Unveiling Life's Essence: Alan Watts on the Profound Purpose of Existence"

it's very commonly said that the root of most human unhappiness is the synthesis that one's life has no meaning this is I suppose most frequently said in circles interested in psychotherapy because the feeling of meaninglessness is often equated with the existence of neurosis and so many activities into which one is encouraged to enter philosophers one is encouraged to believe and religions one is encouraged to join are commended on the on the basis of the fact that they give life a meaning and I think it's very fascinating to think out what this idea itself means or what it is intended when it's said that life has to have a purpose I remember so well as a child listening to sermons in church in which the preacher would constantly refer to God's purpose for you and for me and I could never make out what it was because when questioned about this the Reverend gentleman seemed to be evasive what is the purpose of God for the world we used to sing A Hymn too God is working his purpose out as the Earth exceeds the year and uh the nearest cool one got to it was in the sort of refrain of the hymn nearer and nearer draws the time the time that shall surely be when the Earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea and of course that raises the question what is the glory of God well now it's pretty obvious I think that when we talk about life having or not having a meaning we're not using quite the ordinary sense of the word meaning as the attribute of a sign we're not saying are we that we expect this natural Universe to behave as if it were a collection of words signifying something other than themselves it isn't the point of view which would reduce our lives and the world merely to the status of signs and it's obviously in some different sense than that Gerta wrote his famous lines at the end of Faust Allah is forgive my pronunciation of German all that is Mortal or all that is perishable is but a symbol and so a symbol of what what do we want to feel what would satisfy us as being the meaning behind this world it's so often you know that we don't follow our ideas and our desires through most of the things that we want very fervently are things that we've only half glimpsed our ideals are very often suggestions hints and we don't know really exactly what we mean when we think about it but there is this obscure sense in which we feel that life ought to have significance and be a symbol in at least that sense if not just so uh arid a symbol as a mere sign or it also May mean that life is Meaningful an individual feels that his life amounts to something when he belongs and fits in with the execution of some group Enterprise he feels he belongs in a plan now this too seems to give people a sense of great satisfaction but we have to pursue that question further too why is it that a plan why is it that uh fellowship with other people gives the sense of meaning does it come down perhaps to another sense of meaning that life is felt to be meaningful when one is fully satisfying one's biological urges uh including uh the sense of hunger the sense of love the sense of uh self-expression in activity and so on but then again we have to push that inquiry further what do our biological urges really Point towards are they just however things always projected towards the future is biology and its uh process is nothing but going on towards going on towards going on or there's a fourth and more theological sense of the meaning of life in all theistic religions at any rate the meaning of life is God himself in other words all this world means a person it means a heart it means an intelligence and the relationship of love between God and man is the meaning of the world the sight of God is the glory of God and so on but again here there's something to be further pursued what is it that we want in love with a person and even a person in the sense of the Lord God what is the content of it what is it that we are really yearning after well now if we go back to the first point taking gerta's words that all that is transitory is but a symbol and that we want to feel that all things have significance it does seem to me that there's a sense in which we often use the word significance well the word seems to be chosen quite uh naturally and yet at the same time it's not quite the right word we say for example often as music that we feel it to be significant when just at the same time we don't mean that it expresses some particular kind of concretely realizable emotion and suddenly it's not imitating the noises of nature the program music you know which simply imitate something else and it deliberately sets out to express sadness or Joy or whatever uh is not the kind of thing I mean so often when one listens to the beautiful Arabesque character of uh the Baroque composers Vivaldi it is felt to be significant not because it means something other than itself but because it is so satisfying as it is and we use then this word significance so often in those moments when our impetuous seeking for fulfillment cools down and we give ourselves a little space to watch things as if they were worth watching ordinary things and in those moments when our inner turmoil has really quietened we find significance in things that we wouldn't expect to find significant at all I mean this is after all the art of those photographers who have such genius in turning the camera towards such things as peeling paint on an old door or mud and sand and stones on a dirt road and showing us there that if we look at it in a certain way those things are significant but we can't say significant of what so much as significant of themselves or perhaps the significance then is the quality of a state of mind in which we notice that we're