Nature Of Consciousness - Alan Watts - Podcast about What There Is

i find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter of this seminar is going to be because it's too fundamental to give it a title i'm going to talk about what there is now the first thing though that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about the basic ideas which as westerners living today in the united states influence our everyday common sense our fundamental notions about what life is about and there are historical origins for this which influence us more strongly than most people realize ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use and of our ideas of logic and of what makes sense all together and these basic ideas i call myth not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense a myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world and we at present are living under the influence of two very powerful images which are in the present state of scientific knowledge inadequate and one of our major problems today is to find an adequate satisfying image of the world well that's what i'm going to talk about and i'm going to go further than that not only what image of the world to have but how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of the world that we can manage to conceive all right now the two images which we have been working under for two thousand years and maybe more are what i would call two models of the universe and the first is called the ceramic model and the second the fully automatic model the ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of genesis from which judaism islam and christianity derive their basic picture of the world and the image of the world in the book of genesis is that the world is an artifact it is made as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it don't forget jesus is the son of a carpenter and also the son of god so the image of god and of the world is based on the idea of god as a technician potter carpenter architect who has in mind a plan and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan so basic to this image of the world is the notion you see that the world consists of stuff basically primordial matter substance stuff as pots are made of clay and the potter imposes his will on it and makes it become whatever he wants and so in the book of genesis the lord god creates adam out of the dust of the earth in other words he makes a clay figurine and then he breathes into it and it becomes alive because the clay becomes informed by itself it is formless it has no intelligence and therefore it requires an external intelligence and an external energy to bring it to life and to put some sense into it and so in this way we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts as being made and it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother how was i made or who made me and this is a very very powerful idea but for example it is not shared by the chinese or by the hindus a chinese child would not ask its mother how was i made a chinese child might ask its mother how did i grow which is an entirely different procedure from making you see when you make something you put it together you arrange parts or you from the outside to the in as a as a sculptor works on a stone or as the potter works on clay but when you watch something growing it works in exactly the opposite direction it works from the inside to the outside it expands it burgeons it blossoms and it happens all over itself at once in other words the the original simple form say of a living cell in the womb progressively complicates itself and that's the growing process and it's quite different from the making process and so there is for that reason a fundamental difference between the maid and the maker and this image this ceramic model of the universe originated in cultures where the form of government was monarchical and where therefore the maker of the universe was conceived also at the same time in the image of the king of the universe king of kings lord of lords the only ruler of princes who dust from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth i'm quoting the book of common prayer and so all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way feel related to basic reality as a subject to a king and so they are on very very humble terms in relation to whatever it is that works all this thing i find it odd in the united states that people who are citizens of a republic have a monarchical theory of the universe because we are carrying over from a very ancient near eastern cultures the notion that the lord of the universe must be respected in a certain way people kneel people bow people prostrate themselves because they're when you know what the reason for all that is that nobody is more frightened of everybody else than a tyrant he sits with his back to the wall and his guards on either side of him and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can't use weapons that way when you come into his presence you don't stand up and face him because you might attack and he has reason to fear that you might because he's ruling you all and the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch because he's the one who succeeded in crime the other people are pushed aside because they the criminals the people we lock up in jail are simply the people who who didn't make it so naturally uh the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him and so when you design a church what does it look like catholic church with the altar as it used to be it's changing now because the catholic religion is changing but the catholic church has the altar with its back to the wall of the east end of the church and uh there the altar is the throne and the priest is the chief vizier of the court and he is making a basis to the throne in front but there is the throne of god the altar and uh all the people are facing it and kneeling down and a great catholic cathedral is called a basilica from the greek basilius which means king so a basilica is the house of a king and the ritual of the catholic church is based on the court rituals of byzantium a protestant church is a little different but basically the same the furniture of a protestant church is based on a judicial courthouse the pulpit the judge in an american court wears a black robe he wears exactly the same dress as a protestant minister [Music] and everybody sits in these boxes like there's a jury box there's a box for the judge the box for this the box for that and those are the pews in an ordinary kind of colonial thai protestant church so both these uh kinds of churches which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe decorate themselves are architecturally constructed in accordance with political images of the universe one is the king and the other is the judge your honor there's sense in this when in court you have to refer to the judge as your honor it stops the people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude there's a certain sense to that but when you want to apply that image to the universe itself to the very nature of life it has limitations for one thing the idea of a difference between matter and spirit this idea doesn't work anymore long long ago physicists stopped asking the question what is matter they began that way they wanted to know what is the fundamental substance of the world and the more they ask that question the more they realize they couldn't answer it because if you're going to say what matter is you've got to describe it in terms of behavior and that is to say in terms of form in terms of pattern you tell what it does you describe the smallest shapes of it that you can see atoms electrons protons nissans all sorts of sub nuclear particles but you never never arrive at the basic stuff because there isn't it what happens is this stuff is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus fuzzy stuff the idea of stuff is that it's undifferentiated as some kind of a goo and when your eyes are not in sharp focus everything looks fuzzy when you get your eyes into focus you see a form you see a pattern and so all that we can talk about is patterns so the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff potted clay but pattern a self moving self-designing pattern a dance and we haven't yet our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with us well now in the course of time in the evolution of western thought the ceramic image of the world ran into trouble and changed into what i call the fully automatic model or image of the world in other words western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature and it got that idea from judaism and christianity and islam that in other words the potter the maker of the world in the beginning of things laid down the laws and the the law of god which is also the law of nature it's called the lagos and uh in christianity the lagos is the second person of the trinity incarnate as jesus christ who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine law so we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws as if in other words the laws of the world were like the rails on which a streetcar or tram or a train runs and these things exist in a certain way and all events respond to these laws you know that limerick there was a young man who said damn for it certainly seems that i am a creature that moves indeterminate grooves i'm not even a bus i'm a tram so here's this idea that there's a kind of a plan and everything responds and obeys that plan well in the 18th century western intellectuals began to suspect this idea what they suspected is whether there is a lawmaker whether there is an architect of the universe and they found out or they reasoned that you don't have to suppose that there is why because the hypothesis of god does not help us to make any predictions in other words let's put it this way if the business of science is to make predictions about what's going to happen science is essentially prophecy what's going to happen by studying the behavior of the past and describing it carefully we can make predictions about what's going to happen in the future that's really the whole of science and to do this and to make successful predictions you do not need god as a hypothesis because it makes no difference to anything if you say everything is controlled by god everything is governed by god that doesn't make any difference to your prediction of what's going to happen and so what they did was simply drop that hypothesis but they kept the