LIFE and DEATH Philosophy - Making Peace with Death - Must Listen - #alanwatts #philosophy #life

change and everything is changed nothing can be held on to to the degree that you go with a stream you see you are still you're flowing with it but to the degree you resist the stream then you notice that the current is rushing past you and fighting with you so swim with it go with it and you're there you're at rest and this is of course particularly true when it comes to those moments when life really seems to be going to take us away and the stream of Change is Going to swallow us completely the moment of death and we think oh oh this is it this is the end and so at death we withdraw say no no no no not that not not not yet please but actually the whole problem is uh that it really is no other problem for human beings than to go over that waterfall when it comes just as you go over any other waterfall just as you go on from day to day just as you go to sleep at night be absolutely willing to die now I'm not preaching I'm not saying you ought to be willing to die and that you should um muscle up your courage and somehow put on a good front when the when the terrible thing comes that's not the idea at all point is that you can only die well if you understand this system of waves if you understand that your disappearance as the form in which you think you are you your disappearance as this particular organism is simply seasonal that uh you are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life these are just two sides of you because you is the total wave see you can't have half a wave nobody ever saw waves which just had crests no troughs so you can't have half a human being who is born but doesn't die half a thing that would be only half a thing but the propagation of vibrations and life is vibration it simply goes on and on but its Cycles are long cycles and short Cycles space you see is not just nothing if I could magnify my hand to an enormous degree so that you could see all the molecules in it I don't know how far apart they would be but it seems to me they would be something like tennis balls uh in a very very large space and you look when I move my hand like this and say for God's sake look at all those tennis balls they're all going together crazy and then no strings tying them together isn't that queer no but the space going with them and space is a function of or it's an Inseparable aspect of whatever solids are in the space that is the clue probably to what we mean by gravity we don't know yet so in the same way when those marvelous sandpipers come around here the little ones while they're in the air flying they have one mind they move all together when they Al light on the mud they become individuals and they go picking around for worms or something but one click of the fingers and all those things are going zi into the air they don't seem to have a leader because they don't follow when they turn they all turn together and go off in another Direction amazing but they're like the molecules in my hand so then you see here's the principle when you don't resist change I mean over resist I don't mean being flabby when you don't resist change you see that the changing world which disappears like smoke is no different from the Nirvana World Nirvana as I said means breathe out let go of the breath so in the same way don't resist change it's all the same principle so the bodh SATA saves all beings not by preaching sermons to them but by showing them that that they are delivered they are liberated by the very fact of not being able to stop changing you can't hang on to yourself you resisting death I love the story of a conversation at an English Country House at a dinner party where the hostess started up the question of Church of England he was the church Warden chief of the vest in the local country parish and the lady said sir rodri you haven't said a word what do you think is going to happen to you when you and they make death just awful by pretending it doesn't happen see what happens you go to a hospital and you're at the end you got terminal cancer and all your friends come around and they wear false smiles and they say cheer up you'll be all right uh in a few days from now you'll be back home and we'll we'll go out for a picnic again the doctors have their bedside M you see a doctor is absolutely helpless with a terminal case because he's doctor's by social definition A Healer and he's not allowed to help you do die he's out of role even though I mean he may sneak behind the rules and do it but but he's definitely he's got to heal you so you're going to keep you indefinitely on the end of tubes and all kinds of things while there's a certain grave demeanor to all this and all the nurses are so pleasant and so totally distant because they know this is death and they may be frank with you that's why they feel distant it's not that they're not concerned it's not that they are heartless people but that they just don't know how to be frank like lots of people when they meet a drunk they don't know what to do with a drunk uh because uh he's not he's not behaving like not behaving right so when you're dying you're not behaving right you're supposed to live see so we don't know what to do with a dying person we don't get around that person and say listen now listen man listen I got the news for you you're going to die and this is going to be great look no more responsibilities don't have to pay those bills anymore don't have to worry about anything you're going to just die and let's go out with a bang let's have a party see we'll we'll we'll we'll put some some that morphine in you so you won't hurt too much but we were going to prop you up in bed and we're going to bring all our friends around and we're going to have champagne and you're going You're going to going to die at the end of it see and it's going to be just marvelous just like being born you see when we had birth problems see all women used to think that birth had to be painful it was good for them was one of the things you had to suffer because you'd been you'd been screwing around with people and there you had to have a child and it's got to hurt and uh then the doctors got together and they scratched their heads and the man called grantly Dick Reed said no birth doesn't hurt it's natural all we've got to do is to talk these women into the idea that it doesn't hurt that all these so-called pains are just tensions and that uh birth is great it's not a disease it's not really something you