overlooking the significance of the World by our constant quest for it later all this language is of course quite naturally vague and imprecise because I think the wrong word is used and yet not entirely the wrong word because as I said it comes so naturally to us it was Clive Bell the great esthetician who wanted to say that all the characteristic of art especially the characteristic of um aesthetic success in painting was the creation of significant form again a very vague imprecise expression but it certainly is an attribute not only of those moments in which we are tranquil inside but also of moments of deep spiritual experience of what would be called Moksha or release in Hinduism or Satori in Zen that in those moments the significance of the world seems to be the world seems to be what is going on now and we don't look any further the scheme of things seems to justify itself at every moment of its unfoldment I pointed out that this was particularly a characteristic of music it's also a characteristic of dancing and in the sensation of belonging with one's fellow man in the carrying out of some significant pattern of life uh which I mentioned as a second sense of the world being meaningful again the character of this feeling is again something that is fulfilled in itself but to dance is not to be going anywhere when we dance in the ballroom we don't have a destination we're just going around the room and it's in doing this it's in executing the pattern in singing the music with other people that even though this doesn't point to anything outside itself we again get the sense of meaning and this is also obviously the case so often in the satisfaction of the biological urges does one live to eat or eat to live I'm not at all sure about this I'm sure I very often live to eat because sitting around the table with people I don't like eating alone and enjoying food is absolutely delightful and uh we're not thinking when we do this at least certainly I'm not that we have to eat because it's good for us and we've got to throw something down the hatch as Henry Miller said and swallow a dozen vitamins uh just because our system needs nourishment I remember quite recently there was an article in the consumer report about bread and there have been some correspondence and protests saying that the bread one bought white bread one Buys in the stores is perfectly inedible and lacking in nutrition and that it was much better to eat peasant type breads rough Pumpernickel and things of that kind and the experts replied that uh our white bread is perfectly full of good nutrients and there's nothing really the matter with it at all but I felt like saying it doesn't matter perhaps of the bread being deficient in the essential vitamins bread isn't medicine it's food and one's complaint against it is that it's bad cookery a taste of nothing and we do tend don't we to look upon food so often for what it will do for us rather than the Delight of eating it but if the satisfaction of biological urges is to mean anything surely the point of these urges is not the fatuous one of mere survival of we might say the the point of the individual is simply that he contributes to the to the welfare of the race and the point of the race is that it reproduces itself to reproduce itself to reproduce itself and keep going and that isn't really a point at all that's just fatuous surely the race keeps going because going is great because it's fun and if it isn't and never will be then there's no point obviously in going I mean looking at it from the most hedonistic standpoint but then when we come to the question what is fun what is the joy of it again we come down to something that can't very well be explained in the ordinary language of meaning of leading to something else and this I think becomes preeminently true if we think of it in theological language that the meaning of life is God in any of the theistic religions what is God doing what is the meaning of God why does he create the universe what is the content of the love of God for his creation well there's the Frank answer of the Hindus that the godhead manifests the world because of Lila which is the Sanskrit word for play and this is likewise said in the uh in the Hebrew scriptures or the Christian Old Testament in the Book of Proverbs where there is a marvelous speech by the Divine wisdom Sophia which in describing the function of the Divine wisdom in the creation of the world the world in other words is a manifestation of the wisdom of God a wisdom uses the phrase that in uh producing men and animals and all the creatures of the Earth wisdom is playing and it was that the Delight of wisdom to play before the presence of God and when it is likewise said uh in the scriptures that the Lord God created the world for his pleasure this again means in a sense for play and suddenly this seems to be what the angels in heaven are doing according to the traditional uh symbolic descriptions of Heaven they are as ringed around the presence of the Almighty calling out alleluia alleluia alleluia through all eternity well Hallelujah may have meant something originally but as it's used now it doesn't mean anything except uh well in our own slang would be it's a an exclamation of nonsensical Delight and it was Dante in the Paradiso who described the song of the Angels as the laughter of the universe and this sense of nonsense as the theme of the Divine activity comes out also very strongly in the Book of Job I always think that the Book of Job is the most profound book in the whole Bible Old Testament and New Testament because here is the problem of the man the righteous man who has suffered and all his friends try to rationalize it and say well you must have suffered because you really had a secret sin after all and deserve the punishment of God or