow and calculate well at this point people can go in two directions there's one class of people who will say all right let's live the uncalculated life let's not make any plans and before you know where they are they're living a filthy pair and scrounging around and living on petty thievery and so on this is the usual thing this has got into it the wrong way the first thing to do is just as I said whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not the relationship between you and the environment is always one that is harmonious so in the same way you are always living the uncalculated life you have to find out first of all that you're always doing it and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations in other words your ego has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it because as I pointed out most of the functions most of the goings on in you around you the circumstances of life have nothing to do with your ego at all and you don't even know why you make up your mind to do certain things we know superficially we were few ideas it's like when you were enter into a marriage you have really no control over its outcome in the ordinary sense of ego control you've taken a colossal gamble in which you've involved enormous complexes of patterns and maybe it'll come out all right if you don't interfere with it too much you don't slack off and I'm I said it's perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell and the only possible way we might stop that happening is not to try to prevent it you know all these wars are started out by people who think that they're helping someone but it's gonna make things better so when you begin from the basis not off saying I should now live the spontaneous and improvident and non calculating style of life but realize you've always done that only you rationalized that you didn't you always did what you wanted to do basically only you said sometimes it was my duty but you preferred a conception of yourself as someone who always does his duty that flattered you and so you were still following your own way now the first thing then is to see that that's what's happening so that you don't think well now there is some special thing I have to do to understand this harmonious relationship between the individual in the world because if you work on it that way you will start from the presupposition that that relationship doesn't already exist and has to be brought into being thing is it doesn't have to be brought into being it's there but now when you see that that's so it obviously starts to make a difference you do behave in a different way but the behavior the new kind of behavior that is a result of a transformation is not forced behavior when you try to imitate the way a saint behaves you have made a forced change and you know all forced behavior is phony it's like someone saying I love you I love you I love you when you don't you feel you ought to but you don't really and there's something it doesn't ring true let's think of the poor Lord listening to all the prayers of all those people saying I love you Jesus and they and he knows they don't know they're just saying this because they think they ought to and be very trying so whenever you do a thing like that you see you make a forced change now if the change is to happen in the same way that a seed at proper season breaks open and sends up a chute it comes from the whole force of life itself now when you see that without your having to do anything see you are living the uncalculated life and you're only pretending you're calculating it and arranging it then as it were you will have a grasp of the total situation and it will you can allow it to produce changes in action which are not forced so this is why there is always a trend in every kind of spiritual doctrine which says something about grace divine grace there must come about something in you or change which you can't produce and if you try to produce it you will be a victim of spiritual pride but on the other hand all teachers are universally saying you've got to make an effort there's some discipline there is some something you must do well that's the only way to get it across the people that you as a separate effort maker are a myth our a phantasm because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think of good thoughts to think you will find that you're going round in a circle Krishnamurti is awfully good at pointing this out when he people ask him how do you meditate he says why do you want to meditate why are you concentrating why you saying prayers why do you think you should believe in God and it always comes up because I'm just a son of a bitch I mean I'm up for my own good and this seems to be the it would be the way so he says you see you don't have any genuine love at all it's all fake and so you have to fight first of all where the genuine love is now you love you don't you that's genuine I won't argue about that but then when you start from this I gave a talk some time ago to room the air force camp lab where they make weapons do all the research and they got a bunch of us there who were ministers and philosophers and they had the nerve to ask us what was our basis for moral behavior personal moral behavior well I said my basis for moral behavior is pure selfishness and I'm talking after all to realistic people here and I don't think we need to be sentimental and beat about the bush for all you're all warriors and fighters and so on and you know how rough things are so I'm going to say to you frankly I'm out for me but of course I don't do it in a tactless way I don't go around and hit people over the head and say give me this give me that I much more subtle I say good manners and please and how nice you all are and so on and finally people feel massage psychologically into the state where they'll give well they're nice it's after that lives and things that bother me the first one is if I love me what do I want and furthermore Who am I because if I'm going to be realistic about getting what I want I've got to be pretty sure what it is that's me and what is the sate of desire in me if I am desire see if I am a center of desire what's it all for well I think of all the things I want what it so turns out that none of them are me if I say I want dinner I don't mean I'm gonna eat me up if I'm any pleasure I can think of is the enjoyment of something that I hadn't thought of defining as myself because I like my sensations like what happens to my body when I take their fine wine and down it but then what's the difference between my body and the wine I say I like the wine I also mean I like me and the wine together the mixture but then I don't eat you or a friend or a lover in the same way as I drink wine I live in association and like this but then I'm loving things that aren't formally supposed to be me and as I go into it in other words as I investigate what I mean by me I find that I can't put any limits on it that I cannot experience me without you or without the other they're inseparable but you don't find this out until you investigate it until you really go into the question what do I want and that's the most important investigation anyone can make which I'm going to into in the next session the question of power and all these military men you think they're they think they want power and so I said to them some very subversive and undermining things without anybody knowing it until long after I'd left this concludes session 1 of do you do it or does it do you with Alan Watts our program continues with session 2 [Music] curious that a cardinal feature of the Buddha's doctrine is that craving is the root of suffering but craving going further back to another route which is ignorance avidya in sanskrit means lack of vision video in latin is IC and that's related back to the sanskrit vidya avidya unseeing unconsciousness lies behind craving and this in its turn lies behind suffering and of course when we in the West first heard about this we interpreted the idea in a very crude way which is this that all one's disappointments are the result of frustrated desire and but it's a very much more subtle point of view than that to understand Buddhism in any case you must realize that it is not something like a teaching as we ordinarily understand the system of teaching it isn't simply a way as we have in our universities of a teacher imparting you certain authoritative information which when you've heard it you've got the message it's a dialogue it's a situation in which the teacher doesn't really have anything to tell you he's simply reacting to your own bringing up of problems and it's as if people came to the Buddha and said sir we suffer terribly and what are we going to do about that and he replies is it not true that you suffer because you desire they said well maybe that makes sense all right he said see if you can do without desire and all those students go away and see if they can calm their desires they come back and say this is pretty