Embracing Change in Nature of Life - Alan Watts | Studio Quality Lecture

I was talking a great deal yesterday afternoon about the Buddhist attitude to change to death to the transients of the world and we're showing that preachers of all kinds stir people up in the beginning by alarming them about change that's like somebody you know actually raising an alarm adjusted the same way as if I want to pay you a visit I ring the doorbell and then we can come in and I don't need to raise an alarm anymore so uh in the same way it sounds terrible you see that everything is going to die and pass away and here you are thinking that happiness sanity and security consist in Clinging On to things which can't be clung to and in any case there isn't anybody to cling to them the whole thing is a weaving of smoke so that's the initial standpoint but as soon as you really discover this and you stop clinging to change then everything is quite different it becomes amazing and not only do all your senses become more Wide Awake not only do you feel almost that you're walking on air but you see finally that there is no Duality no difference between The Ordinary World and the Nirvana world they're the same world but what makes a difference is the point of view and of course if you keep identifying yourself with some sort of stable entity that sits and watches the world go by you don't acknowledge your union your inseparability from everything else that there is you go by with all the rest of the things but if you insist on trying to take a permanent stamp on trying to be a permanent witness of the flux then it grates against you and you feel very uncomfortable but it is a fundamental feeling in most of us that we are such Witnesses we feel that behind the stream of our thoughts of our feelings and our experiences there is something which is the Thinker the Feeler and the experiencer not recognizing that that is itself a thought feeling or experience and it belongs within and not outside the changing panorama of experience it's what you call a q signal in other words when you telephone and your telephone conversation is being tape recorded it's uh the law that there shall be a beep every so many seconds and that beep cues you in to the fact that this conversation is recorded So in a very similar way in our everyday experience there's a beep which tells us this is a continuous experience which is mine beep in the same way for example uh it is a q signal when a composer arranges some music and he keeps in it a recurrent theme but he makes many variations on it or more subtle still he keeps within it a consistent Style so you know that its Mozart all the way along because that sounds like Mozart there isn't as it were a constant noise going all the way through to tell you it's continuous although in Hindu music they do have something called a drone there is uh behind all the drums and every kind of singing summing it goes and it always sounds the note which is the tonic of the scale being used but in Hindu music that drone represents the Eternal self the Brahman behind all the changing forms of nature but that's only a symbol and to find out what is eternal uh you can't make an image of it you can't hold on to it and so it's psychologically more conducive to liberation to remember that the Thinker or the feeler or the experiencer and the experiences are all together they're all one but if out of anxiety you try to stabilize keep permanent the separate Observer you are in for conflict of course the separate Observer The Thinker of the thoughts is an abstraction which we create out of memory we think of the self the ego rather as a repository of memories a kind of safety deposit box or record or filing cabinet place where all our experiences are stored now that's not a very good idea it's more that memory is a dynamic system not a storage system it's a repetition of rhythms and these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience in other words first of all how do you distinguish between something known now and a memory actually you don't know anything at all until you remember it because if something happens that is purely instantaneous if a light flashes or uh to be more accurate if there is a flash lasting only one millionth of a second you probably wouldn't really experience it because it wouldn't give you enough time to remember it we say in customer speech well it has to make an impression so in a way all present knowledge is memory because you look at something and uh for a while the rods and cones in your retina respond to that and they go they do their stuff jiggle jiggle jiggle it's all vibration and so as as you look at things they set up a series of Echoes in your brain and these Echoes keep reverberating because the brain is very complicated first of all everything you know is remembered but there is a way that in which we distinguish between seeing somebody here now and the memory of having seen somebody else who's not here now but whom you did see in the past and you know perfectly well when you remember that other person's face it's not an experience of the person being here how is this because memory signals have a different cue attached to them the unpresent time signals they come on a different kind of vibration sometimes however the wiring gets mixed up and present experiences come to us with a memory queue attached to them and then we have what is called a Deja Vu experience we are quite sure we've experienced this thing before but the problem is that we don't see don't ordinarily recognize is that although memory is a series of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them so that we don't confuse them with present experience they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience they are all part of this constantly flowing life process and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process watching it Go by you're all involved now accepting that you see going with that although at first it sounds like the nail of Doom is if you don't touch it anymore it's Blended that's why I said that death should be an occasion for a great celebration