hypothesis of law because if you can predict if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved and you've got some regularities in the behavior of the universe you call that law although it may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word it's simply a regularity and so they what they did was they got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law and so they conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism something in other words that is functioning according to regular clock-like mechanical principles newton's whole image of the world is based on billions the atoms are billiard balls and they bang each other around and so your behavior you every every individual therefore is defined as a very very complex arrangement of billet balls being banged around by everything else and so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists blind energy in say the metaphysics of ann stakel and t.h huxley the world is basically nothing but blind unintelligent force and likewise in parallel to this in the philosophy of freud the basic psychological energy is libido which is blind lust and it is only a fluke it is only as a result of pure chances that resulting from the exuberance of this energy there are people with values with reason with languages with cultures and with love just a fluke like you know 1 000 monkeys typing 1 000 typewriters for a million years will eventually type the encyclopedia britannica and of course the moment they stop typing the encyclopedia britannica they will relapse into nonsense and so in order that that shall not happen because you and i are flukes in this cosmos and we like our way of life we like being human if we want to keep it say these people we've got to fight nature because it'll turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it and so we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it from outside and so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature we talk about the conquest of space the conquest of everest and the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer the rocket you know compensation for the sexually inadequate mail [Laughter] so we're going to conquer space you know we're in space already way out if anybody cared to be sensitive and let what's outside space come to you you can if your eyes are clear enough aided by telescopes aided by uh radio astronomy aided by all the kind of sensitive instruments we can devise we're as far out in space as we're ever going to get but you know sensitivity isn't the pitch in in especially in the wasp culture of the united states we define manliness in terms of aggression you see because we are not we're a little bit frightened as to whether we are really men and so we put on this great show of being a tough guy uh it's completely unnecessary you know if you have what it takes you don't need to put on that show you don't need to beat nature into submission why be hostile to nature because after all you are a symptom of nature you as a human being you grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree so let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples using apple as a verb and a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples and so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in just as spots on somebody's skin are symptomatic of chickenpox but we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths the ceramic and the fully automatic not to feel that we belong in the world so our popular speech reflects it we say i came into this world you didn't you came out of it we say face facts we talk about encounters with reality as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies and the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists inside a bag of skin the center of consciousness which looks out at this thing and what the hell is it going to do to me you see i recognize you you kind of look like me and i've seen myself in a mirror and you look like you might be people so maybe you're intelligent maybe you can love too and maybe perhaps you're all right some of you are anyway if you got the right color of skin or you have the right religion or whatever it is you're okay but there are all those people over in asia africa and they may not really be people when you want to destroy someone you always define them as unpeople not really human monkeys may be idiots maybe machines maybe but not people but we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition the myth the absolutely unfounded theory that you yourself exist only inside your skin now i want to propose another idea altogether and other astronomers either say there was a primordial explosion an enormous bang millions of years ago billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space well let's take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened it's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall smash and all that ink spreads and in the middle it's dense isn't it and as it gets out on the edge the little droplets are finer and finer and make more complicated patterns see so in the same way there was a big bang in the beginning of things and it spread and you and i sitting here in this room as complicated human beings are way way out on the fringe of that band we're the complicated little patterns on the end of it very interesting but so we define ourselves as being only that if you think that you are only inside your skin you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue way out on the edge of that explosion way out in space and way out in time billions of years ago you were a big bang but now you're a complicated human being and with them we cut ourselves off like this and don't feel that we are still the big bang but you are depends how you define yourself you are actually if if this is the way things started if there was a big bang in the beginning you're not something that is a result of the big bang on the end of the process you are still the process you are the big bang the original force of the universe coming on as whoever you are see when i meet you i see not just what you define yourself as mr so-and-so miss song so mrs so-and-so i see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way i know i'm that too but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it and so what i would call a kind of a basic problem we've got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things that is to say separate things or separate events that that is only a way of talking if you can understand this you're going to have no further problems i once asked a group of high school children what do you mean by a thing and first of all they gave me all sorts of synonyms they said it's an object which is simply another word for a thing it doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing finally a very smart girl from italy who was in the group said a thing is a noun and she was quite right a noun isn't a part of nature it's part of speech there are no nouns in the physical world there are no separate things in the physical world either see the physical world is wiggly but clouds mountains trees people are all wiggly and uh only when human beings get working at things they build buildings in straight lines and try and make out that the world isn't really wiggly but here are we sitting in this room all built on straight lines but each one of us is as wiggly as all get out now then when you uh want to get control of something that wiggles it's pretty difficult isn't it you try and pick up a fish in your hands and the fish is wiggly and it slips out what do you do to get hold of a fish you use a net and so the the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world and so if you want to get hold of this wiggle you've got to put a net over it and i can number the holes in a net so many sew holes up so many holes across and if i can number these holes i can count exactly where each wiggle is in terms of a hole in that net and that's the beginning of calculus the art of measuring the world but in order to do that i've got to break up the wiggle into bits and i've got to call this a specific bit and this the next bit of the wiggle and this the next bit and this the next bit of the wiggle and so these bits are things or events bits of wiggles which i mark out in order to talk about the wiggle in order to measure it and therefore in order to control it but in nature in fact in the physical world the wiggle isn't bitted like you don't get a cut up fryer out of an egg but you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it you bite it but it doesn't come bitten so the world doesn't come thing it doesn't come invented you and i are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean the ocean waves and the universe peoples and as the wave i wave at you and say you the world is waving at me with you and saying uh hi i'm here but we are consciousness and the way we feel and sense our existence being based on a myth that we are made that we are parts that we are things our consciousness has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that we feel we have been hypnotized literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins that we are not the original bang but just something out on the end of it and therefore we are scared stiff because my wave is going to disappear and i'm going to die and that would be awful we've got a mythology going now which is father mask maskel put it we're nothing but something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium that's it and therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable you know this is what people really believe today you may go to church you may say you believe in this that and the other but you don't even jehovah's witnesses who are the most fundamentalist fundamentalists they're polite when they come around and knock at the door but if you really believed in christianity you would be screaming in the streets but nobody does you'd be taking full page ads in the paper every day you would have the most terrifying television programs the churches would be going out of their minds if they really believe what they teach but they don't they think they ought to believe what they teach they believe they should believe but they don't believe it because what we really believe is the fully automatic model and that is our basic plausible common sense you are a fluke you are a separate event and you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it baby that's it now why does anybody think that way