difficult because we are animal beings and we have all these appetites to begin with and then beyond that we're in the unfortunate position of being aware of time being aware of the future and although it's advantageous to know about the future in the long run it's depressing because we all know that we come to a bad end and that there everything falls apart in time that would be specially true if you lived under the influence of Indian cosmology where the world is really regarded as the process that begins beautifully but as it goes on gets worse and worse till it destroys itself then there's a long period of rest and it starts out again beginning beautifully but getting worse and worse all the time everything runs down in time according to that cosmology and so there seems to be a fundamental futility desire desire for whatever it is that you want but behind this the intention of studying desire seeing whether one can discipline desire whether one can curb it is a deeper question altogether which is what do you desire what makes you itch what sort of a situation would you like let's suppose I do this often in vocational guidance of students they come to me and say well 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 would 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 in out of doors life and ride horses I said he want to teach in a riding 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 forget the money 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 than 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's 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 spending things you don't like 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 under me 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's all retching no vomit it never gets there and so therefore it's so important to consider this question what do I desire well when we answer that question in a naive way we figure out that we want a desire or what we want is to control everything to create girls that don't grow old apples that don't rot clothes that never wear out conveyance is that get from one place to another instantly so we don't have to wait power available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly like that to get this funny technological omnipotence but if you take time out to think about that and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that's where you want to be you will soon see that's not what you want because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things that is to say in which the future is almost completely predictable you will see as I said last night that a completely predictable future is already the past you've had it and that's not what you wanted you want a surprise and you don't know what that's going to be because obviously wouldn't be a surprise if you did you want a pleasant surprise I'd like you to say what sort of a surprise would be pleasant and you can't really answer that because you know if there are to be such things as pleasant surprises there must also be unpleasant surprises there must be rude shops so you're like somebody taking one of those wishing well boxes you know tubs you know will you fish in and you'll bring out a package and you don't know whether you've got a dead rat in it or a new camera [Laughter] and that's the way that's that seems to be the thing that really excites people but quite certainly there comes out of this inquiry a feeling of real disillusionment with the ideal of power to be in power to be in control is not something that any sensible person wants imagine the situation of Big Brother mister J Edgar Hoover Heinrich Himmler to be glued day and night to a highly defended office with telephones television screens watching pinky spying on everyone in anything getting all this information together why you could never leave the office I mean that people characterize foes like T edgar Hoover's goes home in the evening and but when he's back home you know there are guards sitting outside the door does that hotline telephone go into something he's always having to be in control and he can't take any time he can't go for a walk in the park with a friend or go innocently to the movies or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the bath is a big sur yeah what a pauper this guy is completely deprived because he wants to be in control because he wants power people are frustrated in love be if you're jilted there's a natural tendency in a human being to seek power as a substitute and that's a very negative thing it's like having a bad temper to seek power after you're frustrated in love you should try and get back on the love beam because nobody wants power now you may say that shirking responsibility that if you were a really responsible person you would go out for power and try to use power it to the best possible advantage for the benefit of all all right what would be the benefit of all ask them what do you want me to do with this power I'm dictator what would you like me to do well nobody knows because they haven't thought it through they think of all sorts of short-range things and they are largely conflicting and confusing because they're not well thought out but again when it finally comes down to it nobody wants to be God now then when oriental philosophy and religion was first introduced to the Western world it was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power it was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century when we had heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights and we would eventually develop Superman according to Nietzsche or GB Shaw and HG Wells remember all that early fantasy of where evolution would lead through the development of Technology and so at this time people like HP Blavatsky were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the east and they phrased it they commended it to us in a technological spirit that there was psychic technology now there was something that you could go way beyond anything that could be done through the physical sciences you could cause your physical body to disintegrate to another level of vibration and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else you could live as long as you like because you control the fundamental processes you could determine if you decided to die where you would be reborn exactly you would be a complete master of life and so there are still in numerable books being sold which present oriental philosophy and religion in this light that charlatan Lobsang rampa who writes about tibetan mastery people read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game so therefore the wise man of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life as for example people whose emotions didn't bother them who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings who could foretell the future who could read your thoughts and who were above all kinds of ordinary human frailty well when I first met Buddhist priests Zen masters Swami's all these wise men from the east one of the first things that impressed itself upon me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings they had bad tempers they were fussy about certain things they just acted as I would expect human beings to act and so at first I was very disappointed I thought they had feet of clay but they didn't come up to these promises of psycho technology but after a while I got to realize why not that they had already thought all that through their thought through what might be done if one had all these powers and who decided that wasn't what they wanted the powers of this kind in sanskritic all-city SI d DHI but there is hardly one decent scripture or text on yoga that does not say again and again if you get City ignore them go on to something else these are only the foothills these are furthermore not only foothills but they are seductive blind alleys won't take you anywhere at all now I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn because we are so hung up on the idea of power of control of being able to make everything go the right way and if we've never thought it through when you get control of it what are you going to do with it supposing I have I'm an alchemist and I have a whole secret closet full of love filters very potent ones if I see a desirable woman all I have to do is to offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions in it and instantly I'm a master now what when I think that through what would I do with the situation because all I've got again is that plastic doll that when I push it it does what I tell it to and doesn't have any come back what you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there where there's a comeback and you say my god this thing is alive it has a will of its own it is not in my control and I would like to have a relationship with something like that because it would never be dull and also yeah you would feel true affection after all yeah you can make love to yourself