that people should say happy death uh and always surround death with joyous rights because this is the opportunity for the greatest of all experiences when you can finally let go because you know there's nothing else to do there was a kamikaze pilot who escaped because uh his his plane that he was flying at an American aircraft carrier went wrong and he landed in the water instead of hitting the plane so he survived but he said afterwards that he had the most extraordinary state of exaltation it wasn't a kind of patriotic ecstasy but the very thought that in a moment he would cease to exist he would just be gone for some mysterious reason that he couldn't understand made him feel absolutely like a god well then in Buddhist philosophy this a sort of annihilation of oneself this acceptance of change is the doctrine of the world as the void this Doctrine did not emerge very clearly very prominently in Buddhism until quite a while after Gautama the Buddha had lived we begin to find this though becoming prominent about the year 100 BC and by 200 A.D it had reached its peak and it was developed by the Mahayana Buddhists and it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature which goes by this complex name means wisdom paramita or crossing over going Beyond there is a small ragna paramita Sutra a big prognia paramita Sutra and then there's a little short summary of the whole thing called the Freedia or heart Sutra and that is recited by Buddhists all over Northern Asia Tibet China and Japan and it contains the saying that which is void is precisely the world of form that which is formed is precisely the void form is emptiness Emptiness is form so on and it elaborates on this theme it's very short but it's always chanted at an important Buddhist ceremonies and so it is supposed by Scholars of all kinds who uh have a missionary background that the Buddhists are nihilists that they teach that the world is really nothing there isn't anything and that there seems to be something is purely an illusion but of course this philosophy is much more subtle than that the main person who was responsible for developing and maturing this philosophy was nagarjuna and he lived about 200 A.D one of the most astonishing Minds that the human race has ever produced and the name of nagarjuna's school of thought is majamika which means really the doctrine of the of the middle way but it's sometimes also called the doctrine of emptiness or sunyavada from the basic word or sometimes shunya has ta added on the end and that tah means Ness emptiness well then emptiness means essentially transience that's the first thing it means nothing to grasp nothing permanent nothing to hold on to but it means this with special reference to ideas of reality ideas of God ideas of the self the Brahman anything you like what it means is that reality escapes all Concepts if you say there is a God that's a concept if you say there is no God that's a concept and nagarjuna is saying that always your Concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve or wrap it up in a parcel so he invented a method of teaching Buddhism which was an extension of the dialectic method that the Buddha himself first used and this became uh the great way of studying especially at the University of nalanda which has been re-established in modern times but of course it was destroyed by the Muslims when they invaded India the University of nalanda where the dialectic method of Enlightenment was taught the dialectic method is perfectly simple it can be done with this individual student and a teacher or with a group of students and a teacher and you would be amazed how effective it is when it involves precious little more than discussion some of you no doubt have attended tea groups blab labs in which people are there and they don't know quite why they're there and the some sort of the so-called resource person to disturb them and after a while they get the most incredible emotions and uh somebody tries to to dominate the discussion of the group say and then the group kind of goes into the question of why he's trying to dominate it and so on and so forth well these were the original blablabs and they have been repeated in modern times with the most startling effects that is to say the teacher gradually elicits from his participant students what are their basic premises of life what is your metaphysic in the sense I'm not using metaphysic in a kind of a spiritual sense but what are your basic assumptions want real ideas do you operate on as to what is right and what is wrong what is the good life and what is not what arguments are you going to argue strongest where do you take your step the teacher soon finds this out for each individual concerned and then he demolishes it he absolutely takes away that person's compass and so they start getting very frightened and say to the teacher all right I see now of course I'm I can't depend on this but what should I depend and unfortunately the teacher doesn't offer any alternative suggestions but simply goes on to examine the question why do you think you have to have something to depend on now this is kept up over quite a period and the only thing that keeps the students from going insane is the presence of a teacher who seems to be perfectly happy but is not proposing any ideas he's only demolishing so we get finally not quite finally to the void the shunya and what then when you get to the void there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief that's Nirvana phew as I gave a proper English translation of Nirvana ah great so they are liberated and yet they can't quite say why or what it is that they found out so they call it the void uh nagarjuna went on to say you mustn't cling to the void you have to void the void and so the void of non-void is the Great State as it were of nagaduna's Buddhism but you must remember that all that has been voided all that has been denied are those Concepts in which one has hitherto attempted to pin down what is real in Zen Buddhist texts they say you cannot nail a peg into the sky and so to be a man of the sky a man of the Void is also