there's no reason to because it isn't even scientific it's just a myth and it's invented by people who wanted to feel a certain way they want to play a certain game see the game of god begotten got embarrassing the idea of god as the putter the architect of the universe is is good it makes you feel that life is after all important there is someone who cares it has meaning it has sense and you are valuable in the eyes of the father but after a while it gets embarrassing and you realize that everything you do is being watched by god he knows your tiniest in most feelings and thoughts and you say after a while quit bugging me i don't want you around so you become an atheist just to get rid of it then then you feel terrible after that because you got rid of god but that means you got rid of yourself you're just nothing but a machine and your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too so if you're a smart kid you commit suicide camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question which is whether or not to commit suicide i think there are four or five serious philosophical questions the first one is who started it the second is are we going to make it the third is where are we going to put it the fourth is who's going to clean up and the fifth is it serious but but still should you or not commit suicide this is a good question why go on and you only go on if the game is worth the candle now the universe has been going on for an incredible long time and so really a satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that's worth betting on that's a very seems to me absolutely elementary common sense if you make a theory of the universe which isn't worth betting on why bother just commit suicide but if you want to go on playing the game you've got to have an optimal theory for playing the game otherwise there's no point in it but the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very funny game what they wanted to say was this all you people who believe in religion are old ladies and wishful thinkers you've got a big daddy up there and you want to comfort and thing but life is rough life is tough and uh success goes to the most hard-headed people that was a very convenient theory when the european american world was colonizing the natives everywhere else he said we are the end product of evolution and uh we are tough see i'm a big strong guy because i face facts and life is just a bunch of junk and i'm going to impose my will on it and turn it into something else you see and i'm real hard see that's a way of flattering yourself and so uh it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world works in academic circles no other theory of the world than the fully automatic model is respectable because if you're an academic person you've got to be an intellectually tough person you've got to be prickly see there are basically two kinds of philosophy one's called prickles the other is called ghoul and uh prickly people are precise rigorous logical like everything chopped up and clear goo people like it vague for example in physics prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of mata are particles gu believe it's waves and uh in in philosophy prickly people are logical positivists and goo people are idealists and they're always arguing with each other but what they don't realize is that they neither one can take his position without the other person because you wouldn't know you advocated prickles unless there was somebody else advocating you wouldn't know what a prickle was unless you knew what goo was because life is not either prickles or goo it's gooey prickles and prickly coo they go together like back in front male and female and that's the answer to philosophy see i'm a philosopher and i'm not going to argue very much because if you don't argue with me i don't know what i think so if we argue i say thank you because they're going to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view i understand what i mean so i can't get rid of you but however you see this whole idea that the universe is just nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it is a put down theory of the world people who had a an advantage to make a game to play by putting it down and making out that because they put the world down they were a superior kind of people so that just won't do we've had it because if if you seriously go along with this idea of the world you're what is technically called alienated you feel hostile to the world you feel that the world is a trap it is a a mechanism it's electronic and neurological uh mechanisms into which you somehow got caught and you poor thing have to put up with being in a body that's falling apart and that gets cancer that gets the great siberian itch and uh it's just terrible and these mechanics doctors are trying to help you out but they really can't succeed in the end and you're just going to fall apart and it's a grim business and it's too bad so if you think that that's the way things are you may as well commit suicide right now unless you say well i don't because they're really after all there might be eternal damnation in the back of the thing if i did that or uh then i identify with my children or something and i think of them going on and without me and nobody to support them of course if i do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them i shall merely teach them to be like i am and they'll go on dragging it out to support their children and they won't enjoy it and they'll be afraid to commit suicide and so will their children they all learn the same lesson so you see all i'm trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world that is influencing most people in the united states today the fully automatic model is simply a myth if you want to say that the idea of god the father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth in the bad sense of the word myth so is this other one it's just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs why let's get this clear if there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty well you found it in other people [Music] in other words it exists in us as human beings and as i said if it is there in us it is symptomatic of the scheme of things we are a symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree or the rose of the rose bush the earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells the earth is geological yes but this geological entity grows people and our existence on the earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies goodness only knows what that's in but you see when as a scientist you describe the behavior of a living organism you try to say what a person does it's the only way in which you can describe what a person is describe what they do then you find out that in making this description you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin in other words you can't talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor because when i walk i don't just dangle my legs in empty space i move in relationship to a room and so in order to describe what i'm doing when i'm walking i have to describe the room i have to describe the territory so in in describing my talking at the moment i can't describe this just as a thing in itself because i'm talking to you and so what i'm doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also so if that is necessary if in other words in order to describe my behavior i have to describe your behavior and the behavior of the environment it means that we've really got one system of behavior that what i am involves what you are i don't know who i am unless i know who you are and you don't know who you are unless you know who i am it was a wise rabbi once said if i am i because you are you and you are you because i am i then i am not i and you are not you in other words we are not separate we define each other we are all backs and fronts to each other you know uh you can't for example have two sticks you lean two sticks against each other and they stand up because they support each other take one away and the other falls they interdepend and so in exactly that way we and our environment and all of us and each other are interdependent systems we know who we are in terms of other people we all lock together and this is again and again the serious scientific description of how things happen and any good scientist knows therefore that what you call the external world is as much you as your own body your skin doesn't separate you from the world it's a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it just for example as a whirlpool in water you could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape you have a definite form all right here is a flow of water and it suddenly it does a whirlpool and then it goes on the whirlpool is a definite form but no water stays put in it the whirlpool is something the stream is doing and exactly the same way the whole universe is doing each one of us and i see you today and i recognize you tomorrow just as i would recognize a whirlpool in a stream i'd say oh yes i've seen that whirlpool before it's just near so-and-so's house on the edge of the river and it's always there so in the same way when i meet you tomorrow i recognize you you're the same whirlpool you were yesterday but you're moving the whole world is moving through you all the cosmic rays all the food you're eating the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and uh everything is just flowing right through you when you're wiggling the same way the world is wiggling the stream is wiggling you but the problem is you see we haven't been taught to feel that way the myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe but only parts of it only in it only confronting it aliens and we are i think quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal universe each one of us otherwise we're going to go out of our heads we're going to commit suicide collectively with courtesy of h-bombs and uh all right supposing we do well that will be that and there will be life making experiments on other galaxies maybe they'll find a better game [Music] out of your mind now continues with the next lecture from the nature of consciousness lecture [Music] series well now i was discussing two of the great myths or models of the universe which lie in the intellectual and psychological background of all of us the myth of the world as a political monarchical state in which we are all here on sufferance as subjects of god in which we are made artifacts who