in a mirror you couldn't have a one of those Dutch wives who buy them a place in Kobe where you get these rubber girls that you fill with hot water and sailors take them on long voyages but what an awful thing you know when you realize that this thing has no gear no surprise in it no thing that it does on its own you see and so when you think things through like that you understand you do not want power don't want to control everything and therefore these zen buddhist masters that I met and others were not super artists and very many Westerners who visited Japan expecting to get a Satori as a result of which they would know everything and control everything were grievously disappointed and said there's not much in this after all so therefore from the standpoint of Buddhism the fact that the power game is not the game is expressed by saying a Buddha is one who has gone beyond the gods because the gods have power the Buddhism imagines all kinds of levels of heaven wells inhabited by all kinds of gods and the supreme of all the gods is called ishvara but it is said that all those gods in their paradise all worlds are in samsara there in the round of birth and death and what goes up must come down they are immensely successful they're at the peak of power spiritual power but they're not delivered yet as they still don't know what they want and therefore in the exploration of what you want you get to the point where having all pleasures at your command and they Paul and you think of new sources of pleasure and eventually you get like the ancient Romans who had all these mad crowds of barbarians who had to go every Saturday to the Coliseum for a show that really had to surpass everything because they had public baths they had prostitutes they had every kind of luxury but when they went to see one of the big shows that people like Nero put on they would have for example floats circling the Colosseum all full of slave girls from distant parts of the Mediterranean garland it with flowers and waving at the crowd and going innocently around in the next minute they would release wild lions into the arena to eat up all the slave girls they got a big sadistic kick out of that because you see pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you in to what are the Buddhists call the Naraka world that is to say the hells when you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain so naturally you descend from the devil world at the top of the wheel to the Naraka world at the bottom where it is shows all these beings in in states of torture now of course the the priests say when they're bringing up children if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world but this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world you get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want as a result of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure which ends you eventually in the pursuit of pain so when you're in the hell well that's where you want to be so then the question is to clarify once more what do we want if you understand first of all that you don't want absolute power you don't want absolute control you want yes some control you see we always love controlling something that's not really under our control remember I gave you the illustration right in the beginning of holding a gyroscopic top and feeling sometimes here with it but sometimes it's alive under your hand and this sensation to you often gets a in driving a car or something like that it's more or less under your control but on the other hand it isn't and that's the the beautiful thing because when something is partly under your control but isn't then you have the same sort of relationship with it that you have when you have someone you love some other person they are partly under there your control because they've agreed to live with you and go along with you and so on but also they're not and the measure to which they're not is the measure to which they seem really alive to you so then we ask the question if the motivation of power gaining disappears you've seen through it in you know that's more not what you want what other motivation takes its place as the origins of actions and it seems to me that the answer here is compassion simply because when you want to relate to another living being what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are you want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems your fears and your delights you don't want a doll you want another you another self because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are and so then at once that when you see that that is the case and that the most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others and you can see it once yourself in the situation of all the other people and then you think no I don't want to control these people I would like them yes to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do but obviously I can't force that because if I forced it they wouldn't be happy see when you marry someone when you have a family you want your children you want your relatives you want your wife etc to be happy to do the things for you that they do and so we say to each other um would you like to bring the washing in and very often the answer's no but I will [Laughter] because you can see we put it that way because we always hope that the things that we do for each other will be pleasurable to both sides so a schoolteacher will get up in class and says what nice boy will clean the blackboard for me all these ways we use are trying to get voluntary cooperation willingly given help that's what we look for but there is a despite that a lot of foolishness that goes on this is the sound thing you see that there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do for you what you want because they like it as you on your side would want to do something for them in that way and so as to give pleasure to the other person has take in in in sexuality where you get a kind of a critical example of this the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving orgasm to women and if that doesn't happen many men feel disappointed because the thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it now that's compassion in the real sense of the word feeling with and through someone else where the whole trick is that you lose control for a while of the situation and say I throw the ball to you now it's yours now I may seem therefore as a result of talking in its way to be talking like a Jewish or a Christian theologian because that's what they say about God that God did something called canosa's in the beginning of all time kenosis is a greek word meaning self-emptying self-sacrifice giving up and thereby conferred freedom of will and the power to love on angels and human beings and therefore took a terrific risk by trusting the other by trusting a principle called other that's not under your control with God of course it is ultimately under his control but he sits back and smokes a cigar sometimes and lets it go see what the children will do like the Lord in a meeting pastors a big cigar so but that you see it's really in a way the same idea as the Hindu idea when the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will the Hindu says now God gets lost in that person and gives up power and it's it's really the same thing it's the the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power so that the more you give the power away what you're really doing is your other in yourself now the more you other yourself by giving power away the more of a self you are because self another our reciprocal so you find that people who through a sadhana a yoga discipline have overcome their ego have transcended the ego are tremendously strong personalities you would think theoretically they would all be non entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego strength but actually they're nothing of the kind [Applause] they are every one of them unique they're all quite different from each other and they are very very very called strong characters because the more they have given it up the more they get it so in this way of thinking let's put it in another dimension for the moment let's suppose we we are thinking of a relationship that is not just two people people are very obviously other and independent of one's ego but give it to everything say to everything which in course is going to include as much as you over yourself as you can objectifies in other words your stomach your intestines your everything scene say to it all now it's your turn let's see what you're gonna do let it happen you know you do this complete let off of control and you find that you you let's I have to put it in a provisional way first you get the sensation that the that everything else is living you it lives you that you've given away control you see to everything else it's a lovely irresponsible state to be in [Music] this concludes CD number 2 of do you do it or does it do