Go With the Flow - Alan Watts Speech & Ambient Music #alanwatts​ #focus #selfhelp #loveyourself

the 17th century master writes in one of his poem he uses the phrase taking hold of the no thought in the midst of thoughts so that means having a mind that is in a way like a mirror juan sir the chinese taoist said the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror it grasps nothing it refuses nothing it receives but does not keep and so the poem says the wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection water has no mind to retain their image so where is the mind as it then that is has no attachments now attachment is a word uh that has associations in english which do not quite doesn't quite give the buddhist feeling for the meaning of the word but the slang term that we now use a hang up is the right translation for attachment when you say a person's all hung up or he has a particular hang up that is the buddhist meaning of attachment it means a mental fixation or an emotional fixation on some particular pattern of life so to get rid of hang ups one must first get rid of thinking after you've got rid of it completely and have thereby revived the background the mirror as it were the mirror mind then you can go back to thinking and you can think against the background perfectly comfortably and not get hung up on thinking and so in this way uh you get an extraordinary feeling of life going on as a single process all the time which doesn't stick you and it are all one and it's got all kinds of differentiations within it so that it doesn't become some sort of a formless blur but it is sort of uh it flows like water as water has all the patterns in it network of sunlight the ripples so on so in the same way the world has all this but it constantly flows because of no hangouts so then the the royal road to this state is giving up the sense of urgency that you ought to do something something is required of you and understand for example that looking at a rubber band on your fingers can be quite as important as anything else you can do in other words being here at this moment and listening to the sound of my voice without paying the slightest attention to what it means can be as important as anything there is in the universe why not is the tree outside important it's beautiful is it worth looking at why certainly but it's not achieving any great mission in life it's just being a tree as emerson said in his essay i think on compensation these roses under my window are not concerned whether they are better than last year's roses or whether next year's roses will be better than they there is simply the rose it lives for today and that's the point when you learn the art of meditation in this way you will see other people rushing around wildly like chickens with their heads cut off and they think they're going somewhere and they're completely deluded they're there and they don't know it that's why they're rushing around so wildly but you by this means can begin to learn that you're there now and that uh the extraordinary thing as you see the world in this way especially as you see people in this way and from this point of view you realize that people are valid natural processes just like trees and birds and clouds now do you ever criticize a cloud for being badly shaped did you ever see patterns in foam make an aesthetic mistake ah well no one just doesn't there was once an 18th century classicist one of those people who enjoyed formal gardens and kind of greek palaces who criticized the stars for not being symmetrically arranged but that would never occur to us today we don't want to see our stars in wretched geometrical patterns we love to see the scatter of them and the curious groupings through the sky in a marvelous irregular order a marvelous um orderless order you might call it yeah the the funny thing about clouds and stars and mountains and all natural outlines is that they're beautiful and we know that they have a quality which distinguishes them from being messes when you you know a mess when you see it but these things don't apparently make messes so in a way human beings don't either and when you see human life as something that is just the same kind of thing as the shape of a tree or a cloud or like that you stop judging it and you have to know that about yourself and this is the beginning of everything this is the beginning of every kind of wisdom to see that you really don't have to go anywhere you don't have to get any better than you are because with all your defects your selfishness your neuroses your sicknesses and everything well fish have neuroses and sicknesses and so on and so do plants you've often seen plants that have got bumps on them or some queer little diseases and so on and uh they they all have those sort of troubles that's life but when you realize that you are an authentic uh projection of the universe just as you are at this moment then there's nowhere to go there's no need to do anything and out of that peace comes energy real energy instead of phony energy which is trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps the usual kind of human energy which gets progressively nowhere with more and more business now beyond this state there is going to follow another which i have numbered uh five i called it cellular awareness and i must repeat the fact that i use this word cellular not in a strictly scientific way but as a good way of describing the kind of awareness that it is how it feels from the inside because it is as if every cell in your body became alive now you know your cells don't talk english but they are a very very subtly and highly organized things if you've ever seen a model of a living cell you've seen the most fantastic object and those cells are engaged in all sorts of activities but they don't structure the world