called a man not depending on anything and when you're not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn't hung on anything which is the universe which doesn't hang you see where would it hang it has no no place to fall on even though it may be dropping there will never be the crash of it landing on concrete floor somewhere but the reason for that is that it won't crash below because it doesn't hang above and so there is a poem in Chinese which speaks of such a person as having above not a tile to cover the head below not an inch of ground on which to stand and you see this which to People Like Us who are accustomed to Rich imageries of the Divine the loving father in Heaven who has laid down the Eternal laws a word of God incarnate a wisdom from above oh truth unchanged unchanging a lighter life and love the wisdom which from the hallowed page Lantern for our footsteps shines out from age to age see so that's very nice we feel we know where we are and that it's all been written down and that in heaven the Lord God is resplendent with Glory with all the colors of the rainbow with all the saints and Angels around and everything like that so we we feel that it's positive that we've got a real rip roaring gutsy religion full of color and so on but it doesn't work that way roaring gutsy religion full of color and so on but it doesn't work that way the more clear your image of God the less powerful it is because you're clinging more it's an idol avoiding it completely isn't going to turn it into what you think of as void what would you think of as void being lost in a fog so that it's white all around you can't see in any direction being in the Darkness or the color of your head is perceived by your eyes that's probably the best illustration that we would think of as the void because it isn't black and it doesn't white it isn't anything but that's still not take the lesson from the head how does your head look to your eyes well I tell you it looks like what you see out in front of you as all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head so it's the same with it and so for this reason the great six patriarch went on China said that it was a great mistake for those who were practicing Buddhist Meditation try to make their minds empty and a lot of people tried to do that they sat down and tried to have no thoughts whatever in their minds not only no thoughts but no sense experiences so they'd close their eyes they'd plug up their ears and uh generally go in for sensory deprivation well sensory deprivation if you know how to handle it can be quite interesting it'll have the same sort of results as uh taking LSD or something like that and there are special Labs made nowadays where you can be sensory deprived to an amazing degree but if you're a sort of a good Yogi this doesn't bother you at all send some people crazy but if you dig this world you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene also especially if they get you into a condition of weightlessness skin divers going down below a certain number of feet I don't know exactly how far it is but get a sense of weightlessness and at the same time this deprives them of every sense of responsibility they become alarmingly happy and they have been known to Simply take off their masks and offer them to a fish and of course they then drown so if you skin dive and you keep you have to keep your eye on the time you have to have a water watch or a friend who's got a string attached to you if you go down that far and at a certain specific time you know you have got to get back however happy you feel and however much inclined to say survival survival what the hell's the point of that and this is happening to the men who go out into space they will increasingly find that they have to have automatic controls to bring them back I decide that they can't change in any way from the spaceship Now isn't that interesting can you become weightless here I said a little while ago that the person who really accepts transience begins to feel weightless when Suzuki was asked what is it like to have experienced Satori Enlightenment he said it's just like ordinary everyday experience but about two inches off the ground sir the Taoist said it is easy enough to stand still the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground why do you feel so heavy it isn't just a matter of gravitation and weight it is that you feel that you are carrying your body around so there is a koan in Zen Buddhism who is it that carries this corpse around so when you feel a weak common speech expresses us all the time life is a drag I feel I'm just dragging myself around my body is a burden to me to whom that's the question you see and when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden the body isn't a burden but so long as you fight it it is so then when there is nobody left to resist the thing that we call change which is simply another word for life and when we dispel the illusion that we think our thoughts instead of being just a stream of thoughts and that we feel our feelings instead of being just feelings it's like saying you know to feel the feelings is a redundant expression it's like saying actually I hear sounds for there are no sounds which are not heard hearing is sound seeing his sight you don't see sights sightseeing is a ridiculous word you could just say the sighting or seeing one or the other but sightseeing is nonsense so we keep the doubling our words and this doubling is comparable to oscillation in an electrical system where there's too much feedback where are you remember in the old-fashioned telephone where the receiver was separate from this from the mouthpiece the transmitter uh if you wanted to annoy someone who was abusing you on the telephone you could make them listen to themselves by putting the receiver to the mouthpiece but it actually didn't have that effect it set up oscillation it started to howl could be very very hard on the ears the same way if you turn a television camera at the monitor that is to say the television set in the studio the whole thing will start to jiggle the visual picture