do not exist in our own right god alone in the first myth exists in his own right and you exist as a favor and you ought to be grateful it's like your parents come on and say to you maybe look at all the things we've done for you all the money we spent to send you to college and uh you turn out to be a beatnik you're a wretched ungrateful child and you're supposed to uh say sorry but um i really am but you're you're definitely in the position of being on probation so that that idea of the royal god the king of kings and the lord of lords which we inherit from the political structures of the tigris euphrates cultures and from egypt the pharaoh amenhotep iv is probably as freud suggested the original author of moses monotheism and the certainly the jewish law code comes from hammurabi and these men lived in a culture where the pyramid and the ziggurat the ziggurat is a chaldean version of the pyramid indicating somehow a hierarchy of power from the boss all the way down and god in this first myth that we've been discussing the ceramic myth is the boss and the idea of god is that the universe is governed from above but you see this parallels and goes hand in hand with the idea that you govern your own body that the ego which lies somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes in the brain is the governor of the body and so we can't understand and assist a system of order a system of life in which there isn't a governor oh lord our governor how excellent is thy name in all the world but supposing on the contrary there could be a system which doesn't have a government that's what we are supposed to have in this society we are supposed to be a democracy and a republican and we are supposed to govern ourselves and yet as i said it's so funny that americans can be politically republican i don't mean republican in the party sense and yet religiously monarchical it's a real strange contradiction so what is this universe is it a monarchy is it a republic is it a mechanism or an organism because you see if it's a mechanism either it's a a mere mechanism as in the fully automatic model or else it's the mechanism under the control of a driver a mechanic if it's not that it's an organism and an organism is a thing that governs itself in your body there is no boss you can say you can argue for example that the brain is a gadget evolved by the stomach in order to serve the stomach for the purposes of getting food or you can argue that the stomach is a gadget evolved by the brain to feed it and keep it alive whose game is this is it the brain's game or the stomachs game it doesn't make actually they are mutual the brain implies the stomach the stomach implies the brain and neither of them is the boss you know that story about all the limbs of the body said the hand said we do all our work the feet said we do our work the mouth said we do all the chewing and here's this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn't do a thing he doesn't do any work so let's go on strike and the hands refused to carry the feet refused to walk the mouth refused to chew and said now we're on strike against the stomach but after a while all of them found themselves getting weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker because they didn't recognize that the stomach fed them so there is the possibility then that we are not in the kind of system that these two myths delineate that we are not living in a world where we ourselves in the deepest sense of our of self are outside reality and somehow in a position that we have to bow down to it and say as a great favor please preserve us in existence nor are we in a system which is merely mechanical and in which we are nothing but flukes trapped in the electrical wiring of a nervous system which is fundamentally rather inefficiently arranged what's the alternative well we can put the alternative in another image altogether and i will call this not the ceramic image not the fully automatic image but the dramatic image consider the world as a drama what's the basis of all drama the basis of all stories of all plots of all happenings it's the game of hide and seek you get a baby what's the fundamental first game you play with a baby you put a book in front of your face and you peek at the baby like this the baby starts giggling because the baby is close to the origins of life it comes from the womb really knowing what it's all about but it can't put it into words see what every child psychologist really wants to know is to get a baby to talk psychological jargon and explain how it feels [Laughter] but the baby knows you do this and this this this and the baby starts laughing because the baby is a recent incarnation of god and the baby knows therefore that hide and seek is the basic game see before uh when we were children we were taught one two three and abc but we once sat down on our mother's knees and taught the game of black and white that's the thing that was left out of all our educations that life is not a conflict between opposites but of polarity the difference between a conflict and a polarity is simply when you say about opposite things we sometimes use the expression these two things are the poles apart you say for example with someone with whom you totally disagree i'm the poles apart from this person but you're very saying that gives the show away poles poles are the opposite ends of one magnet and if you take a magnet it's a north pole in the south pole right chop off the south pole move it away the piece you've got left creates a new south pole you never get rid of the south pole things may be the poles apart but they go together and you can't have the one without the other that's the basic idea of polarity but what we're trying to imagine is the encounter of forces that come from absolutely opposed realms they have nothing in common when we say of two personality types that they're the poles apart we are trying to think eccentrically instead of concentrically and so in this way we haven't realized that life and death black and white good and evil being and non-being come from the same center they imply each other so that you wouldn't know the one without the other now i'm not saying that that's bad that's fun you are playing the game that you don't know that self and other go together in just the same way as the two poles of the magnet so that when anybody in our culture says uh slips into the state of consciousness where they suddenly find this to be true and they come on and say i'm god we say you're insane now it's very difficult you you can very easily slip into the state of consciousness where you feel your god it can happen to anyone just in the same way as you can get the flu or measles or something like that you can slip into the state of consciousness when you get it it depends upon your background and your training as to how you're going to interpret it if you've got the idea of god that comes from popular christianity god as the governor the political head of the world and you think your god then you say to everybody well you should bow down and worship me but if you're a member of hindu culture and you suddenly tell all your friends i'm god instead of saying you're insane they say congratulations at last you found out because their idea of god is not the autocratic governor when they'd uh make images of shiva say he has 10 arms how would you use 10 arms it's hard enough to use two you know if you play the organ you've got to use your two feet and your two hands and you play different rhythms with each member it's kind of tricky but actually we're all masters of this because how do you grow each hair without having to think about it each nerve how do you beat your heart and digest with your stomach at the same time you don't have to think about it in your very body you are omnipotent in the true sense of omnipotence which is that you are able to be omnipotent you are able to do all these things without having to think about it when i was a child i used to ask my mother of course all sorts of ridiculous questions that every child asked and when she got bored with my question she'd say darling there are some things we're just not meant to know well i said well we ever know she said yes of course when we die and go to heaven every god will make everything plain so i used to imagine that on wet afternoons in heaven we'd all sit around the throne of grace and say to god well now why did you do this and how did you do that and he would explain it to us heavenly father why are the leaves green and he would say because of the chlorophyll and we'd say oh [Laughter] but in the hindu universe you would say to god how did you make the mountains and he would say well i just did it because what you're asking me for when you ask me how did i make the mountains you're asking me to describe in words how i made the mountains and there are no words which can do this words cannot tell you how i made the mountains anymore then i can drink the ocean with a fork a fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it but it won't it is no use for for imbibing the ocean it would take millions of years so it would take millions of years in other words you would be bored with my description long before i got through it if i put it to you in words because i didn't create the mountains with words i just did it like you open and close your hand you know how to do this but can you describe in words how you do it but you do it you are conscious aren't you do you know how you manage to be conscious do you know how you beat your heart can you say in words explain correctly how this is done you do it but you can't put it into words because words are too clumsy and yet you manage this expertly for as long as you're able to do it we are playing a game and the game runs like this the only thing you really know is what you can put into words let's suppose i love some girl rapturously and somebody says to me would you really love her or how am i going to prove this let's say uh write poetry tell us all how much you love her then we'll believe you so if i'm an artist and i can put this into words and convince everybody that i've written the most ecstatic love letters ever written they say all right okay we'll admit it you really do love but supposing you're not very articulate are we going to tell you you don't love her surely not you don't have to be heloise and ability to be in love so the whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless it's in the newspaper so when we are at a party and there's a great party somebody said it's too bad