Mastering Emptiness - Alan Watts with Ambient Music (Dark Screen After 10 Minutes)

i began by reviewing two possible concepts of the nature of space one that it is simply an abstraction and uh projected upon the physical world in rather the same way that we project measurements [Music] lines of latitude and longitude or the cutting up of an another abstraction called time into divisions like hours minutes and seconds uh which are there only on the dial of the clock the earth in its rotation doesn't tick uh and time is of course thus seen thus simply a measure of change of the rate of change as between two changing processes the changing process of the clock and the changing process of say a person's running around uh it is out of that relationship in other words that you get a concept of time and similarly through being able to measure distances in a similar way you get a concept of space you see this is one point of view that it's a an abstraction because uh force would be led to this point of view by the fact that space itself isn't really there space is the best earth absence and you must be very careful not as whitehead would have said to reify that is to make a thing out of uh something that isn't uh there at all like saying um have an absence oh boy gary snyder invented a corporation is called the null and void guarantee and trust company and its slogan was register your absence with us and so i had some business cards made up for bush but at the bottom gary snyder non-representative but this is of course zen humor because then people are always joking about things not really being there at all uh the the general feeling of um being nobody at all uh as distinct from being important and somebody has a kind of inverse humor to it one becomes a sort of bag of wind and there's something about that uh the zen masters call each other wind bags and rice bags and things like that because uh the whole idea of taking nothingness for real is somehow funny the other point of view that i was trying to contrast with this was rather different that is that just because they are so imponderable and so ungettable space is you space is your consciousness and your consciousness is not something located in your head although your head is a way in which it's focused and therefore consciousness can be altered by a surgeon putting instruments into the brain but the the full range of consciousness or the full range of the mind is the entirety of space as the continuum in which the universe exists in rather much the same way as images exist in a mirror only here there seems to be no solid mirror there is uh an infinitely permeable continuum space in um a chinese text called the dungeon or the platform sutra attributed to the sixth patriarch of zen buddhism he has the passage where he says that the mind is like the emptiness of space now he says if you want to realize this don't exclude everything from your mind because if your mind is like space space contains the earth and the stars sun the moon and the mountains and forests good men and bad men enlightened men and unenlightened men everything is in it and so if a person wants to attain an understanding of the mind merely by emptying his mind he's making his mind small instead of great so you cannot therefore separate space from what it contains because without the content there's no container without the container no content and when you see that kind of relationship when you see two apparently very different things going together inseparably always find them together you can smell a rat for example nobody has seen any stuff that had no shape and nobody's ever seen a shape that had no stuff there's a suspicion here then that staff and shape are the same and likewise and improbable as it may seem you can realize that space and solid are the same only they are as it were the same energy showing itself under two different aspects to a being who always must see things two-sidedly which is man man yeah is symmetrical almost see right down this dividing line two sides to his brain two eyes two nostrils two ears a symmetrical mouth two arms two nipples uh hips legs you see all balancing except the heart is a little bit over to one side and uh but here he is you see this this two-way thing man is like a rorschach plot uh he's some mess that was squeezed folded then you unfolded it by jove it's symmetrical and there's a very strange thing about that you can make a order out of almost any mess by symmetrizing it in various ways you you know there's a gadget called a tele-scope which uh is a marriage between a kaleidoscope and a telescope and uh you can look at things through it and because it's got mirrors inside at a 45 degree angle they will bounce the reflection in a circle which is very elegant and the more messy that you think you look at the more interesting it is with the kaleidoscope because it is through this balancing process of some sort of symmetry that order comes about repetition regularity so the human being then being thus two-sided is always wanting to ask is you is or is you ain't is it this or is it that answer yes or no true or false black or white and has very different great difficulty the more simple-minded the person is the more difficult they have in using their conscious attention to do anything but estimate these very simple contrast between the good guys and bad guys you man or woman there can be no doubt see there might be nothing vaguely in between uh no greys no no washes because a simple mind wants this great precision which of course you can't have but as poles you see of one of the greatest uh dualities in the world is the is the duality of something and nothing of being and non-being and of course in our thinking the solid world represents existence and the space world represents non-existence the conquest of space therefore will be the conquest of non-existence perhaps say this is their our great attempt to survive by being able to leave this increasingly plundered planet somewhere else under that [Music] that's the difference between mining and farming hunting well so there's this great contrast of reality considered as uh what's in the space the that's what's there and the space is simply what's not there but you can't make it that simple because you've only got to think about it one step to realize that you can't have the recognition or perhaps even the existence of what is