ought to go to hospital for because you associate hospitals with diseases and sickness birth isn't sickness all right now let's do some new thinking what about death is death sickness or is it a healthy natural event like being born of course it is so I mean a little change in Social attitude about this will fortify everybody else I mean I'm if I'm alone and all my relatives are pretending to me it's going to be hard for me I've got to challenge the whole bunch of them and get my dander up and say listen damn you I don't want all this thing around here you've got to take a different attitude about my death well that's hard but if everybody helps me and we do we are all one body if they all come around around and say congratulations you're going to die Liberation Liberation now you see because just before you die I mean look I know very well a skillful priest handling a person dying can do this for them but he has to talk very very very straight and he has to say listen these doctors uh you don't don't you pay any attention to them they're trying to amuse you and deceive you you're going to die this isn't terrible but it's just going to be the end of you as a system of memories and so you've got a great chance right now before it happens to let go of everything cuz you know it's going to go and it's is going to help you it's going to help you let go of everything so if you have any possessions left give them away give everything away and if you have anything to say that is you felt that you ought to say before you die and that you're kind of hanging on to and it's bothering you say it I mean I don't mean necessarily a last confession but say it said that ADI Stevenson shortly before he died said that uh he had been making a monkey of himself because he didn't agree with the government's policy about something or other you know he had to get that off his chest because he had a little thought in the back of his mind that things were catching up with him you see so the moment comes when this thing called Death has to be taken completely not as some ghastly accident something that uh well the friends are going to stay away because you're awful I mean sometimes people when they die are in a very unpleasant physical condition they don't smell good they don't look good uh and so on but an enormous amount can be done with scientific methods to make things reasonably tidy from a purely sensory point of view but the main thing is the attitude that death is as positive as birth and should be a matter for rejoicing because death is the symbol of The Liberation there is a wonderful saying that anandakumar swam used to quote I pray that death will not come and find me still un nihilate in other words that man dies happy if there is no one to die other words if the ego has disappeared before death caught up with it but you see the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear because it tells you you can't hang on so what we need uh if if we're going to have a a good religion around that's one of the places where it can start having 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 uh just in 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 uh 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 and the whole thing is a weaving of smoke so that's the uh initial standpoint but as soon as you really discover this and you stop clinging to change then everything is quite different it becomes a 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 the 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 stand 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 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 uh 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 it's Mozart all the way along because it sounds like Mozart but 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 the Drone there is uh behind all the drums and every kind of singing something [Music] goes and it always sounds the note which is the tonic of the scale being used uh 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 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 together they're all one but if out of anxiety uh 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 uh 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 1 millionth of a second you probably wouldn't really experience it it because it wouldn't give you enough time to remember it we say in customary 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 body 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 than 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 cue 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 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 in it 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 to you 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 kamikaz pilot who escaped because uh his his plane uh that he was uh 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 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 a 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 Goa the Buddha had lived we begin to find this though becoming prominent about the year 100 BC and by 200 ad it had reached its peak and it it was developed by the Mahayana Buddhists and uh it it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature which goes by this complex name pragia paramita now pragna means wisdom parameter for crossing over for going Beyond there is a small pragna parameter Sutra a big pragna parameter Sutra and then there's a little short summary of the whole thing called the Keda or heart Sutra and that is recited by Buddhists all over Northern Asia Tibet China and Japan and uh it contains the saying that which is void is precisely the world of form that which is form is precisely the void form is emptiness Emptiness is form so on um and it elaborates on this theme it's very short but it's always chanted at important Buddhist ceremonies and so it is supposed by Scholars of all kinds who uh have a mission 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 nagaj Juna and he lived about 200 ad one of the most astonishing Minds that the human race has ever produced and the name of nagaj juna's school of thought is mamika which means really the doctrine of the of the middle way but it's sometimes also called the doctrine of emptiness or sunada from the basic word sha or sometimes sha has t added on the end and that t means n 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 nagaj Juna is saying that always your Concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a