there wasn't a tape recorder and so our children begin to feel that they don't exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers and the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime then you'll be photographed then you'll appear in court then everybody will notice you it really happened if it was recorded in other words if you shout and it doesn't doesn't come back an echo it didn't happen well that's a real hang up it's true the fun with echoes we all like singing in the bathtub because there's more resonance there and when we play a musical instrument like a violin or a cello it has a sounding box because that gives resonance to the sound and in the same way the cortex of the human brain enables us when we are happy to know that we are happy and that gives a certain resonance to it if you're happy and you don't know you're happy there's nobody home but this is the whole problem for us several thousand years ago human beings evolved the system of self-consciousness and they knew they they knew there was a young man who said though it seems that i know that i know what i would like to see is the eye that knows me when i know that i know that i know you see and and this is uh the human problem we know that we know and so there came a point in our evolution when we didn't guide life by distrusting our instincts and had to think about it and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols accountancy calculation and so on and then we worry once you start thinking about things you worry as to whether you thought enough did you really take all the details into consideration was every fact properly reviewed and by jove the more you think about it the more you realize that you really couldn't take everything into consideration because all the variables in any human decision are incalculable so you get anxiety and this though also this is the price you pay for knowing that you know for being able to think about thinking to feel about feeling and so you're in this funny position now then do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage what has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness a certain kind of reflexive consciousness being aware of being aware being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols such as words such as numbers you put as it were two lives together at once one representing the other the symbols representing the reality the money representing the wealth and if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary it doesn't have the same value you know people go to the supermarket and they uh get a whole cart load of goodies and they drive it through and then the clerk fixes up the counter on this long tape comes out and you say 30 please and everybody feels depressed because they they give away thirty dollars worth of paper but they got a cart load of goodies they don't think about that they think they just lost lost thirty dollars but you got the real wealth in the cart all you parted with was a paper because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth it represents power potentiality whereas the wealth think oh well that's just necessary you gotta eat i mean that's to be really mixed up so then if you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white self implies other life implies death or shall i say death implies life you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world not as something here on probation not as something that has arrived here by fluke but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental what you are basically deep deep down far far in is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself so say in hindu mythology they say that the world is the drama of god god is not something in hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on the throne and it has royal prerogatives god in in indian mythology is the self which means sat that which is chit that which is consciousness that which is under is bliss and in other words the what exists reality itself is gorgeous it is the plenum the fullness of total joy wow we and all those stars if you look out in the sky as the firework display like you see on the fourth of july which is a great occasion for celebration the universe is a celebration it is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is wow we and then they say but however there's no point just in sustaining bliss let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream and that you could for example have the power one night to dream 75 years of time or any length of time you wanted to have and you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams you would fulfill all your wishes you would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive and after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say well that was pretty great but now let's um let's have a surprise let's have a dream which isn't under control well something is going to happen to me that i don't know what it's going to be and uh you you would dig that and come out of that and say wow that was a close shave wasn't it and then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream and finally you would dream where you are now you would dream the dream of living the life that you were actually living today that would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have of playing that you weren't god because the whole nature of the godhead according to this idea is to play that he's not the first thing he says to himself is man get lost because he gives himself away the nature of love is self-abandonment not clinging to oneself throwing yourself out as in for example in basketball you're always getting rid of the ball you say to the other fellow have a ball see and uh that keeps things moving that's the nature of life so in this idea then everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality not god in a politically kingly sense but god in the sense of being the self the deep down basic whatever there is and you're all that only you're pretending you're not and it's perfectly okay to pretend you're not to be absolutely convinced because this is the whole notion of drama when you come into the theater there is a proscenium arch and a stage and down there is the audience and everybody assumes their seats in the theater and uh are going to see a comedy a tragedy a thriller or whatever it is and they all know as they come in and pay their admissions that what is going to happen on the stage is not for real but the actors have a conspiracy against this because they're going to try and persuade the audience that what is happening on the stage is for real they want to get everybody sitting on the edge of their chairs they want to get you terrified or crying or laughing ab absolutely captivated by the drama and if a skillful human actor can take in an audience and make people cry think what the cosmic actor can do why he can take himself in completely he can play so much for real that he really believes it is like you sitting in this room you think you're really here why you've persuaded yourself that way you've acted it so damn well that you know this is the real world but you're playing it it's because the audience and the actor is one because behind the stage there's the green room off scene obscene where the actors take off their masks you know that the word person means mask the persona which is the mask worn by actors in greek roman drama because it has a megaphone type mouth which throws the sound out in an open-air theater so pair through sona but the sound comes through that's the mask how to be a real person how to be a genuine fake a mask so the dramatist personae at the beginning of a play is the list of masks that the actors will wear and so in the course of forgetting that this this life is a drama the word for the role the word for the mask has come to mean who you are genuinely the person the proper person incidentally the word parson is derived from the word person person of the village person around town funny so anyway then this is the drama i'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it i want you to play with it i want you to think of its possibilities i'm not trying to prove it i'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about so then this means that you are not victims of a scheme of things of a mechanical world or of an autocratic god the life you're living is what you put yourself into only you don't admit it because you want to play the game that it's happened to you in other words i got mixed up in this world my parents i had a father who got hot pants over a girl and she was my mother and uh because he got he was just a he was just a horny old man and as a result of that i got born and i blame him for it and say well that's your fault you've got to look after me and he says i don't see why i should look after you you're just a result and but let's suppose we admit that i really wanted to get born and that i was the ugly gleam in my father's eye when he approached my mother that was me i was desire and i deliberately got involved in this thing look at it that way instead and that even if i got myself into an awful mess and i got born with syphilis and the great siberian itch and tuberculosis and uh in the nazi concentration camp nevertheless this was a game which was a very far out play it was a kind of cosmic masochism but i did it isn't that an optimal game rule for life because if you play life on the supposition that you're a helpless little puppet got involved or if you played on the supposition that it's a frightful serious risk and that we really ought to do something about it and so on it's a drag there's no point in going on living unless we make the assumption that the situation of life is optimal that really and truly we are all in the state of total bliss and delight but we are going to pretend we aren't just for kicks you play non-bliss in order to be able to experience bliss and you can go as far out as non-bliss as you want to go and when you wake up it'll be great you know you can slam yourself on the head with a hammer because it's a nice when you stop and it makes you realize you see how how great things are when you forget that that's the way it is and that's just like black and white you don't know black unless you know white you don't know white unless you know black this is simply fundamental so then here's the drama my metaphysics let me be perfectly frank with you are that there is the central self you can call it god you can call it anything you like and it's all