there unless there is also what is not in other words i wouldn't be able to see you as moving human entities if you were all densely packed in some sort of material medium like say jello or milk or whatever because then there would be no intervals between you to bring you out you see now actually space uh must in this connection for a moment be considered from the point of view of optics the eye is receptive to a certain spectrum of vibrations of light and therefore where such vibrations are not being transmitted the nerve ends are not stimulated and therefore don't report and that failure to report is space we call it darkness where there is no visible light but actually there is nowhere in the universe where there is not some kind of vibration going on so that if you had an instrument that responded to it you would see that space was full of impulses and if you saw it all you wouldn't be able to make out the individual outlines which require these non-being intervals in order that their being can be realized that is to say outlined distinguished delineated discriminated so to see the outline of the being you must have the intervening space of the non-being but non-being means simply in this connection uh the lack of stimulation of whatever perceptive or perceiving instrument you are using now for example when you print a book we say there is empty paper underneath the print but of course it isn't nothing under the print it's nothing so far as print is concerned but something very much so far as white paper is concerned now do you see in the same way perhaps it isn't nothing in which we are living and moving it's only nothing so far as our visible shapes are concerned but it is a you mean you could say this that space is a something of a quite different order than ordinary something ordinary something being the things and events which we say occupy space just as the print occupies the paper but the philosophers especially modern philosophers have a great deal of trouble thinking about this the reason is that uh they are too one-sided in the kind of instruments they use for understanding the world and the instrument they use principally is words and thought now they have just as much trouble in thinking about the universe in terms of their words and thoughts and logical categories as you would have in a printed book writing some words down which have pointed directly to the paper underneath supposing i say there is paper underneath every word on this page now the philosopher the type of logical positivist person who dominates american and british academic philosophers today he would think uh about that could only mean something if i wrote the sentence there is paper under every word on this page then under each one of those words i wrote the word paper paper paper paper paper then he would say yes that's true but you see that but that isn't the way it is the difficulty is you see there is an incommensurability between the print and the paper if we can stand outside that because we are diverse enough to realize that print is one process and paper is another and they can be put together but if you are immersed in the print you can't see the paper so if you're immersed in the kind of consciousness which simply discriminates things you cannot realize the background that is to say that you cannot realize uh the nature of space when you use only your analytical consciousness the consciousness which looks at things bit by bit by bit by bit i call the spotlight consciousness if you use that alone then you you can't think anything about uh the continuum the ground in which all this flourishes uh that you may then go on to make a mistake uh if you under if you if you're not following me correctly this is a mistake of course that these kinds of philosophers fall into if i say now underneath all distinct things space constitutes the ground in which they live and move and have their being this is not quite correct [Music] because if i speak of space in that way it makes it just another thing of the same kind and nature as all the things it contains if in other words i can think about space and i can only think about it by analogy by liking it to paper to a mirror to the basis the background well if i can think about it that makes it a thing which is to say a thing all things are things they're as much of life as you can catch hold of in one thought that means a thing so likewise in german danken to think ding thing in latin ray or to think ray's thing so if i make space into a think i've somehow missed it that's why we have to say it's a no thing why the in buddhism it has said the real nature of mind is no mind and you realize this in daily life by the fact that when you see clearly you see everything except your eyes except if there's something wrong with your eyes and you see spots in front you know that interferes with seeing if you hear clearly you don't hear your ears but if you have ear trouble you get buzzing in your ears same way if you are very healthy physically you hardly notice your body except as a kind of blissful vagueness which is exhilarating so on and if your clothes are comfortable you don't notice it so this is connected with the nature of a beautifully functioning mind is that it doesn't get in its own way it doesn't think itself if it thinks itself it gets in its own way because it's a no thing no thinks is the background for things see so that's why every attempt to conceptualize the ground of being whether it's space or god is an idolatry and that's why sages have always condemned idolatry that it to to understand uh the the nature of the the ground of being correctly you must not have an image of it now we don't need to be compulsive about that uh compulsive uh iconoclasm is a terrible thing the islamic people suffered from it from time to time and when they got to india they knocked down all the buddhas and beautiful images and banged off their noses uh and the puritans did the same sort of thing to roman catholic and anglican churches in england they hated images that meant you see they were terribly attached to them they hadn't they they were still hung up by the images therefore had to smash them uh either way uh if you say you must not like as in in very strict orthodox islamic culture you must not make any image of any living creature and so there are very interestingly and one must admit went off into abstract