will be of oscillation like that and the same thing happens here when you get to think that you think your thoughts the you standing aside the thoughts has the same sort of consequence as seeing double and then you think can I observe the Thinker thinking the thoughts or I am worried and I ought not to worry but because I can't stop worrying I'm worried because I worry and you see where that could lead to it leads to exactly the same situation that happens in the telephone and that is what we call anxiety trembling but this discipline that we're talking about of nagarjunas abolishes anxiety because you discover that no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that's going to happen in other words from the first standpoint the worst is going to happen you're all going to die and don't just put it off in the back of your mind and say I'll consider that later it's the most important thing to consider now because it enables you it is the mercy of nature because it's going to enable you to let go and not defend yourself all the time waste all energies in self-defense so go and not defend yourself all the time waste all energies and self-defense so this doctrine of the Void is really the basis of the whole Mahayana movement in Buddhism it's marvelous the void of course is in Buddhist imagery symbolized by a mirror because a mirror has no color and yet reflects all colors when this man I talked to you of huenang said that you uh shouldn't just try to cultivate a blank mind what he said was this the void is like space now space contains everything the mountains the oceans the Stars the good people and the bad people the plants the animals everything now the the mind in US the true mind is like that you will find that when Buddhists use the word mine they have several words for mine but I'm not going into the technicality they mean space see space is your mind it's very difficult for us to see that because we think we're in space and look out at it there are various kinds of space there's visual space distance there is audible space silence there is temporal space we say between times there is musical space so-called distance between intervals or the intervals between tones rather but a different kind of space than temporal or visual space tangible space that all these spaces you see are the mind they are the dimensions of consciousness and so this great space which every one of us separate ends from a slightly different point of view in which the Universe moves this is the mind so it's represented by a mirror because although the mirror has no color it is for that reason able to receive all the different colors Meister Eckhart said in order to see color my eye has to be freed from color so in the same way in order not only to see but also here see feel you have to have an empty head and the reason why you are not aware of your brain cells unless you're only aware of your brain cells if you get a tumor or something in the brain when it gets sick but in the ordinary way you're totally unconscious of your brain cells their void and for that reason you see everything else so that's the central principle of the Mahayana and it works in such a way you see that it releases people from the notion that Buddhism is clinging to the void this was very important when Buddhism went into China the Chinese really dug this because Chinese are a very practical people and when they found these Hindu Buddhist monks trying to empty their minds and to sit perfectly still and not to engage in any family activities they were celibates Chinese thought they were crazy why do that and so the Chinese reformed Buddhism and they allowed Buddhist priests to marry and in fact what they especially enjoyed was the Sutra that came from India in which a Layman was a wealthy Merchant called vimala kirti out argued all the other disciples of Buddha and of course you know if in these These are these dialectic arguments that are very very intense things if you win the argument everybody else has to be your disciple hahaha so vimala Kitty the Layman won the debate even with manjusri who is the bodhisattva of supreme wisdom they all had to see a contest to define the void and all of them gave their definitions finally manjusri gave his asked then for his definition and he said nothing and so he won the whole argument hahaha under a silence when you get to the void there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief that's Nirvana phew as I gave a proper English translation of Nirvana ah great so they are liberated and yet they can't quite say why or what it is that they found out so they call it the void but nagarjuna went on to say you mustn't cling to the void you have to void the void and so the void of non-void is the Great State as it were of nagarjuna's Buddhism but you must remember that all that has been voided all that has been denied are those Concepts in which one has hitherto attempted to pin down what is real in Zen Buddhist texts they say you cannot nail a peg into the sky and so to be a man of the sky a man of the Void is also called a man not depending on anything and when you're not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn't hung on anything which is the universe which doesn't hang you see where would it hang it has no no place to fall on even though it may be dropping there will never be the crash of it landing on concrete floor somewhere but the reason for that is that it won't crash below because it doesn't hang above and so there is a poem in Chinese which speaks of such a person as having above not a tile to cover the head below not an inch of ground on which to stand and you see this which to People Like Us who are accustomed to Rich imageries of the Divine the loving father in Heaven who has laid down the Eternal laws a word of God incarnate a wisdom from about oh truth unchanged unchanging a lighter life and love the wisdom which from the hallowed page Lantern for our footsteps shines out from age to age so that's very nice we feel we know where we are and that it's all been written down and that in heaven the Lord God is resplendent with gory with all the