you with Alan Watts our program continues with CD number 3 [Music] you [Music] but then you see you you you do the flip in giving away the control you got it you've got the kind of control you wanted that's to say where you had a loving relationship to the world but you didn't have to make up your mind what it should do you let it decide now do you see that's how your bodies work you don't have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do you've delegated all that authority if the president the United States has to lay awake at nights thinking what every official under his command is going to do he can't be President he's got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way as you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do and this is the secret of what we will call organic power as distinct from political power loud sir puts it in this way the great Dow 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 the more therefore you relinquish power trust others the more powerful you become but in such a way that instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else and they carry it on for you so you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning you can even tell it I want to wake up at six o'clock and it'll wake you up just like an alarm clock this seems a sort of paradox to say this but the principle of unity of coming to a sense of of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe is not to try to be obtained power over the rest of the universe that will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever the way to become one with the universe is to trust it as another as you would another and say let's see what you're going to do but in doing that you see in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you you are also saying it to yourself because finally as I pointed out you do not know where your decisions come from they pop up like hiccups and when you make a decision people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions who's this guy who farmer who ordered a help man to come in and family was an extraordinarily efficient worker because the first day he put him on sawing logs and he saw more logs than anybody had ever saw it was fantastic but it all done in one day so the next day putting on put him onto mending fences and there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm and in one day he had the whole thing done so he thought what am I gonna do this guy so he took him down into a basement and said look here all are all the potatoes that have come in from this harvest and want you to sort them into three groups those that we sell those that we use for seeding and those that we throw away so he left him at that at the end of the day the laborer came back and said well that's enough mister I quit no he said you can't quit I've never had such an excellent weather I'll raise your salary I'll do anything to keep you around it I said no it's alright mending fences and chopping wood but this potato business is decision after decision after decision obviously so when we decide we're always worrying did I think this over long enough did I take enough data into consideration and if you think it through you'll find you never could take enough data into consideration the data for a decision in any given situation is infinite so what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this and then when the time comes to act you make a snap judgment I mean I'm speaking a little extremely making some fun of it and so on because after all we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds but we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right it's amazing how often it works but warriors are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen so then when you make a decision and it works out all right I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control but somehow or other you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority it's why very great businessmen others who can delegate authority trust others to work for them because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism delegation of authority it loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them and you see then the world what is happening is this the more you let go of it and trust it as if it were quite other than you the more you realize the inseparable identity of self and other to go back if you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self no-go if on the other hand you find it through giving self that is control over to other and trusting that you may make a mistake you may make a bad gamble but in the long run you are acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution this is the way biological evolution goes on constant delegation of authority that's why if obviously at the democracy is superior to the monarchy was the Tocqueville who said that democracy is always right but for the wrong reasons because there is operating in a democracy the principle the Buckminster Fuller called synergy and synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members because that's goes back again to this point that we are always entering a new environment we don't ever know fully what the new environment is because the only environments we know the past ones there is always then operating in the development of cellular life on any level a new way of organization higher than any existing form and we are not aware of it until after it's happened if you ever saw for example the film kontiki this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsa wood raft to sail from South America to the Pacific Islands but once he had set this in motion he discovered that all sorts of unexpected factors cooperated with him that when the wood got wet it expanded so that the ties bit into it and held it completely secure he'd never expected that and he found that as he sailed along a flying fish would simply a light flat on the deck every morning for breakfast that all kinds of natural factors it was just he that he had touched a key where he was flowing with the course of nature and everything cooperated with him because he had touched the key he had made the act of faith and he was just picking up in other words a practice which had been hundreds and hundreds of years ago had been followed by others who had worked it out by their great ecological awareness so we do come out of this way of thinking to something which has I would say the most enormous ly creative and revolutionary social consequences that it has become not virtuous not self-sacrificing and not anything like that it has become the hardest practical politics to let go control to others to give up trying to dominate the scene also in a parallel way it has become at this time in our history very much hard practical politics to learn how to enjoy ourselves you can go to the Protestant people with their Protestant ethic who are against this kind of thing and now say to them with greatly it is your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy yourself why because in an age of leisure people have really got to know how to enjoy themselves because if they don't they'll smash the whole future of the human race so you a utopia has become not some sort of a dream but an urgent necessity we can't do without it because if we try to do without it what's gonna happen is that we are going to terminate our race in a mutual Massacre of scapegoats and so the present paranoia in the United States that is going on where everybody is thinking up a new scapegoat and how great it will be to demolish them I'll get them out of power or all this kind of bickering and right and left politics has become irrelevant because we now have the opportunity of trusting our own intelligence our own technology to take the risk of doing what we want which will work to the extent that we realize that what I want basically what I really want is what you want and I don't know what you surprise me but that's my that's the kinship between I and off so when I ask I go right down to the question should be started with what do I want the answer is I don't know when bodhidharma was asked who are you which is another form of the same question he said I don't know planting flowers to which the butterflies come Bodhidharma says I know not I don't know what happened well when you don't know what you want you've really reached the state of desirelessness when you really don't know did you see there's a there's a beginning stage of not knowing and there's an ending stage of not knowing in the beginning stage you don't know what you want because you haven't thought about it or you've only thought superficially and then when you somebody forces you to think about it and go through and say yeah I think I'd like this I think I'd like that I think I'd like the other as the middle stage then you get beyond that say is that what I really want in the end you say no I don't think that's it I might be satisfied with it