patterning but what one is saying here not is not that it is somehow just wrong to make an image the point is much deeper than that it is this that in order to realize in order to experience the ground of being you need to be free from images that is to say you need to suspend the activity for thinking now most people imagine that if they stop thinking that's sort of the end the life of the mind there instantly curls up and dies but um this isn't the case because there's a lot more to the mind than thinking there is this direct apprehension of the world unmediated through concepts or thoughts and that's the kind of apprehension of the world you need to understand space it's interesting how to some extent this sort of thing enters even into the sciences because scientists operate with certain shall we say so hard to say concept certain tools that are not concepts really you always feel about a concept but you have to know what it is but for example the basis of algebra is operating with patterns and you don't know what they are they're called unknowns x is the unknown you can say x plus y equals y plus x and you made a perfectly clear statement but you don't have to know what x is or what y is it doesn't mean anything at all so in the same way in in modern geometry you don't define what you mean by a point they've abandoned this as a sort of a nonsense definition euclid's idea that a point is that which has position with no magnitude you mean it has position what has position and so now a point everybody knows what a point is but you don't explain because you see there must be a starting point in anything that anybody does anything they think about any um system of ideas any conception of the good life where you don't explain it because everybody knows what it is and yet when you ask them about it they don't you see we get time and space if you turn back on your starting point and say i will not go anywhere i will not proceed with my geometry with my investigation with my business plans until i am quite sure of my starting point you will never begin because you can go back into your starting point forever and that's the manifest itself in people who for example have certain kinds of hypochondria the starting point is their body they wonder my goodness would i to go out would i catch cold uh would i get into an accident should i go to a foreign country would i get the great siberian itch or the eevee trots or whatever and so always worrying about the starting point uh now are you quite sure that you your your premises are right it's always good to look at your premises but you very quickly come to the conclusion that if you don't have some premises uh you won't go anywhere at all so as one general once said a poor plan of attack carried out with zest and uh determination is much better than an excellent plan carried out in a wobbling way so in in this way for example in japan i have no idea really about talking japanese i know lots of words and no grammar therefore i have no compunction whatsoever about talking because i know it's mistakes all over the place and if i were nervous about it as they get nervous about talking english because they do desperately want to be correct i have absolutely no desire to be correct because i know that in my whole lifetime i shall never be able to speak correct japanese so i just plunge in and i get understood [Laughter] that's the way you have to do in life you muddle through so if you keep turning back you see on the initial beginning point and trying to be sure of it uh nothing will ever happen so then whatever is the point whatever is the ground that we are and that we take our stand upon appears to us as space as not being there to give us transparency you see if god were visible nobody could see anything with god uh it would blot out everything else but by virtue of becoming invisible the world is created [Music] because as it were god gets out of the way so that the world can appear and the world is a selection as i explained the eyes select what they see because they are only noticing what goes on in a certain spectrum of light if you could change the eye spectrum altogether you would see a different world of creatures flip flip flip you could have to think like a radio tuner from performance performance all on different bands of a spectrum to see them all at once though would be for our kind of intellect like taking your hands like this across the piano and going slap see you just get this chaos of sound so that there being realized objects in space is uh partly dependent upon are using an attentive and selective type of consciousness you see that the same thing if you have a selective consciousness you have a selective world uh so putting down the five fingers on the piano instead of the full flat arm selects a certain pattern of sound and you can say it's a chord it's a melody and so on so when the angels play their harps in heaven they are selecting they are the fingers of god selecting uh what kind of patterns are appearing in the world you see that's that's really what that image is about so then to to see this then uh you go back to no thinking the suspension of thought is for modern man in particular a tremendously important undertaking when in about 19 21 ludwig wittgenstein published a book called the tractatus logical philosophical it was the end of western philosophy because where he finished he said you know philosophy is really a method for getting rid of meaningless concepts and uh so he practically got rid of all metaphysical concepts and ended up by saying uh whereas one cannot speak of that one should be silent this was the great moment for philosophy departments all over the western world to lapse into silence and practice meditation but instead they had to go on talking because they couldn't prove that they were an academic discipline unless they did some talking especially some publishing so uh they began them to chatter nauseatingly about trivialities they became grammarians mathematical logicians and things and there everybody forgot about philosophy because it got so dull it wasn't expressing any more man's fascination and wonder at the improbable situation living in the universe [Music] so uh but unfortunately things are at last getting through to people and uh you would not be entirely laughed out of court in academic surroundings today if you suggested that some non-verbal