because rationalize it somehow and when they've had their say the Lord God appears on the scene and says who is this the darkness counsel with words without knowledge and then proceeds to ask job and his friends a series of absolutely unanswerable conundrums pointing out all the apparent irrationality and nonsense of his creation why for example he said do I send rain upon the desert where no man is most commentators on the Book of Job and with the remark that well this poses the problem of suffering and the problem of evil but doesn't really answer it and yet in the end himself job seems to be satisfied uh he somehow surrenders to the apparent unreasonableness of the Lord God and this is not I think because job is beaten down and that he that he's unduly impressed with the Royal monarchical and paternalistic authority of the deity and doesn't dare to answer back he realizes that somehow these very questions are the answer I think of all the commentators on the Book of Job the person who came closest to this point was old GK Chesterton he once made the Glorious remark that it is one thing to look with amazement at a gorgon or a griffin a creature who doesn't exist but quite another thing to look at a hippopotamus a creature who does exist and looks as if he doesn't in other words that all these This Strange World with its weird forms like hippopotami and when you look at them from a certain point of view stones and trees and water and clouds and stars when you look at them from a certain point of view and don't take them for granted they are as weird as any hippopotamus or any imagination of fabulous beasts of Gorgons and Griffins and things like that they are just plain improbable and it is in this sense I think that they are the Alleluia as it were the nonsense song why do we love nonsense why do we love Lewis Carroll with his brilliant in the slithery toes did Gare and gimbal in the wave all Mimsy were the borrow Groves and the mum wrath's outgrabe why is it that um all those old English songs are full of faulty riddle Idaho and hey Noni Nani and all those dabbling choruses why is it that when uh we get Hep with jazz we just go booty booty boo and so on and enjoy ourselves swinging it it is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world that isn't going anywhere that is a dance but it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning that its purpose is no purpose and that it senses nonsense but still we want to use about it the word significant significant nonsense yes nonsense that is not just chaos that is not just blathering Balderdash but that has in it rhythm fascinating complexity a kind of artistry it is in this kind of meaninglessness that we get the profoundest meaning an orthodox an unacademic thing to do to stop a discussion with a group of psychologists on the subject of metaphysics but we have to do that because a lot of people say that their approach to life is scientific as distinct from metaphysical and that metaphysics is Bosch anyway but everybody by virtue of being a human being is willy-nilly a metaphysician that is to say everybody starts from certain fundamental assumptions as to what is the good life what he wants what are his uh shall we say axioms for living and I find that psychologists tend to be blind to these fundamental assumptions maybe it's true of psychiatrists than it is a psychologist but they tend to feel that they are scientists they're rather bending over backwards to have a scientific status because that of course is fashionable in our age but you know it's so amusing that when say let's take psychoanalysis for example has pointed out to many philosophers that their philosophical ideas are capable of being shown to have a psychoanalytic reference for example John wisdom wrote a book about the philosophy of Berkeley in which he attributed a great deal of his point of view to his experiences in toilet training as a child the philosopher is very grateful to the psychoanalyst for revealing to him his unconscious and its emotional contents but the psychoanalyst must in turn await the Revelation from the philosopher as to his philosophical unconscious and the unexamined assumptions which lie in it so if I may stop by insulting your intelligence with what is called the most Elementary lesson the thing that we should have learned before we learned one two three and ABC but somehow was overlooked now this lesson is quite simply this that any experience that we have through our senses whether of sound or of light or of touch is a vibration and a vibration has two aspects one called on and the other called off vibration is seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs and so life is a system of now you see it now you don't and these two aspects always go together for example sound is not pure sound it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence and that's simply the way things are only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable nobody ever saw quests without troughs or troughs without crests just as you don't encounter in life people with France but no backs just as you don't encounter a coin that has the heads but no tails and although the heads and the tails the fronts and the backs the positives and the negatives are different they're at the same time one and one has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things can be inseparable that what is explicitly to can at the same time be implicitly one if you forget that very funny things happen if therefore we forget you see that black and white are inseparable and that existence is constituted equivalently by being and non-being then we get scared and we have to play a game called oh black might win and once we get into the fear that black the negative side might win we are compelled to play the game but white