for a while and I wouldn't turn my nose up at it but it's not really what I want why don't you really know what you want two reasons that you don't really know what you want number one you have it number two you don't know yourself because you never can the Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge just as a knife doesn't cut itself fire doesn't burn itself light doesn't illumine itself it's always an endless mystery to itself I don't know and this I don't know other than the infinite interior of the spirit this I don't know is the same thing as I love I let go I don't try to force or control it's the same thing as humility and so the Upanishads say if you think that you understand brahmana you do not understand and you have yet to be instructed further if you know that you do not understand then you truly understand for the Brahman is unknown to those who know it unknown to those who know it not and the principle is that anytime you as it were voluntarily let up control in other words cease to cling to yourself you have an access of power because you're wasting energy all the time in self-defense trying to manage things trying to force things to conform to your will the moment you stop doing that that wasted energy is available and therefore you are in that sense having that energy available you are one with the Divine Principle you have the energy when you're trying however to act as if you were God that is to say you don't trust anybody and you're the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line you lose the divine energy because what you're doing is simply defending yourself so then the principle is the more you'll give it away the more it comes back now you say I don't have the courage to give it away I'm afraid and you could only overcome that by realizing you better give it away because there's no we're holding on to it the meaning of the fact you see that everything is dissolving constantly that we're all falling apart and we're all in a process of constant death and that the world we hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers and like snow upon the deserts dusty face lighting a little hour to its dawn you know all that Omar Khayyam jazz mm-hmm you know the cloud-capped towers the gorgeous palaces the great globe itself I all which it inherit shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind all falling apart everything is that's the the great assistance to you be that that fact that everything is in decay is your helper that is allowing you that you don't have to let go because there's nothing to hold ond it it's achieved for you in other words by the process of nature so once you see that you just don't have a prayer and it's all washed up and that you will vanish and leave not a rack behind and you really get with that suddenly you find you have the power this enormous access of energy but it's not power that came to you because you grabbed it came in entirely the opposite way and power comes to you in that opposite way is power with which you can be trusted of course what we've been talking about is not so much a set of ideas as an experience or shall we say experiencing and this kind of seminar in comparison with the encounter groups or workshops of various kinds or experiments in sensory awareness is now being called a conceptual seminar although I'm not talking about concepts but the crucial question arises that an understanding a real feeling understanding of the polar relationship between the individual and the world is something that operates as we say in your bones and isn't just a view that you hold or a belief that you hold it's so curious that the emphasis of the Western tradition in religion is primarily upon right belief do you believe in the right dogmas and the right doctrines and only secondarily upon right action because what you believe is in Christianity at any rate far more important than what you do because one is saved through faith not by works and early in its history the Christian Church rejected the movement in the church which had been known as Canasta sysm from the Greek gnosis which means knowledge and in a way there were some sound reasons for doing so because the ganache sticks were what I would call anti materialists they divided human beings into three classes that were called respectively pneumatic psychic and Hayek last one being h yl IC from the Greek Haile or they would call it now L a Ely meaning wood so the people were spiritual psychological and wooden and that is to say the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality and most closely identified with their bodies and Orthodox Christianity rejected this sort of distinction because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence is not inconsistent with spirituality this is something which most Christians have forgotten but they do believe as the central principle of Christianity in what's called the Incarnation that in the Jesus of Nazareth Almighty God did in fact become material become human and by this process initiated a transformation of the cosmos in the words of Saint Athanasius God became man that man might become God and you don't hear that from the pulpit very often the Christian Church therefore emphasized pista soar faith as against you gnosis or knowledge because they said you can never know God God could never become an object of knowledge and in this funny roundabout way the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus only the Hindus do call this knowledge of God through faith they call it jnana which is the same as the Greek word gnosis but just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things he just says he doesn't know but the original word agnosia in greek meant a special kind of knowledge it was called the dark knowledge of God the knowledge of God in the Cloud of Unknowing to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk this monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of dionysius the areopagite Dionysus was a fifth or sixth century syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from porphyry who got it from plutinos who was a neoplatonist and who probably got a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of alexandria and alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous exchange place between east and west Buddhist monks visited Alexandria it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know all Rome's gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed they bought too much luxury from India India in exchange got Roman architecture and you'll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples but Alexandria was the great Center for the Gnostics and for Christian theology and some of the greatest theologians Clement Origen Athanasius Saint Cyril all worked out of Alexandria we're now going back to this strange monk dionysius it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowledge as the knowledge of God by faith by agnosia really by unknowing and he in a book which he wrote very short book called the theologian Mystica he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads in certain parts of it the last section of it reads like the man do kill punished and because it's a series of negations it says what God is not and he goes very far because he says that God is not one he says our idea of unity falls far short of what God is so does our idea of Trinity so does our idea of spirit our idea of mind of justice of love all these things ah not really God and he says in another place if anybody having seen God understood what he had seen what he would have seen would not have been God but some creature of God less than God some sort of angel or something like that it's perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of dionysius the areopagite he became identified you see with Saint Paul's first convert in Athens and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul now where he's known as some Denis but some Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of dionysius the areopagite as having the highest authority and you could if all the texts of Dionysus his work had been lost you could restore most of it from quotations in some Thomas he wrote really two very important books one was the one I said with the theologian estiga the other was called the divine names and these two books presented the two phases of his theology the book called the divine names was a discussion on the nature of God in terms of what God is like by analogy and this kind of knowledge of God he called catyph attic from the Greek Femi to speak or say Qatar meaning to say according to that is to say to speak by analogy where he used though entirely negative language about God this sort of discourse was called apophatic and the word appo meaning away from to talk away from just as a sculptor when he makes an image reveals the image by removing stone and so darn Isis explained that one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts which is exactly