uh research be carried on you'd have to put it rather carefully you would have to refrain from calling it yoga or buddhism or meditation but it would be sort of research in non-verbal um sensory awareness or something you know some kind of academic god will be good but it's coming and this presents problems to people who are compulsive thinkers because when they try to reach this completely non-verbal level they think about doing it they think i'm trying to reach the non-verbal level i'm trying to empty my mind of thoughts i'm trying to think not thinking you feel so sorry for those people but it is an awful problem if you have it and uh to get rid of it then one uses gimmicks one uses methods of absorbing the individual in non-conceptual experiences such as you can play a single loud musical tone and get that going and it really shatters thinking it has you just turns you into this your whole body becomes this one tone you get the person concentrated on that one point you see go go go go and zip cut it off then where are you from that time to collect your thoughts you're blown by this tone and all those uh techniques that are used in yoga they when they chant when they uh do some kind of physical exercises when they have a nonsense proposition like a koan to concentrate on all these things work in the same essential way to suspend the analytical thinking to suspend uh the spotlight mind for a while so that you get back to what is called original mind where you act without thinking that's why in in the whole interchange between a zen teacher and his students the zen teacher is constantly challenged challenging the student to respond intelligently to a given situation without thinking without stopping to think just as in say using judo you mustn't stop to think you're lost if you do you must learn to respond without thinking so creative skill in so many things depends upon uh the opposite of thinking when you examine what people say what inventors say what artists say what um uh mathematicians say about the discovery of new ideas very few of them arrived at those ideas by a purely um thought thinking verbal or numerical process [Music] and the reason is of course that the structures which we have arrived at and we do understand by analytical thinking once you see them they tend uh to [Music] stay put they become habits and there's nothing more difficult to cure in an individual than a habit of thought you know i've argued for hours and hours and hours sometimes with people who simply can't understand knowing without a noah because they are so trapped by sentence structure the verb has to have that subject therefore you can't have the state of affairs in which there is just the verb that is to say knowing they say well who is who is knowing and it's as bad as arguing the flat earth or a jehovah's witness impossible because of the ruts of thought how such a person can never be inventive why because he will never see a new pattern in the new structure and he won't see one because he's thinking all the time he's not open to the variations of the actual world and so he can only see what he's been taught to see that's why academic psychology is always in a position of bafflement about learning theory because if learning is a process of converting new experience into the terms of what you've already learned you never really learn at all it's like according to kind of a narrow-minded aerodynamics bees cannot fly while there's no way of explaining the aerodynamics of that vibration but it flies and you often come up against this when an inventor has an idea and all his colleagues say to him oh don't be silly you can't do that it just wouldn't work though he says i've tried it and it does work or they say come on and very often they won't even try they'll just say it can't be done you can get a fantastic dogmatism in the scientific world and you have to be terribly careful not to upset certain absolutely fundamental strictly prejudices which are the result of thinking too much and of getting accustomed to the warm rats of thought and so you never could see the new so this is the real meaning of an open mind not merely that you're a liberal sort of guy but that you can turn off thoughts and yes thus be turned on to reality thoughts you see belong to the world of symbols what we experience with our senses is of course the physical world the real world you may ask me well isn't there also a spiritual world but you must understand that the spiritual world is the same thing as the physical when the physical is not confused with the symbolic there is no real difference between the spiritual and the physical it's all one energy all in one space now you see though the difficulty is that in saying something like it's all one energy this is the really the point i mean if you understand that this whole universe is one energy and you're it you don't really have any any much in the way of further problems uh yeah i mean you have some a few practical problems like how to make a good table or a beautiful dress or whatever it is that you're after but you don't have any more metaphysical problems when you see that but a person who thinks a lot can't understand that at all because he says well it doesn't make any difference everything is all one energy let's begin again i mean uh what have you said of course we haven't said anything logically the statement is pure nonsense everything is one end so what but that's only because the person who's received this communication has had it only as a thought and as a thought it's again like saying there is paper under every word on this page and thinking that that means that paper paper pretty much but when this is something that emerges from not thinking and when you see that you've been bamboozled all your life long you've been bugged by everybody else into thinking that um you're a some kind of a freak that came into this world and uh you don't really belong here because all your probably your parents didn't really want you certainly your brothers older brothers and sisters want you around you were eating up more and in school they tell you you know you've got to learn you're not the only people on the beach therefore the best way of teaching you that is that you're really rather insufferable around here and you're on probation until you uh are acceptable well babies they grow up you see with this treatment feeling