must win and from that start all our troubles because you see the human awareness has a very odd mechanism I don't think mechanism is quite the right word but it'll do for the moment that is to say we have as a species specialized in a certain kind of awareness which we Call Conscious attention and by this we have the faculty of examining the details of Life very closely we can restrict our gaze and it corresponds somewhat to the peripheral field I mean the the central field of vision in the eyes we have central vision we have peripheral vision central vision is that which we use for reading for all sorts of close work and it's like using a spotlight whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight now civilization and civilized human beings for maybe five thousand years maybe much longer have learned to specialize in concentrated attention even if a person's attention span is short he is as it were wavering his Spotlight over many fields the price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field I would rather say ignorance than ignorance because if you concentrate on a figure you tend to ignore the background you tend therefore to see the world in a disintegrated aspect you take separate things and events seriously imagining that these really do exist when actually they have the same kind of existence as an individual's interpretation of a Rorschach plot they're what you make out of it in fact our physical world is a system of inseparable differences everything exists with everything else but we can drive not to notice that because what we notice is what is noteworthy and we notice it in terms of notations numbers words images what is notable noteworthy notated noticed is what appears to us to be significant and the rest is ignored as insignificant and as a result of that we select from the total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction and this causes us to believe that we are separate beings isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the rest of the world and you see this is also the mechanism involved in not noticing that black and white go together not noticing that every inside has an outside and that the inside what's inside goes on inside your skin is inseparable from what goes on outside your skin do you see that uh for example in the science of ecology one learns that a human being is not an organism in an environment but is an organism hyphen environment that is to say a unified field of behavior if you describe carefully the behavior of any organism you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment and by that you know that you've got a new entity of study you are describing the behavior of a unified field but you must be very careful indeed not to fall into Old Newtonian assumptions about the billiard ball nature of the universe the organism is not the puppet of the environment being pushed around by it nor on the other hand is the environment the puppet of the organism being pushed around by the organism the relationship between them is to use John Dewey's word transactional the transaction being a situation like buying and selling in which there is no buying unless somebody sells and no selling unless somebody buys so that fundamental relationship between ourselves and the world which is in an old-fashioned way by people such as Skinner who have who have not updated his philosophy interpreted in terms of Newtonian mechanics he interprets the organism as something determined by the total environment he doesn't see that in a more modern way of talking about it we're simply describing a unified field of behavior which is nothing more than what any Mystic ever said that's a dirty word uh in the modern academic scientific environment but if a Mystic is one who is sensibly or even sensuously aware of his inseparability as an individual from the total existing universe he is simply a person who has become sensible aware through his senses of the way ecologists see the world so when I'm in academic circles I don't talk about mystical experience I talk about ecological awareness same thing and so the next aspect of our metaphysical introduction must be about games you know I think there are really four questions that all philosophers have discussed from the beginning of recorded time [Applause] first is who started it the second is are we going to make it the third is where are we going to put it and the fourth is who's going to clean up when you think these over it poses a fifth question is it serious and that's the one I want to discuss is existence serious like you said Doctor um after he's looked at your x-ray picture is it serious what does that mean s am I in danger of not continuing to survive but the basis of it all is this then if we say You must survive or I must survive life is earnest and I've got to go on then your life is a drag and not a game now it's my contention my personal opinion this is my basic metaphysical Axiom shall we put it that way that existence the physical universe is basically playful there is no necessity for it whatsoever it isn't going anywhere that is to say it doesn't have some destination that it ought to arrive at but but it is best understood by analogy with music because music as an art form is essentially playful we say you play the piano you don't work the piano why music differs from say travel when you travel you are trying to get somewhere and of course we because being a very compulsive and purposive culture are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster until we eliminate the distance between places I mean with the modern jet travel you can arrive almost instantaneously and what happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place so you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey because the fun of the journey