what the Hindus mean when they say of God one can only say neti neti not this not this not any conception thus in Hindu philosophy the highest state of consciousness in Samadhi is called nirvikalpa samadhi which means literally non conceptual vikalpa means a concept near is a negation so the non conceptual knowledge now people have greatly misunderstood this they have imagined that unknowing the state of the highest contemplation was the acquisition of a blank mind from which you first discarded thought you went on to discard perception he went on to discard any kind of sensory content in awareness until you were so far as anyone could say aware of nothing and they supposed that this kind of catatonic state was mystical consciousness this is often believed in India if you go to the Vedanta Society and asked what do you mean by nearly Kalpa Samadhi they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever of the sensory world that he's completely absorbed as you sometimes see Hindu holy men sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf to everything going on around them the founder of Chinese then known as hainan described people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood he said it's a very serious mistake indeed to confuse Tsun yatta the sanskrit word for the great void which is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof it is a great mistake to confuse it with nothingness it is rather to be thought of as space or like space because space is not empty it contains the whole universe and so in the same way the State of Mind of a person who is truly enlightened he is not empty it contains everything but like space it is not stained by what it contains and it's often said in Zen imagery you can't hammer a nail into space you can't spit on the sky and soil it if you try the spit will just return and hit your own face so they go on to say the consciousness in all of us your basic mind is like space it is completely pure but of course by purity they don't mean unsexual which is of course what purity generally means in the Western world blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God a person who's pure in heart has generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts you know what naughty means means vain negative empty a naughty person therefore as one who doesn't amount to anything was just nothing that's the real meaning but this misunderstanding of the nature of contemplation existed not only in India from which it was transmitted to China but also in the West you read many treatises on Western mysticism and the still the feeling that getting into a deep deep trance sometimes called rapture again the word rapture has undergone some transformations we talk about rapture as people being beside themselves with pleasure but to be wrapped means to be taken away from the body so also ecstasy we now interpret as meaning in a state of high pleasure but it means to be outside yourself to stand outside yourself your soul has left you it is with God as Arabs say of all crazy people be kind to them they're not here their soul is with God but actually if it can be true as Buddhists say that Nirvana and sansara are one and if it can be true as Christians say that the spirit can be made flesh the word can be made flesh then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting in a trance like a lump on a log with a perfectly blank mind because if that were the highest state of consciousness it would be an exclusive state of mind a state of mind that shuts out life and in that sense it could not qualify for being what the Hindus called non-dualistic they always speak of the highest reality as being not one because one excludes many not nothing because nothing excludes something not being because being excludes non being and vice-versa and so they use this word non dual to mean that which doesn't exclude anything which as it were has no outside as we say space has no outside you can only have outsides inside space you can't have any outsides outside space there is no outside space even though space may be curved and finite so if you want to think incidentally of that curved space go and take a look at photograph in the life a book on mathematics well there's a picture of a klein bottle which is a three-dimensional mobius strip there might be a strip you know is a piece of paper that is twisted once and then joined and it has only one side and only one edge now our Klein bottle is a three-dimensional mobius strip and it only has one inside it has no outside you can say it has an inside and no outside or it has an outside and no inside it's a fabulous little little trick but there's something like that would be the nature of space as that which does indeed trilliant transcend the opposites mm not quite now we'd have to do one extra move on a serpent to make it into a client bottle you'd have to tuck its head through the ins through the side of its skin and make the aperture through the mouth continuous with the inside of the serpent towards the tail you see that's more or less what bottle is so what I'm getting to I'm giving you something out of the general history of religions to show that what has been meant by the mystical state the state of Samadhi or awakening in certain traditions is not this state of trance about a state of consciousness in which you can perfectly well carry on your daily affairs and of course what is meant by a bodhisattva as the ideal type of Buddhist person is that he is not wrapped that he is actively engaged in the life of the world because he has gone beyond the illusion that nirvana is to be found away from everyday life so what is then the point of meditation why meditate why do you have to crawl off into a hole or go to a Zen monastery or retire and be quiet when this is only a withdrawal is there anything to be said for it our meditation is in there in that sense as a practice as a discipline is a very curious problem because from one point of view it's a help and from another point of view a hindrance and I think we have to understand first of all that meditation exercises are medicinal rather than dietary the same could be said of LSD a medicine not a diet something that is described in Zen as when you want to open a door or summon someone to open the door for you you pick up a brick and you knock on the door but you don't carry the brick into the house when you need a raft for crossing a stream you cross the stream on the raft but you leave the raff on the bank at the other side you don't go carrying it around but a lot of people when they get into meditation or they get into religion or into any kind of exploration of this sort turn the door into a revolving door and keep on going round and round and round and never get through they say what a gasp it is to be in this revolving door it's anything a good definition of a parasite is the person who goes through a revolving door on someone else's push so there are all sorts of people in the religious racket who are going through revolving doors and they're very bitter about people who walk right through and leave the door behind because they say well you haven't paid enough respect you must really understand religious one-upmanship it's a tremendously important thing and don't be caught out by this because what happens is there's a little game going on which I'm going to initiate you into and it's played in Zen which is it works like this if you go to a teacher and ask for rich spiritual instruction or even if you come to a seminar like this you are by doing that confusing yourself because you are looking for what you're asking for outside as if someone else could give it to you as if you didn't have it so the teacher knows that as long as you do that you haven't understood but he doesn't just tell you to go away he may sometimes just say go away I'm too busy and I'm any in any case I can't tell you anything well people won't take that for an answer they won't take no for an answer and furthermore if he just said go away they would just find some other teacher who would exploit them and maybe keep them as followers for years and acquire a great deal of money by so doing what he does is another thing he tries to give them the put down as if to say you have a great long distance to go yet your attainment is not at all perfect and where are they they're always talking about other sects and other schools and saying well they haven't really got the point you see so that you keep losing faith in yourself and feeling my goodness I haven't yet attained this thing and that keeps you working not all the time you're being talked out it's like someone who's a pickpocket and he's stolen your own watch and is selling it to you but just so long as you can be talked out of yourself you deserve to be [Laughter] now you become very aware of this if you ever do momentarily slip into some sort of a mystical experience you become aware of this tremendous gamesmanship going on and you see it is sort of continuous with