of us it's playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere and it's playing the game of hide and seek with itself it gets lost it gets involved in the forest out adventures but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself and when you're ready to wake up you're going to wake up and if you're not ready you're going to stay pretending that you're just a little poor little me and uh since you're all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture i assume that you're all on the process of waking up or else you're teasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation with waking up which you're not serious about but i assume maybe you are not serious but sincere that you are ready to wake up so then when you're in the way of waking up and finding out who you really are you meet a character called a guru as the hindus say this word the teacher the awakener and what is the function of a guru he's the man who looks at you in the eye and says oh come on i know who you are you know you come to the guru and say sir i have a problem i'm unhappy and i want to get one up on the universe or i want to become enlightened i want spiritual wisdom ah the guru looks at you and says who are you you know sri ramana maharshi that great hindu sage of modern times people used to come to him and say master who was i in my last incarnation as if that mattered and he would say who is asking the question let me look at you and say basically go right down to it you're looking at me you're looking out and you're unaware of what's behind your eyes go back in and find out who you are where the question comes from why you ask and if you've looked at a photograph of that now i have a gorgeous photograph of it and you look in those i walk by it every time i go out of the front door and i look at those eyes and the humor in the lilting laugh that says oh come off it [Laughter] shiva i recognize you when you come to my door and you say i'm so-and-so i say ha ha what a funny way god has come on today uh there are all sorts of tricks of course that gurus play they uh say well we're going to put you through the mill and the reason they do that is simply that you won't wake up until you feel you've paid a price for it in other words the sense of guilt that one has or the sense of anxiety is simply the way one experiences keeping the game of disguise going on do you see that supposing you say i feel guilty christianity makes you feel guilty for existing that somehow the very fact that you exist as an affront you are a fallen human being i remember as a child when we went to the services of the church on good friday they gave us each a colored postcard with jesus crucified on it and it said underneath this have i done for thee what doest thou for me you know you felt awful you nailed that man to the cross because you eat steak you have crucified christ because you kill the bull after all you depend on it mithra it's the same mystery and what are you going to do about that this has i done for thee what do you start from you feel awful that you just exist at all but that sense that sense of guilt is the veil across the sanctuary don't you dare come in in order to you know in all mysteries when you're going to be initiated there's somebody saying don't you come in you've got to fulfill this requirement that this requirement of this requirement of this requirement then we'll let you in and so you go you you go through the mill why because this is you're saying to yourself i won't wake up until i feel i deserve it i won't wake up until i've made it difficult for me to wake up so i i i invent for myself an elaborate system of delaying my waking up i put myself through this test and that test and when i feel it's been sufficiently arduous then i may at last admit to myself who i really am and draw aside the veil and realize that after all when all is said and done i am that i am which is the name of god and when it comes to it that's really rather funny they say in zen when you attain satori nothing has left you at that moment but to have a good laugh but naturally all masters zen masters yoga masters every kind of master puts up a barrier and says to you [Music] he simply plays your own game you know we say anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined because you when you go to a psychiatrist you define yourself as somebody who ought to have his head examined same way the zen masters say anybody who studies then or comes to a zen master ought to be given 30 blows with a stick because he was stupid enough to pose the question that he had a problem you're the problem you you put yourself in this situation so it's a question fundamentally do you define yourself as a victim of the world or as the world you can define yourself you see if you identify you with what you call the voluntary system of the nerves and say only that's me and that's really a rather limited amount of my total performance what i do voluntarily then you've defined yourself as the victim in the game and so you are able to feel that life was a trap something else whether it was god or whether it was fate or whether it was the big mechanism the system imposed this on you and you can say poor little me but you can eat equally well and with just as much this justification define yourself not only as what you do voluntarily but also what you do involuntarily that's you too do you beat your heart or don't you or does it just happen to you and if you define yourself as the works then nobody's imposing on you you're not a victim you're doing it because you can't explain how you do it in words because words are too clumsy and it take too long to say you get bored with it but actually then you can say with with gusto i am responsible for this life whether comedy or tragedy i did it and it seems to me that that is a basis for behavior and going on which is more fundamentally joyous and profitable and great than defining ourselves as miserable victims or sinners or what have you [Music] out of your mind now continues with the next lecture from the nature of consciousness lecture [Music] series i was discussing an alternative myth to the ceramic and fully automatic models of the universe i'll call the dramatic myth the idea that life as we experience it's a big act and that behind this big act is the player and uh the player or the self as it's called in hindu philosophy the atman is you only you are playing hide and seek since that is the essential game that's going on it's the game of games it's the basis of all games hide and seek and so since you're playing hide and seek you are deliberately although you can't admit this or won't admit it you are deliberately forgetting who you really are or what you really are and the knowledge that your essential self is the foundation of the universe the ground of being as tilik calls it is something you have is what the germans call a hintergadanka a hintagidanka is a thought way way way in the back of your mind way back here somewhere something that you know deep down but to can't admit so in a way then in in order to bring this to the front in order to know that that is the case you have to be kidded out of your game you see the problem is this we identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us we have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary and we feel in control of those and then over against that there is all those things that are involuntary but the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary because for example when you move your hand you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it but then ask yourself how do you decide when you decide to open your hand do you first decide to decide you don't do you you just decide and how do you do that and if you don't know how you do it is it voluntary or involuntary let's consider breathing you can feel that you breathe deliberately you can control your breath but when you don't think about it it goes on is it voluntary or involuntary and so we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self that much of my activity which i feel i do and that then doesn't include breathing most of the time it doesn't include the heartbeats it doesn't include the activity of the glands it doesn't include digestion it doesn't include how you shape your bones circulate your blood do you or do you not do these things now if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself very strange thing happens you find that your body knows that you are one with the universe in other words that the so-called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining if you find out that it's you who circulates your blood you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that's going on just as the waves are continuous with the ocean your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos and it's all you only you're playing the game that you're only this bit of it but as i tried to explain there are in physical reality no such things as separate events so then remember also when i tried to work towards a definition of omnipotence omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done it's just doing it you don't have to translate it into language look supposing when you got up in the morning you had to switch your brain on and you had to think and do as a deliberate process waking up all the circuits that you need for active life during the day why you would never get done because you have to do all those things at once how can a centipede control a hundred legs at once because it doesn't think about it and so in the same way you are unconsciously performing all the various activities of your organism only unconsciously isn't a good word because it sounds sort of dead super consciously would be better give it a plus rather than a minus because what a consciousness is is simply a sort of specialized form of awareness when you uh look around the room you are conscious of as much as you can notice and you see an enormous number of things which you don't notice if for example i look at a girl here and somebody asked me later what was she wearing i may not know although i've seen because i didn't attend but i was aware you see and perhaps if i could under hypnosis be asked this question where i would get my conscious attention out of the way through being in the hypnotic state i could recall what press she was wearing so then just in the same way as you don't focus your attention on how you make your thyroid gland function so in the same way you don't have any attention focused on how