is to travel not to obliterate traveling so then in music though one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the competition of the composition if that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest and there would be composers who wrote only finale people go to concert just hear one crashing cord because that's the end [Laughter] say when dancing you don't aim at a particular spot in the room that's where you should arrive the whole point of the dancing is about now but we don't see that as uh something brought by our education into our everyday conduct we've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression it's all graded and what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of come on kitty kitty kitty and yeah you go to kindergarten you know and that's a great thing because when you finish that you'll get into first grade and then come on first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school you've got high school and it's revving up the thing is coming then you're going to go to college and by Joven you get into graduate school and when you're through with graduate school you'll go out to join the world and then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance and they've got that quota to make and you're going to make that and all the time the thing is coming it's coming it's coming that great thing the the success you're working for then when you wake up one day about 40 years old you say my god I've arrived I'm there and you don't feel very different from what you always felt and there's a slight letdown because you feel there's a hoax and there was a hoax a dreadful hoax they made you miss everything by expectation look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away and then when they 65 they don't have any energy left they're more or less impotent and uh they go and rot in an old people's Senior Citizens Community because we've simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line we thought of Life by analogy with the journey with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end but the thing was to get to that end success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you're dead but we missed the point the whole way along it was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played but you had to do that thing you didn't let it happen and so for this in this way the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration let's take uh koshipski called man A Time binder that means that he's the animal peculiarly aware of the time sequence and as a result of this is able to do some very remarkable things he can predict he studies what's happened in the past and he says the chances are so and so of that happening again so he predicts oh this is very useful to be able to predict because that has survival value but at the same time it creates anxiety you paid for this increased survival ability involved in prediction by knowing that in the end you won't succeed you're all going to fall apart by one way or another it might happen tomorrow might happen 50 years from now but it all comes apart in the end and people get worried about that they get anxious so what they're getting on the roundabout they lost on the swings so then if you see on the other hand that existence this is as I said my basic metaphysical assumption which I won't conceal from you that existence is musical in nature that is to say that it is not serious it is the play of all kinds of patterns we can look upon different creatures as we look at different games as we look at chess Checkers backgammon tennis there's the tree game the beetle game the grass game or you can look at them as you look at different styles of music Missouri um Sonata etc etc all down the line there are all these different things doing their stuff and they're going to do today you know a different Rhythm and we're doing that if you we're in a flying saucer from Mars or somewhere and you came and looked try and make out what was living on this world from about 10 000 feet at night or early morning you would see these great ganglia with tentacles going out all over the place and early in the morning you'll see little Blobs of luminous particles going into the middle of them see and then uh in the late afternoon or early evening it would spit them all out again and they say well this thing the thing breathes and it does it in a special Rhythm it goes in and out in and out in and out once every 24 hours but then it rests today and doesn't fit so much It just fits in a different way that's the kind of irregularity and then it starts spinning all over again the same way I say that's very interesting that's this kind of thing we have see this is something that goes this way just like uh music did you ever see a lady go this way go that way that's what it does and when people uh when you think a bit what people really want to do with their time what do they do when they're not being pushed around and somebody's telling them what to do they don't go uh they like to make rhythms they listen to music they dance or they sing or they do something of a rhythmic nature playing cards or bowling or raising their elbows everybody wants to spend their time swinging and that's that's the nature of this whole thing we're in you see it like the swing that's why it does it

Channel: Inner Pigment

Views: 269,068

Keywords: life, meaning of life, purpose of life, relationship, Alan watts, Alan lecture, wisdom, philosophy, spiritual teaching, existential questions, Eastern wisdom, Western philosophy, meaning of existence, introspection, self-discovery, mindfulness, present moment, universe, consciousness, enlightenment, thought-provoking.

Id: YDZckegDPNk

Length: 43min 0sec (2580 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2023