with all sorts of cosmic games that are going on of creatures eating other creatures up and the creatures that get eaten of course transform themselves into the creatures that eat them and then in turn eat other creatures and that you you see the whole hide-and-seek game going on and then you realize very clearly that the state of development that you are in now is no better and no worse than anybody else's state because it's like space again which planet is an or which star is in the best position well it's all equal they're all in the middle anyone can be considered as the center one any point on a sphere is the center of the surface of the sphere so you know that in the same way everybody in all his behavior whatever he's doing whether we call him from a certain point of view sick or whether we call him healthy whether we call him good or bad neurotic normal psychotic saying all the manifestations are just like the leaves on the trees and in each being in a unique way is as Christians would say manifesting the will of God so they're really if from that point of view there is nothing to do to attain buddhahood nothing at all but you see that's very difficult to understand because a lot of people when they hear that there's nothing to do try to do nothing and you can't because you are karma and karma means action you can't do nothing but the thing you're looking for or think you're looking for is what you're doing is what's called you only of course as we all know we've got ourselves into the idea that oneself is so difficult to see because it's like as I've often said trying to bite your own teeth or look into your own eyes and you can't find it it's always behind it's like your head is from the optical point of view a blank space neither light nor dark it's right in the middle of everything and so one of the great tricks of gurus is to set people looking for their heads there's a famous story of a king in India and ancient times called yajna Dutta and one morning he woke up and reached out for his mirror and brought it over no head he was looking in the wrong side of the mirror you know he was kind of bleary-eyed and had a hangover so he summoned servants and said he gots I've lost my head find it and they said but your majesty it's there on your shoulders he said it is not I can't see it in the mirror nobody can show me my head so they were rushing all over the place looking for the head now the trick to that is of course that you are perfectly well aware of your head only not in a form in which you expect to be aware of it you expect to be aware of your own head in the same way as you're aware of other people's heads but that wouldn't be true of you because you've got an inside view on your head you have an outside view one of other people's heads because of course you're taking an inside point-of-view but the way in which you are aware of your head is in terms of what you are seeing and hearing because all sights and all sounds are what the nerves inside your head are doing that's how to be aware of one's head you are aware therefore of yourself the mysterious self that you have in terms of experience because there isn't really any difference but that always escapes people you see so perpetually so long as you don't understand that you can be talked into going on to all kinds of weird excursions and just so long as you believe it you're a sucker you're hooked and it takes a tremendous inner confidence and nerve finally to say I mean it don't pull that stunt on me anymore I see through your game and because guru's a very clever at putting you down but they're just trying to see how strong you are testing you out see if they can hoodwink you so long as they can you see they're gonna go on doing it because they've got to get you to the point where they can't do it to you anymore then they'll graduate and so one of RINs i's students after he saw through it said well it wasn't much in rin sized buddhism after all of course there wasn't he said boldly and straight out my teaching is just like using an empty fist to deceive a child you know when you play games with a child and pretend you've got something here and the child goes into all kinds of tizzy to get you to open your hand and show what it is and then there's nothing fooled see you so you can be fooled as long as you can be fooled when you can't be fooled you don't ask the question anymore because it's all become clearer it's all become clear that there is no puzzle about this universe what makes you think the Rapunzel out this universe very simple reason you're trying to explain it and when you explain things what you would what do you mean by explanation there are several meanings of explanation there's really one basic meaning but first of all to be able to translate what is happening in terms of words or numbers in other words to describe but a real explanation is not just the description it's a description which enables us to control what we are describing but didn't we see in the last session that to control the world is not really what we want to do so that if all explanations have as their function enabling us to control things then maybe an explanation isn't what we wanted and furthermore you can very simply see that what makes things complicated is explaining them when somebody explains to you how a flower works and he's a great botanist and analyzes all the innards of the flower and shows the channels the fibers the processes of reproduction and so on that go on in it everybody stands fascinated see how complicated that is how clever God must have been to create that flower to have all that complexity going it seemed complicated at all it's only complicated when you start thinking about it because the vehicle of words is a very clumsy one and when you try to talk about the processes of nature what is complicated is not the processes of nature but trying to put them into words that's as complicated as trying to drink up the ocean with a fork takes forever and so this intense complexity that we see in everything is created by our attempt to analyze it all and so what we do is you see when we analyze we use our eyes and ears as scalpels and we dissect everything and we have to put a label on every piece we chop off and so we scalpel eyes and we get it right down to atoms getting finer and finer and we suddenly thought well we've got to the end of it because the word atom means what is not cuttable optimist but any family could cut the atom and lo and behold big fleas had little fleas upon their backs to buy them and it goes on forever there is no end to the my Newton s which you can unveil through physical investigation for the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into pieces and the sharper you can sharpen your knife the finer you can cut it and the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed and the sophisticated instruments that we can now make that was probably no limit to it but in a way all that is vain knowledge in a way because you see it what it does is it gives you the illusion that you've solved your problem when you have control certain things and you have solved certain problems practical problems you say fine more of that please let's go on solving problems and then you do and you create a world of people as we are today far more comfortable than people who lived in the 19th century just remember the troubles of going to a dentist when you were children or some of you when you were children of medicine of badly heated homes of all sorts of things that we don't put up with anymore but the problem is we keep running into this thing that all constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious and when we take it as a matter of course to have certain comforts then we switch the level on which we worry when you solve a whole set of problems people find new ones to worry about and after a while you begin to get that haven't we been here before feeling aren't we just going round on a cycle and doing the same old thing over and over and over again because we don't realize that we are take chasing our own tails by an eternally recurrent process of not knowing who you are that is the hide-and-seek that is the nature of what the hindus call the manvantara and the pralaya the period of the manvantara in which the worlds are manifested and the period of the pralaya in which the worlds are withdrawn from manifestation in and out in and out evermore came out by the same door as in I went and the thing is to get to the point where you can see that you are doing that in every moment of your existence with every tiny little atom of your body you now at this minute you see are the whole the whole system of eating and outing in other words you often think perhaps maybe a long long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world illusion and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification my friends there is no diversification in other words what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces did