Solving the Ghosts in Our Minds - Alan Watts

there is no problem of life in the sense in which we ordinarily use that phrase and that seems an almost astounding affront to our Common Sense life not a problem we see it as nothing but problems we regard ourselves in a morning noon and night struggle to solve the great problem of existence and for some people this problem is uh why does the UN exists other people the problem is how am I going to get enough to eat and therefore when you take it at one extreme or the other who can say that life is not a problem and yet here is this audacious suggestion that what we are bothering about is a ghost it's something that isn't really there one of the characteristics of neurotic Behavior you know is it's repetitive the neurotic personality keeps going through unsuccessful life patterns again and again and again and nothing seems to be able to stop it the round or the rat race of birth and death that is to say of Life As We ordinarily live it because it is around it is a vicious circle for the reason that we keep trying to solve problems that are not simply overwhelmingly difficult but problems that are not problems at all they only look like problems and so when we tackle you see impossible questions things go round and round and never come out now take for example some of the many ghosts which haunt our minds we say for example that we all have an instinct to survive and a lot of people thus treat the problem of life is how am I to survive and one might almost be a little cautious about relieving people of this problem lest they should lose the impetus to go on doing their work but that also impetus to go on doing your work is another ghost we think we are driven you see we think that what we do has these mysterious things behind it see it's very important simply to keep your eye on what is being done and to describe that and if you describe it clearly enough and well enough you will probably find the ghost of instinct disappeared thus you see when we talk about an instinct for survival uh what is this saying how what is the evidence for the fact that there is an instinct for survival there is no evidence except that in in fact people survive until they don't and this is rather odd because what happens to the Instinct for survival when people don't survive so in this way we find that when we try to explain some kind of behavior some kind of activity by supposing that there is a motivating force a sort of Incarnate spook behind the whole thing what has really happened is that we haven't described what's going on sufficiently clearly now this comes out in another way when we try to describe anything at all and think that we are describing something that as it were exists all by itself as I've often said we are so bugged by the notion of stuff you see stuff acting stuff doing things but all that is you see is that the world strikes us as being material until we examine it closely in other words a distant nebula in the heavens looks like a solid star until you turn a giant telescope on it and you make out the clear pattern of a spiral nebula in other words the concept of stuff is a sense ation that we get when we haven't examined things sufficiently closely or when our instruments are not fine enough to penetrate what we're observing but when the instruments are fine enough what we get instead is pattern and pattern is simply a form of behavior of activity consider this in another way let's go back to the human organism and ask the question well what about its shape how is it that a human organism is contained all the organs are kept in by the skin well we will describe of course the structure of skin and how it is that it holds together but then we will soon find out that we're also talking about the surrounding air which impinges upon the human skin with a pressure of about 15 lb per square in so that if it weren't there we'd explode now so the question arises that you know what is keeping the organism in shape and we find out that it is not only what is going on inside the skin that keeps it in shape but also what's going on outside the skin and when we go on to describe this still more carefully we discover that it isn't quite correct to say that it is the air that is doing this or that it is the organism that is doing this we begin to describe instead what Dewey and Bentley in their very fascinating book knowing and the known call a transaction now that is to say a buyer can't buy unless somebody is also selling you can't know anything unless there's something to know and this fact you see is constantly overlooked that any thing in the world whether it's inanimate or animate whatever it may be is there by virtue of being in a transactional relationship not with something else but with everything else a human being of course has ever so many relationships they're very complicated a person say we call a doctor is not only related to his actual work of doctoring but he may be also a father related to a family he's a citizen related to a community in other ways than as the doctor and so on and so forth and so we begin to imagine him as it were apart from his relationships as a sort of constant going through all these different relationships and therefore in some way different from them all but this you see creates a ghost it creates a being independent of all the different relationships in which he finds himself whenas strictly speaking he is inseparable from those relationships and we can't eliminate them we can only describe him fully as the entire whole complex so in other words every organism could be called the behavior of the field or environment in which it is found now this doesn't mean that the organism is something pushed around by the environment and is completely passive and inert and that everything that it does is simply a response to external stimulus because in a way the organism is part of its environment after all it is an object a process in nature in the cosmos just as much as everything in its Environ there is really no way of separating the two instead of speaking as it were in this terminology of doers and done toos attackers and victims we simplify things considerably just by confining ourselves to a description of what is happening and as we do this we get a peculiarly clarified picture of the world without all sorts of ghosts and it is in this way that we also begin to be able to have some preliminary Intuition or sensation of the meaning of the fact that life is not a problem in other words not a contest between ourselves and our environment this conception of life turns out to be basically phony

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Id: l5ajZO28fDA

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2024