the way you structure it because they don't use that language and so as you get into cellular awareness uh you begin to feel rather like the artist who paints in a pointless fashion that everything is dots little tiny vortices you become aware of the texture of things to an extraordinary degree uh it's almost as if the world had been photographed through a screen which put into the senses a feeling of intense detail as if every one of your nerve ends had was now detected in sending it separate message to the brain and so this makes the world look highly textured there are no more such things as blank green or blank white spaces all space is rich and that is what those painters are representing in doing uh spaces of the brush like this and also you will notice that certain kinds of painting particularly say persian miniatures if you look at them you will see the artist is painting the world as the arabian nights describe the secret garden into which aladdin went where all the trees were made of jewels and where everything looked as precious as if it had been carved by a master carver and they try with their art to give the impression that the more you look into the background you see suddenly that the background of a pillar the painter hasn't made it white he's put a design into it in white but just a slightly different shade of white complex design you feel that within the design there is still another design and that it has an infinitely carved rich texture this is a this is why uh oriental art in general you find this among the chinese at a certain period you find it constantly in india you find it in persia you find it in the moorish work and you find it too in early celtic manuscripts like the book of kells the lindisfarne gospels and so on this fascination with what seems to be a world of infinite detail and this of course is the world of paradise this is what uh all those angels and uh whatnot or about now from cellular consciousness you can pass to what i would call again symbolically molecular consciousness not that you are going to be aware of molecules no but it is as if suddenly uh this is the state which buddhists or part of the state which the buddhists call suchness it's as if it can be rather frightening because everything becomes perfectly meaningless people everything that's going on is just jazz almost electronic jazz it is a dancing process of energy and you feel sort of lost in it where what's supposed to happen i mean what's it all about it's this dancing energy and you can you have to be careful here because this is the danger point in the meditative process because here you can suddenly get the vision of hell and the vision of hell is that this world is a monstrous mockery that it is meaningless in the worst sense of that word it is just a gyration a pointless gyration of particles or a wavicles or of whatever which is tormenting itself it keeps itself going on with a certain kind of hope in order that it may eventually destroy things and then you see the horror of biology as the mutual eating society what a ghastly conception it all is and everything is phony people say they're people but they're not they're just robots everything is made of plastic or enamel tin uh everything is just buzz that's a danger you see here but if this happens to you uh you and you get the feeling that everything is pointless everything is just mechanical buzz uh what you do is what an arab does in a sandstorm he knows there is no possibility of conquering the sandstorm uh so he kneels down sort of in a fetal position and takes his wool bonus and covers himself completely and waits until the storm is over if he gets uh covered by sand uh it is usually uh porous enough to admit some air for breathing or in the same way as an ocean liner in a typhoon they just turn off the engines and drift it's the only thing to do so in the same way if you ever get into this particular kind of psychic horrors drift just let it be and it will resolve itself and it's important to go through that state in a way important to realize that you don't know anything you don't know what it's all about you don't understand the universe it's all incomprehensible words and systems were just a way of whistling in the dark we all whistled in the dark together and agreed that we had the same whistle and that was great but we really don't know anything anybody who proposes as an authority about anything at all is this making an authoritative noise and uh he may be able to make some remarkable demonstrations for example um by interfering with diseases in various ways we can make people healthy for a time until we can't make them healthy anymore uh this may be a good thing it may not be a good thing uh it might be best not to interfere with nature but simply to uh let human beings uh alone and regulate uh by a kind of inner natural homeostasis their own population uh level and uh let's let it happen there's no way of proving conclusively that our way of dealing with these things is better than doing nothing but life is in a way an experiment all the time uh your one's whole existence the very shape of one's body is just coming on you see you've gotta come on somehow and so uh one way is this we all come together come on together looking like each other and having certain common characteristics but look at a snake's skin every scale is rather like the other and it's all coming on together so you suddenly see that there is no particular reason why you should be this way rather than that that everybody is putting on a good show a big act and if you're not ready for that if you're not educated to the point where you can understand that situation you may get very nervous you say well everybody always wants to know what am i supposed to do see this is a common question what am i supposed to do how am i supposed to