strangers feeling that the earth is something alien and so we all have this feeling of being alone of being impotent little puppets of a huge system going on and so we are progressively full out of really with our own cooperation pulled out of this sense that you can get if you suspend all these identifications that one does with the thinking process this is this this is that i'm me what's me is different from so on do you suspend that you see not simply that all those problems and all those definitions of who you are were unreal there's something else you see there's the feeling beyond having dissipated the illusion of the sheer joy and delight of this one energy now is realizing itself as you and uh how nice that um it won't always be doing that because that would get boring you'll go like this you see and there'll be a different situation altogether uh you know you'll run into a brick wall before you know where you are you're uh out of an eggshell [Applause] the whole thing is flipped and you're doing on it on another track but there's only one you you see it's all the one energy but this is as i say difficult to understand logically if you don't understand it experimentally if you understand it experimentally it's perfectly clear when somebody says everything is one in the juice of course but the person who's stuck with the concept and has nothing more than the concept can't can't simply make any sense of it at all he says well you're suffering from a hallucination and we'll proceed to prove according to his ideas that what you've achieved in that has made no difference to you or anything else of course you can prove it because his proof is set up to give just that result well then i got into that at some length the question of no thinking because of trying to point out how one must avoid trying to understand space uh in such a way as to make it a thing like a box you see which contains all the objects in it but i know thing like space is at the same time in cahoots with things there are two aspects to pose to terms of the same one energy [Music] don't make space at the same pole of the one energy as the things it's the opposite [Music] it is then because of our treatment of space as nothing you see that we're afraid of death we are afraid of that pole of experience which is unconscious that corresponds to space uh surrounding the world and because we think that reality that our life that our identity is entirely in the domain of consciousness and thingness and thinkableness the other pole seems completely threatened whereas of course it is that on which it all depends because the two poles depend on each other they energize each other so when you are scared of the non-being side of things you are as it were frightened of your own mother now of course you may have reason to be because there are such things as devouring mothers but the devouring mother represents uh the original horror felt for the unknown and uh in practice in human relationships the devouring type of mother is precisely the person who cannot come to terms with her own unknown therefore she wants to control everything she wants to see that all her children remain perpetually under her dominance she can't let go as if she let go you know she'd become unconsidered and flop all over the place [Laughter] so uh she becomes the devourer but you always conquer the devourer by dropping into it by faith in other words faith in the sense of trust i don't mean belief trust drop into space and you float see this is only begins to be understood by rocket people as they get out there we're going to have i don't know how the psychology of this is proceeding we're going to have an awful lot of people getting out in space and not wanting to come back because uh when you're in orbit and you float very interesting sensation and they have to follow very strict rules that same way where you do with the skin diving and you get to a certain level of pressure you start floating and you feel no no body weight and uh you have to absolutely keep your will going when the watch says a certain thing up you go orders disorders see otherwise you drown in great delight and bliss so so uh [Music] the point is though that [Music] we are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown and that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship which could hardly be improved upon it has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it it's beautifully equipped with oxygen with food supplies with all kinds of um uh delightful things to do while on the journey and it's traveling through the space at a colossal speed and it's called the planet earth the art of exploring from the planet earth depends not on conquering space with uh rockets and bombs but on developing greater sensitivity in the place where we are laozer said without going out of my house i know the whole universe so by uh clumsy beginnings of the sensitivity are seen in radio astronomy instead of trying to leap out of the world it stays here and gets more sensitive and eventually i feel that we shall discover each one of us have inside our heads a radio astronomical contraption of great subtlety and uh we shall eventually the more we use instruments we shall begin to watch a process which i will call etherealization what a person we call miniaturization is connected with this miniaturization means that electronic equipment becomes smaller and smaller and smaller until what was originally a great box like this becomes a tiny tiny little thing a little tiny cell and so in the same way as certain techniques advance all kinds of joining lines like wires begin to vanish see when radio substitutes for the telephone all the wires vanish when um the airplane substitutes for road and railway all the roads and rails are going to vanish see and uh more and more we find means of getting rid of the clumsiness of primitive technology and then as all this apparatus disappears we find [Music] that we are moving in the direction of having it all in our own apparatus just like um dolphins have sonar homing pigeons have built-in radar i think it's all in us that we had to exteriorize it technologically in order to discover it within [Music] you

Channel: Elements - Meditations & Mindfulness

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Id: 3K_X2oqDdnQ

Length: 54min 55sec (3295 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021