you shine the sun so then let me connect this with the problem of birth and death which puzzles people enormously of course because in order to understand what what the self is you have to remember that it doesn't need to remember anything just like you don't need to know how you work your thyroid gland so then when you die you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence because that's not an experience a lot of people are afraid that when they die they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever and sort of undergo that but one of the most interesting things in the world this is a yoga this is a way of realization try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up think about that children think about it it's one of the great wonders of life what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up and if you think long enough about that something will happen to you you will find out among other things that uh it'll pose next question to you what was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep that was when you were born you see you you can't have an experience of nothing nature reports a vacuum so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born in other words we all know very well that after people die other people are born and they're all you only you could only experience it one at a time everybody is i you all know you're you and wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't make any difference you are all of them and when they come into being that's you coming in to be you know that very well only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland or whatever else it is in your organism you don't have to know how to shine the sun you just do it like you breathe isn't it doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it you never learned but you're this miracle well the point is that from a strictly physical scientific standpoint this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that's going on and if i am my foot i am the sun only we've got this little partial view we've got the idea that no i'm just something in this body the ego that's a joke the ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention it's like a radar on a ship the radar on a ship is a troubleshooter is there anything in the way and conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment like a radar does and note for any trouble making changes but if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety and the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism you realize that as the first thing how harmonious it all is because your organism is a miracle of harmony all this thing functioning together even those copper schools and creatures that are fighting each other in the bloodstream and eating each other up if they weren't doing that you wouldn't be healthy so what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level and you begin to realize that and you begin to be aware too that the discords of your life the discords of people's life which are a fight at one level at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious and you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is at that as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves the markings in marble the way a cat moves and that this world is really okay and can't be anything else because otherwise it couldn't exist but the reality underneath physical existence or which really is physical existence because in my philosophy there's no difference between the physical and the spiritual these are absolutely out of date categories it's all process it isn't stuff on the one hand and form on the other it's just it is pattern life is pattern it is a dance of energy so i will never invoke spooky knowledge now that is to say that i've had a private revelation or that i have sensory vibrations going on a plane which you don't have everything is standing right out in the open it's just a question of how you look at it so you do discover when you realize this the most extraordinary thing to me that i never cease to be flabbergasted out whenever it happens to me some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of god to the universe wherein god is say brilliant light only somehow veiled hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around you so far so good but the truth is funnier than that it is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now that the experience you are having which you call ordinary everyday consciousness pretending you're not it that experience is exactly the same thing as it there's no difference at all and when you find that out you laugh yourself silly that's the great discovery in other words when you really start to see things and you look at an old paper cup and you go into the nature of what it is to see what vision is or what smell is or what touches you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos nothing could be brighter ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter only they are hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out but it is actually see the source of all light is in the eye if there were no eyes in this world the sun would not be light you evoke light out of the universe in the same way you by virtue of having a soft skin evoke hardness out of wood wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin it's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air you by being this organism call into being the whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything you see but in the mythology that we've sold ourselves on during the end of the 19th century when people discovered how big the universe was and that we live on a little planet in a solar system on the edge of a galaxy which is a minor galaxy everybody thought we're really unimportant after all god isn't there and doesn't love us and nature doesn't give a damn and uh we put ourselves down see but actually it's this little funny microbe tiny thing crawling on this little planet that's way out somewhere who has the ingenuity by nature of this magnificent organic structure to evoke the whole universe out of what would otherwise be me a quanta there's jazz going on but you see this little little ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this this little organism on this little planet is what the whole show is growing there and so realizing its own presence well now here's the problem if this is the state of affairs which is so and if the the consciousness state you're in at this moment is the same thing as what we might call the divine state if you do anything to make it different it shows you don't understand that it's so so the moment you start practicing yoga or praying or meditating or indulging in some sort of spiritual cultivation you are getting in your own way the buddha said we suffer because we desire if you can give up desire you won't suffer but he didn't say that as the last word he said that as the opening step of a dialogue because the if if you say that to someone they're going to come back after a while and say yes but i'm now desiring not to desire and so the buddha will answer well at last you're beginning to understand the point because you can't give up desire why would you try to do that it's already designed so in the same way you say oh you ought to be unselfish or to give up your ego let go relax why do you want to do that just because it's another way of beating the game isn't it the moment you see you hypothesize that you are different from the universe you want to get one up on it but if you try to get one up on the universe and you're in competition with it it means you don't understand you are it you think there's a real difference between self and other but self what you call yourself and what you call other are mutually necessary to each other like back and front they're really one but just as a magnet polarizes itself in north and south but it's all one magnet so experience polarizes itself as self and other but it's all one so if you try to make the north pole get the mastery of it or the south pole get the master of the north pole you show you don't know what's going on a guru or teacher who wants to get this across to somebody because he knows it himself and when you know it you know you like others to see too so what he does is he gets you into being ridiculous harder and more assiduously than usual in other words if you are in a contest with the universe he's going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous and so he sets you such tasks as saying now of course in order to be a true person you must give up yourself be unselfish so the lord sits steps down out of heaven and says first and great commandment is thou shalt love the lord thy god you must love me well that's a double bind you can't love on purpose you can't be sincere purposely it's like trying not to think of a green elephant while taking medicine but if a person really tries to do it so you know this is where christianity is rigged you should be very sorry for your sins and though everybody knows they're not but they think they ought to be and so they go around trying to be penitent or trying to be humble and they know the more assiduously they practice it the phonier and phonier the whole thing gets and so in this way it's what it's called the technique of reductio absurdum if you think you have a problem you see and that you're an ego and that you're in difficulty the answer that the zen master makes to you is show me your ego i want to see this thing that has a problem when bodhidharma the legendary founder of zen came to china a disciple came to him and said i have no peace of mind please pacify my mind and bodhidharma said bring out your mind here before me and i'll pacify it. well he said when i look for it i can't find it so bodhidharma said there it's pacified see because when you look for your own mind that is to say your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else you won't be able to find it but the only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look for it hard enough to find out that it isn't there and so everybody says all right know yourself look within find out who you are because the harder you look you won't be able to find it and then you'll realize that it isn't there at all there isn't a separate you your mind is what there is everything but the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible that's one way i don't say the only way but it is one way and so almost all spiritual disciplines