you forget that you cut it and so when you see the world is complicated and that there are life problems and that you might one day succeed see hundreds and hundreds of people are running like mad after something that they caught there is success and they have no idea what it is so in exactly the same way the Guru is keeping you running and running after spiritual attainment you don't know what you want see where Krishnamurti is so clever because he says if you ask me for enlightenment how can you ask me for enlightenment if you don't know what it is how do you know you wanted is it any concept you have of it will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the situation you're already in if you think you know what you're going out for all you're doing is you're seeking the past what you already know what you've already experienced therefore that's not it is it because you say you're looking for something quite new but what do you mean new what's your conception of something new well I figure I can only think about it in terms of something old something I once had so he doesn't say anything he doesn't indicate anything positively everybody says why are you so negative why don't you give us something to hang on to well if these simple answer is it would be spurious you don't need anything to hang on to your it you don't need a religion but then you say well well what is all this religious stuff about then why don't we just forget it you can try by all means go away don't go to gurus don't go to church don't enter philosophical discussions forget it but then you'll realize that by having consented to forget it you're still seeking what a trap what can you do you see if you stay here and listen to me or to anyone else who comes around here you're fooling yourself but if you go away you're fooling yourself to because you still think that's going to improve your situation it won't and therefore when you discover that it doesn't you think well maybe it was a mistake to go away and you come back to the guru and he looks at you and says uh-uh-uh-uh you are very undisciplined very very inferior student and you you need to apply yourself well as I explained I explained what he's doing but it comes down in a way to a sort of contest with a guru you see will you call his bluff you're afraid to because you might discover that if you do call his bluff he's no better than you are well that's what you're supposed to find out but without being cynical about it he's as divine as you are but you've got to call the bluff there's going to be a showdown and it's it's a double bind the whole situation is a double bond because it doesn't do any good to stay here and it doesn't do you any good to go away either to do something about it don't do nothing about it now then there's something else when you understand that and when you realize that there's nothing to realize and it's all here and then what are you gonna do well of course this is the sense of Zen poem supernatural activity and marvelous power drawing water carrying fuel no do whatever one does as a human being but there's a little element of philistinism in that it's like when a child is pestering father or mother with all sorts of questions they finally get down to the deepest metaphysical problems they say oh shut up and eat your doughnut and I wouldn't say that you see at this point because life as one looks at it you see is in fact a celebration of itself when you look out at night at the Stars and you really want a good God what is all that about well it's a firework display and it's celebrating High Holy Day its whoopee and the whole world is whoopee it's a kind of exuberance and therefore the proper function of religion is digging this it's not seeking it's not seeking anything but is in a way Thanksgiving that's why of course the Christians were right in calling the mass the the Eucharist the Thanksgiving only they had such a complicated way of thinking about it that nobody can understand it so they're in in religion all religious exercises whether they are meditative or whether they are ritualistic ah Whoopie they are not something you do in order to attain anything they are like art forms like dancing they are expressive of attainment of the attained less attainment so here's another hang-up for you when you go to mr. Suzuki who runs the Zen Center he's a good disciple of Dogen who brought then a certain school of Zen to Japan in the 13th century Dogen said you can't sit and meditate unless you're already a Buddha in which case why I meditate well meditation is just the way a Buddhist sits and he called this sitting just to sit not to attain enlightenment as the minute you do that you see you're not meditating so you only become a good meditator if you're not looking for anything and therefore you realize what a great thing it is to be able to sit and what a great thing it is not to dissect the world with your analytical intellect to be able to look out at the water or the trees or the floor and the light on it in front of you without calling it light or floor or trees or thinking that it has parts or thinking that it's complicated it isn't so when you can sit without thinking not with an empty mind mind you I'm going back to that point not with an empty mind but just a non analytic mind a non probing mind where you're not creating problems all the time by trying to control it by trying to control your mind by trying to control your experience what you see in here you then just simply discover that there is no way of controlling what you're experiencing because what you're experiencing is you and to try and really fundamentally control that this is going around a circle so if I were to say to you now what you have to learn is to let it happen that's wrong - there's no one to let it happen if I say to you accept your experience be calm and open to things that again perpetuates the illusion that you're something different from so we go round and round but if there are some people who want to get together and like we would get together to play poker or to have a walk go fishing or sail a boat if there are some people who want to get together to meditate and have rituals and to chant great it's an art form and you can only use it and make it a good art form if you're not using it to get something and this is what really is the bane of temples all over the world you go into Buddhist temples where they theoretically don't believe in any God but there are the people praying and they're all doing it in order that we get a male child next time around or that the horse recover from a disease or that mama gets cured of the dropsy and all these petitions are going on and on and on people always coming to the temple to ask for something lowbrow people for lowbrow things highbrow people for highbrow things and they're all the vendors sit outside and sell souvenirs and magic and charms and all the people go in and do this and all these serious priests sitting there really having to keep up face and say yes we can't provide these services on the other hand if you go in to one of these temples along with all the faithful followers and have a ball by a by a bead by a candle by this father by some incense go in and dig this great thing going on salute the Buddha's or the crystal the altars or the crucifixes or what you will but don't take it seriously and this is one of the great important transformations of today in our consciousness is that a great many people are finding out that religion is not supposed to be taken seriously this is a shocking thing to many people or those used to be an old saying that a religion is bad when the Beast laughs across the opera's that's true in one sense when the priests know that they've got a racket going and they don't believe one word of it and they're laughing across the altar because of all these suckers around doing it then it's true the religion is dead but when the priests laugh at the audience because they're having such fun because this whole scene is so beautiful well it's the difference between some stuffy old Buddhist priest humming a Sutra and Allen Ginsberg chanting a Sutra that's the thing to hear no they're gone for interminable it's a ball they are sick of it but they get paid for it this is magical but when our Ginsberg Johnson Sutra everybody gets in the circle he gets these little bells and they get going it's just like a it's like a jam session where everybody is absolutely delighted well that's the way to do it and if you can't do it that way forget it [Music] this concludes do you do it or does it do you with Alan Watts our program continues with CD number four [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Eye 1

Views: 652,105

Rating: 4.6625242 out of 5

Keywords: alan, watts, alan watts, spirituality, spiritual, wisdom, knowledge, lecture, occult, occult knowledge, 2017, eye, eye1, audio, wise, philosophy, Alan Watts

Id: OAFH_nwqSHQ

Length: 204min 18sec (12258 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2017