The Power of Nothing - Nature of Duality | Alan Watts

and when i think over the weirdest of all things i can think of you know what it is nothing [Music] the whole idea of nothing is something that bugged people for centuries especially in the west because we have a saying in latin ex nihilony he'll fit which means that out of nothing comes nothing you can't in other words get something out of nothing and it's occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions that lies at the root of all our common sense not only in the west but in many parts of the east as well and it comes up as a kind of terror of nothing a put down on nothing on everything to do with nothing everything associated with nothing such as sleep passivity rest because what has struck me is that nothing the negative the empty is exceedingly powerful i would say not ex nihiloni he'll fit out of nothing comes nothing but i would say you can't have something without nothing but how do we basically begin to think about the difference between something and nothing i can say there is a cigar in my right hand and there is no cigar in my left hand and so we get the idea of is here and isn't or empty here but behind that of course lies the far more obvious contrast of solid and space now we tend to think of space as nothing space as such that is to say whatever it is that lies between the earth and the moon and the earth and the sun is considered to be just nothing at all but to suggest how very powerful and important this nothing at all is let me point out to you that if you didn't have space you couldn't have anything solid to begin with without space outside the solid you wouldn't know where the solids edges were but you always have to have a background to see a figure you just can't do without it so that means that the figure and the ground the solid and the space in some way are inseparable and go together so what this is trying to get into our basic logic is this that there isn't a sort of fight between something and nothing and we can turn that right the other way around and say you can't have space without solid to have the whole idea of there being only space and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless because we always know what we mean by contrasts we know what we mean by white in comparison with black we know life in comparison with death we know pleasure in comparison with pain up in comparison with down but you will notice of all these things that they must come into being together so in this sense the positive and the negative the something and the nothing are inseparable they go together and in this way you could say that the nothing is the force whereby the something can be manifested but here it is this common sense notion that the world is made of some kind of stuff it isn't there at all but instead form and emptiness what we have found is not stuff but form we have found shapes we have found structures because when you turn up the microscope and you look at things where you thought there was some sort of stuff you find instead form pattern structure you find the shapes of crystals you go in beyond the shapes of crystals and you find molecules and you go in beyond molecules and you find atoms and you go in beyond atoms and you find electrons and positrons between which there are vast spaces and that's why there's a buddhist saying really the whole of buddhism is based on this saying which is that which is void is precisely form and that which is form is precisely void form is void void is form or we could put it in another way instead of saying is we could say implies or the word that i invented goes with spelled all in one like a front goes with a back a male goes with a female and so on [Music] now the same thing is true of all life together we shouldn't really contrast existence with non-existence because actually existence is the alternation of to be and not to be of positive and negative of on and off and this of course is represented in this fundamental chinese figure of the yang or the positive principle and the yin or the negative principle like two fishes constantly circulating going round and round and round and round in the alternations of life now the question is are these two fishes involved in a fight is the white one eating up the black one and the black one trying to eat up the white one if that is the situation then of course life is fundamentally nothing but a grim contest if this one up here is the good fellow and this one is the bad fellow if this is order and this is chaos then a fight goes on between them and that's largely the way in which our technology has interpreted man's situation as against nature this is man the white the good fellow this is nature the dark the bad fellow and the white one has got to eat him up but what happens if the white fish succeeds in eating up the dark fish the white fish disappears as well as the dark one because the white one is only there in relation to the dark so then if these two fishes as it were wake up if this one wakes up and this one wakes up which is called awakening in buddhism they realize they're one in other words they go together they are inseparable from each other and this realization is that experience which is called in zen satori or in buddhism bodhi awakening this sudden dawning on our consciousness that life is not really a contest to make yes triumph over no to make the positive triumph over the negative the two sides go together and then one sees in this strange way that underlying all that is negative in the world all that is in a way painful and evil there is a kind of necessity to it it goes with the good it is necessary for the good disorder is necessary for the manifestation of order just as you must have say a black background to show up a light figure and then when one sees that a profound transformation takes place in one's attitude to the world that is to say instead of looking upon life as a contest it becomes a dance it becomes a game one doesn't withdraw from it one doesn't stop living but one goes into the game so that these revolving fishes are no longer trying to eat each other but they're just going around dancing having the biggest fun in the world [Music] [Music] you

Channel: theJourneyofPurpose TJOP

Views: 26,188

Keywords: Alan Watts, Nothingness, life, death

Id: NA95I4eRHd4

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021