feel i want an authority i want someone to convince me that the way i'm doing it's the right way but don't you realize whenever you accept authority you accept it on your authority you say i believe the bible because why do you believe the bible because it said jesus says in the bible that we should believe the bible yeah but it's you it's all it's your opinion that that is an opinion to be accepted it's on your own authority you create the power of your own teacher and you create the power of your own government that's the saying the people gets what government it deserves and if you don't like it and you don't overthrow it well then that's your problem but always you see authority springs from you so so also does the way you define yourself you accepted society and its suggestions always rather tacitly but you did so here in this amazing moment of seeing the world as a big act as a big buzz as jazz this is doing is this is this is all vibration and you see absolutely no compelling reason why it should be that way rather than any other way well if you don't panic you see then then you get into the domain that buddhists call suchness it is just as it is now if it's a big act who's doing it who is the actor what what lies behind all this jazz that's a big question and it is through asking that question that we move from six to seven into the state that i called light because when you become aware of energy jazzing this way and that way and on top of this you have already don't forget become aware that you and the outside world are a single energy system then what is it you realize for example i do not exist as i at all unless there's something else that's other that immediately is the clue to the fact that itself and other are polar they go together well how do they go together all right put it the other way around what would you do if you were god if you were the works in other words if you were this whole capacity for patterning energy what would you do well you first of all have to draw the line somewhere and then proceed you have to make a difference because if something makes it doesn't make a difference it doesn't matter does it so if you want to make matter you've got to make a difference well if you take that along and you try all the amazing differences that can be tried and you differentiate this from that and uh and so on from so forth uh among all the possibilities of being god you will eventually arrive at what you're doing now do you be just this sort of circumstance because this will be one of the infinitely many things to do with certain restrictions on you which of course you have tacitly originated because you wouldn't know where you were without them then you suddenly see this astounding clarity that the the energy may symbolize itself to you as a sensation of intense light you see our understandings have a way of representing themselves to us in sensuous imagery we say when very happy i was walking on air you could have knocked me down with the feather ah he saw the light everything became clear are you transparent now these are not necessarily meant literally but in intense cases of insight there is a literal sensory feeling corresponding to the inside and when something becomes utterly clear in a way that is emotionally and intellectually overwhelming you are liable to have the feeling of intense light inside your head or sometimes the feeling that everything looks transparent as if it were glass but it's still there you don't actually see through it you don't see the pattern on the chair behind somebody's head but they look transparent because things have become clear and it has become at this point a light shatteringly clear that everything is it the light the energy coming on at you in different ways and you're coming on at it and it's all one coming on you can see that light is the basic component of black things there is nowhere that isn't light and if you can't see it you can hear it it comes on at you uh in all kinds of disguises so here you see it's tabling here it's handling handing here it's revolving uh it's dancing all sorts of patterns and you're it now as i said this may clothe itself this comprehension in the sensation of vivid light as being the ultimate component of the uh might say the very inside stream of the nerve reduce it all down to what it is fundamentally that's why when you blow up the atom you get this light because it's all locked in it but then simultaneously you remember how i described yesterday the fellow who gets to the heart of the wheel and gets his piece there then he gets energy and then he goes out to the circumference again well then you see that there really is no difference not fundamentally between this state of illumination and what we call number three or ordinary everyday consciousness you suddenly realize that the way things are now in the perfectly ordinary life are the same thing as the light which is sort of undifferentiated and overwhelmingly brilliant the same energy that seems to you light and that state pure light then you understand is just what you're looking at that sitting in this room you're sitting bang in the middle of the beatific vision only we've we were taught before then uh to sort of put down the world by saying well this is press a coordinate everyday life and we're just sitting in a lecture room and on these sort of funny chairs which act as perches for the human body and um you know having a lecture so on very ordinary matter of fact and you see from this point of view there's nothing ordinary about it at all while we [Laughter] so the zen poem supernatural power and marvelous activity you

Channel: Elements - Meditations & Mindfulness

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Id: 2sEh441uG-M

Length: 33min 13sec (1993 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021