c or wrap it up an apostle 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 reestablished 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 uh it can be done with a 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 te groups blab blabs in which people are there and they don't know quite why they're there and the some sort of a so-called resource person to disturb them and after a while they get the most incredible emotions and uh somebody tries to to to dominate the discussion of the group say and uh 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 blab blabs 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 what real ideas do you operate on as to what is right and what is wrong what is good life and what is not what arguments are you going to argue strongest where do you take your stand 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 sure all right I see now of course I I can't depend on this but what should I depend on 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 them so we get finally not quite finally to the void the shuna and what then when you get to the void there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief that's Nirvana few as I gave a proper English translation of Nirvana 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 Aruna 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 nagaj juna's Buddhism but you must remember that all that has been voided all that has been denied are those Concepts in which one has hither to attempted to pin down what is real in Zen Buddhist text 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 at 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 oh word of God incarnate oh wisdom from above oh truth unchanged unchanging oh light of life and love the wisdom which from the hallowed page a 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 resplendant 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 is positive that we've got a real rip roaring gutsy religion with full of color and so on that it it doesn't work that way the more clear your image of God the less powerful it is because you're clinging to it the more it's an idol but voiding 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 and you can't see in any direction being in the darkness or the color of your head as 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 isn't white it isn't anything but that's still not the void 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 because 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 six patriarch hang in China said that it was a great mistake for those who were practicing Buddhist Meditation to 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 and 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 sensorily deprived to an amazing degree but if you're a sort of a good Yogi this doesn't bother you at all since some people crazy but if you dig this world uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 quite aside that they can't change in any way from the spaceship Now isn't that interesting can you become weightless here I I said a little while ago that the person who really accepts transients 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 2 Ines off the ground janga the doist said it is easy enough to stand still the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground and why do you feel so heavy it isn't just a matter of gravitation and weight it is that you are feel that you are carrying your body [Music] around so there is a Coan in Zen Buddhism who is it that carries this corpse around and so when you feel it we common speech expresses this all the time life is a drag I feel I'm just dragging myself around my body is a burden to me to whom 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 is sight you don't see sights sightseeing is a ridiculous word you could just say either sighting or seeing one or the other but sightseeing is nonsense so we keep though doubling our words and this doubling is comparable to oscillation in an electrical system where there's too much feedback where you remember in the oldfashioned telephone where the receiver was separate from the from the mouthpiece the transmitter uh if you wanted to annoy someone who was abusing you on the telephone you could make the 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 it 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 nagaj junus 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 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 this you will find that when Buddhists use the word mind they have several words for mind but I'm not going into the technicality at the moment 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 as we say between times there is musical space so-called distance between intervals or the intervals between tones rather it's quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space there tangible space but all these spaces you see are the mind they are the dimensions of Consciousness and so this great space which every one of us apprehends 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 me eart said in order to see color my eye has to be free from color so in the same way in order not only to see but also to hear to think to 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 they 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 uh Buddhist priests to marry and in fact what they especially enjoyed was a Sutra that came from India in which a Layman who was a wealthy Merchant called vimalakirti 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 so viala the Layman won the debate even with MRI who is the bodhisatwa of supreme wisdom they all had us see a contest to define the void and all of them gave their definitions finally manjusri gave his and viala was asked then for his definition and he said nothing and so he won the whole argument the thunderous Sil [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: Equanimity

Views: 18,258

Keywords: modern perspective, 21st century thought, human existence, contemplation, philosophy, psychology, quotes, equanimity, thought provoking perspectives, zen, buddhism, life and death philosophy, alan watts philosophy, alan watts and life and death, philosophy of life, alan watts consciousness and perception, alan watts, alan watts spiritual philosophy, alan watts and the human condition, alan watts and life

Id: ERtrWXlsYX4

Length: 51min 36sec (3096 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024