colors of the rainbow with All Saints and Angels around and everything like that so we we feel that there's a positive that we've got a real rip roaring gutsy religion full of color and so on but it doesn't work that way roaring gutsy religion full of color and so on but it doesn't work that way the more clear your image of God the less powerful it is because you're clinging more it's an idol avoiding it completely isn't going to turn it into what you think of as void what would you think of as void being lost in a fog so that it's white all around you can't see in any direction being in the Darkness or the color of your head is perceived by your eyes that's probably the best illustration that we would think of as the void because it isn't black and it doesn't white it isn't anything but that's still not take the lesson from the head how does your head look to your eyes well I tell you it looks like what you see out in front of you as all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head so it's the same with this and so for this reason the great sixth patriarch way none China said that it was a great mistake for those who were practicing Buddhist Meditation try to make their minds empty and a lot of people tried to do that they sat down and tried to have no thoughts whatever in their minds not only no thoughts but no sense experiences so they'd close their eyes they'd plug up their ears and uh generally go in for sensory deprivation well sensory deprivation if you know how to handle it can be quite interesting it'll have the same sort of results as taking LSD or something like that and there are special Labs made nowadays where you could be sensorily deprived to an amazing degree but if you're a sort of a good Yogi this doesn't bother you at all send some people crazy but if you dig this world you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene also especially if they get you into a condition of weightlessness skin divers going down below as a repository of memories a kind of safety deposit box or record or filing cabinet place where all our experiences are stored now that's not a very good idea it's more that memory is a dynamic system not a storage system it's a repetition of rhythms and these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience in other words first of all how do you distinguish between something known now and a memory actually you don't know anything at all until you remember it because if something happens that is purely instantaneous if a light flashes or uh to be more accurate if there is a flash lasting only one millionth of a second you probably wouldn't really experience it because it wouldn't give you enough time to remember it we say in customer speech well it has to make an impression so in a way all present knowledge is memory because you look at something and for a while the rods and cones in your retina respond to that and they go they do their stuff it's all vibration and so as as you look at things they set up a series of Echoes in your brain and these Echoes keep reverberating because the brain is very complicated first of all everything you know is remembered but there is a way that in which we distinguish between seeing somebody here now and the memory of having seen somebody else who is not here now but whom you did see in the past and you know perfectly well when you remember that other person's face it's not an experience of the person being here how is this because memory signals have a different cue attached to them then present time signals they come on a different kind of vibration sometimes however the wiring gets mixed up and present experiences come to us with a memory queue attached to them and then we have what is called a Deja Vu experience we are quite sure we've experienced this thing before but the problem is that we don't see don't ordinarily recognize is that although memory is a series of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them so that we don't confuse them with present experience they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience they are all part of this constantly flowing life process and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process watching it Go by you're all involved now accepting that you see going with that although at first it sounds like the nail of Doom is if you don't clutch it anymore Splendid that's why I said that death should be an occasion for a great celebration that people should say happy death uh and always surround death with joyous rights because this is the opportunity for the greatest of all experiences when you can finally let go because you know there's nothing else to do there was a kamikaze pilot who escaped because uh his his plane that he was flying at an American aircraft carrier went wrong and he landed in the water instead of hitting the plane so he survived but he said afterwards that he had the most extraordinary state of exaltation it wasn't a kind of patriotic ecstasy but the very thought that in a moment he would cease to exist he would just be gone for some mysterious reason that he couldn't understand made him feel absolutely like a god well then in Buddhist philosophy this a sort of annihilation of oneself this acceptance of change is the doctrine of the world as the void this Doctrine did not emerge very clearly very prominently in Buddhism until quite a while after gotem of the Buddha had lived we begin to find this though becoming prominent about the year 100 BC and by 200 A.D it had reached its peak and it was developed by the Mahayana Buddhists and it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature which goes by this complex name foreign means wisdom paramita crossing over or going Beyond there is a small ragna parameter Sutra a big prognia parameter Sutra and then there's a little short summary of the whole thing called the kridaya

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Views: 26,993

Keywords: alan watts, spirituality, growth, self improvement, consciousness, higher dimension

Id: _eERfsNOGcQ

Length: 52min 51sec (3171 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023