meditations prayers etc etc are ways of persisting in folly doing resolutely and consistently what you're doing already so if a person believes that the earth is flat you can't talk him out of that he knows it's flat look out of the window and see it's obviously it looks flat so the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say well let's go and find the edge and in order to find the edge you've got to be very careful not to walk in circles so you'll never find it that way so we've got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude and eventually when we get back to where we started from you've convinced the guy that the earth is round but that's the that's the only way that'll tell that'll teach him because people can't be talked out of illusions but now there is another possibility however but this is more difficult to describe let's say uh we we take us the basic supposition which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening or whatever you want to call it that this now moment in which i'm talking and you're listening is eternity that although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary and that we may not feel very well and that uh we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on and that it ought to be changed this is it so you don't need to do anything at all but the difficulty about explaining that is that don't you you mustn't try not to do anything because that's doing something and how to explain that because there's nothing to explain it it is the way it is now and if you understand that it will automatically wake you up that's why zen teachers use shock treatment to uh sometimes while they hit people or shout at them or create a sudden surprise because it is that jolt that suddenly brings you here see there's no road to here because you're already there if you ask me how am i going to get here it'll be like the famous story of the american tourist in england who are some yoke all the way to upper tottenham little village the oakland scratched his head and he said well sir i do know where it is but if i were you i wouldn't start from here [Laughter] so you see when you ask how do i attain the knowledge of god how do i attain nirvana liberation all i can say is it's the wrong question why do you want to attain it because the very fact that you're wanting to attain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there you already have it but of course yeah it's it's up to you it's your privilege to pretend that you don't that's your game that's your life game that's what makes you think you're an ego and uh when you want to wake up you will dislike that if you're not awake it shows you don't want to you're still playing the hyde part of the game you're still as it were the the self pretending it's not the self that's what you want to do so you see in that way too you're already there when you understand this a funny thing happens and some people misinterpret it you will discover as this happens that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior disappears you will realize that what you describe as things under your own will feel exactly the same as things going on outside you you watch other people moving and you know you're doing that [Music] just like you're breathing or circulating your blood if you don't understand what's going on you're liable to get crazy at this point and to feel that you are god in the jehovah sense say that you actually have power over other people so that you could alter what they're doing and that you are omnipotent in a very crude literal kind of bible sense you see and uh a lot of people feel that and they go crazy they have to put them away they think they're jesus christ and that everybody ought to fall down and worship that's only they got their wires crossed they haven't been able to this experience happened to them but they don't know how to interpret it so be careful of that jung calls it inflation people who get the holy man syndrome that uh i've suddenly discovered that i'm the lord and that i'm above good and evil and so on and that that therefore i start giving myself heirs and graces but the point is everybody else is too if you discover that you're that then you ought to know that everybody else is well for example let's see how in other ways you might realize this most people think when they open their eyes and look around that what they are seeing is outside it seems doesn't it that you are behind your eyes and that behind the eyes there is a blank if you can't see at all turn around and see something else in front of you but behind the eyes there seems to be something that has no color it isn't dark it isn't light it's just it's there from a tactile standpoint you can feel it with your fingers although you don't get inside it but what is that behind your eyes you see well actually when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around that's how it feels inside your head the color of this room is back here in the nervous system where the optical nerves are at the back of the head it's in there it's what you're experiencing what you see out here is a neurological experience now if that hits you and you feel sensuously that that's so you may think that then then therefore the external world is all inside my skull but you've got to correct that with the thought that your skull is also in the external world so you suddenly begin to feel well wow what kind of a situation is this it's inside me and i'm inside it and it's inside me and i'm inside it but that's the way it is this is the what you could call transaction rather than interaction between the individual and the world just like for example in buying and selling there cannot be an act of buying unless the simultaneously an act of selling vice versa so the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional the environment grows the organism and in turn the organism creates the environment the organism turns the sun into light but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all and the answer to it is simply they're all one process and it isn't that organisms by chance came into this world but it rather that this world is the sort of environment which grows organisms it was that way from the beginning just in the same way i mean the organisms may in time have arrived in the scene or out of the scene later than the beginning of the scene but from the moment it went bang in the beginning if that's the way it started organisms like us are sitting here we're involved in it you see look here let's take the propagation of an electric current i can have a an electric current running through a wire that goes all the way around the earth and here we have our power source and here we have a switch all right here's the positive pole here's the negative pole now before that switch closes there is the current doesn't exactly behave like water in a pipe there isn't current here waiting to jump the gap as soon as the switch is closed the current doesn't even start until the switch is closed from the positive pole it never starts unless the point of arrival is there now it'll take an interval for that current to get going and uh circuit if it's going all the way around the earth it's a long run but the but the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning in a similar way although uh in the development of any physical system there may be billions of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life that billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of the current round the wire takes it into time but it's already implied it takes time for an acorn to turn into an oat but the oak is already implied in the acorn so in any lump of rock floating about in space there is implicit human intelligence sometimes somehow somewhere they all go together so don't differentiate yourself and stand off against this and say i am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk rocks and stuff it all goes together those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails need rocks what are you going to stand on what i think you know awakening really involves is a re-examination of our common sense we've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned obvious and our speech reflects the communist phrases face the facts as if they were outside you as if uh life was something you simply encountered as a foreigner face the facts our common sense has been rigged you see so that we feel strangers and aliens in this world and this is terribly plausible simply because it's what we're used to that's the only reason but when you really start questioning this say is that the way i have to assume life is i know everybody does but does that make it true it doesn't necessarily it ain't necessarily so and so then you is as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture you find you get a new kind of common sense it becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe for example people used to believe that the people who lived in the antipodes would fall off and that was scary but then when somebody sailed around the world and we all got used to it and now we travel around in jet planes and everything we have no problem about feeling that the earth is globular none whatever we got used to it so in the same way einstein's relativity theories the curvature of the propagation of light that began to bother people when einstein started talking like that but now we're all used to it well in a few years it will be a matter of common sense to very many people that they're one with the universe it'll be so simple and then maybe if that happens we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense with love instead of with hate for our environment

Channel: Simply Art

Views: 95,166

Rating: 4.8316031 out of 5

Keywords: nature of consciousness, alan watts, podcast, what there is, alan watts podcast, consciousness alan watts, the nature of everything, life, the universe, education, meditation, inspiration, science, spiritual awakening, alan watts overthinking, alan watts choice, alan watts anxiety, alan watts live, lecture ambient, alan watts lecture, simply2020art, simply art, the nature of consciousness, alan watts letting go, the nature of consciousness alan watts, audiobook, wisdom, awaken, mind, your

Id: H1NfmK7goMM

Length: 126min 29sec (7589 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mydmtusername]

Alan Watts is one of the few speakers who can actually make me feel like there is still good in this world

[u/KalmarLoridelon]

He looks like Jim Carry in disguise.