It's Already Happening But People Don't See It - Alan Watts on Duality

any experience that we have through our senses whether of sound or of light or of touch is a vibration and a vibration has two aspects one called on and the other called off vibration is seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs and so life is a system of now you see it now you don't and these two aspects always go together for example sound is not pure sound it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence and that's simply the way things are only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests just as you don't encounter in life people with fronts but no backs just as you don't encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails and although the heads and the tails the fronts and the backs the positives and the negatives are different they're at the same time one [Music] and one has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things can be inseparable that what is explicitly two can at the same time be implicitly one if you forget that very funny things happen because you see the human awareness is a very odd mechanism we have as a species specialized in a certain kind of awareness which we call conscious attention the price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field i would rather say ignorance than ignorance you tend therefore to see the world in a disintegrated aspect you take separate things and events seriously imagining that these really do exist when actually they're what you make out of it now in western culture it is practically a basic assumption that existence is serious this is particular particularly true among people who call themselves existentialists when they talk about a person who exists authentically they mean that he takes his life seriously and other people's lives seriously but the poet and sas gk chesterton once observed that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly if the angels take themselves lightly how much more so the lord of the angels but you see we have been brought up in a mythological context where the lord god definitely does take himself seriously and is indeed the serious person so that when we go into church laughter is discouraged in the same way as it's discouraged in court this is a serious matter and everybody has to have the right expression on their faces because this is the great great authority figure this is grandpa and we don't realize that he has a twinkle in his eye but the basis of it all is this then if we say you must survive or i must survive life is earnest and i've got to go on then your life is a drag [Music] and not a game now it's my contention my personal opinion that existence the physical universe is basically playful there is no necessity for it whatsoever it isn't going anywhere that is to say it doesn't have some destination that it ought to arrive at but but it is best understood by analogy with music because music as an art form is essentially playful we say you play the piano you don't work the piano why music differs from say travel when you travel you are trying to get somewhere and of course we because being a very compulsive and purposive culture are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster till we eliminate the distance between places what happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place in music though one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition now but we don't see that as uh something brought by our education into our everyday conduct we've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression and yeah you go to kindergarten you know and that's a great thing because when you finish that you'll get into first grade and then come on first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school you've got high school and it's revving up the thing is coming then you're going to go to college and buy a job then you get into graduate school and when you're through with graduate school you go out to join the world and then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance and they've got that quota to make and you're going to make that and all the time the thing is coming it's coming it's coming that great thing the success you're working for then when you wake up one day about 40 years old you say my god i've arrived i'm there and you don't feel very different from what you've always felt and there's a slight letdown because you feel there's a hoax and there was a hoax a dreadful hoax they made you miss everything by expectation look at the people who lived to retire and put those savings away and then when they 65 they don't have any energy left they're more or less impotent they go and rot in an old people's senior citizens community because we've simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line we thought of life by analogy with a journey with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you're dead but we missed the point the whole way along it was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played so then if you see on the other hand that existence is musical in nature that is to say that it is not serious it is the play you've got to let go and let it happen because if you don't you're going to be all clutched up you're going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only if you don't try and when people uh when you think about what people really want to do with their time what do they do when they're not being pushed around and somebody's telling them what to do they like to make rhythms [Music] they listen to music they dance or they sing or they do something of a rhythmic nature playing cards or bowling or raising their elbows everybody wants to spend their time swinging that's that's the nature of this whole thing we're in you see it likes the swing that's why it does it [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: T&H - Inspiration & Motivation

Views: 873,956

Keywords: alan watts, alan, watts, philosophy, alan watts speech, alan watts meditation, alan watts lecture, t&h inspiration, t&h, t&h motivation, alan watts inspiration, alan watts motivation, motivation, inspiration, alan watts 2021, allen watts, secret, it's happening, happening t&h, reality, people don't see it, Alan Watts It's Happening, watts happening, it's already happening, alan watts duality, It's Already Happening But People Don't See It, duality, alan watts on duality, life

Id: LuZ1SqXjLmw

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021