Trust the universe to give you what you need - Alan Watts

the great da flows everywhere both to the left and to the right it loves and nourishes all things but does not Lord it over them and when merits are accomplished it lays no claim to them the more therefore you relinquish power trust others the more powerful you become but in such a way that instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else and they carry it on for you so you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning you can even tell it I want to wake up at 6:00 and it'll wake you up just like an alarm clock this seems a sort of Paradox to say this but the principle of unity of coming to a sense of of Oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe is not to try to be obtain power over the rest of the universe that will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever the way to become one with the universe is to trust it as another as you would another and say let's see what you're going to do but in doing that you see in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you you are also saying it to yourself because finally as I pointed out you do not know where your decisions come from from they pop up like hiccups and when you make a decision people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions she's this guy who um farmer who ordered a help man come in and uh found he was an extraordinarily efficient worker because the first day he put him on sawing logs and he soared more logs than anybody had ever saw it was fantastic but it were all done in one day so the next day putting on put him onto mending fences and there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm and in one day he had the whole thing done so he thought what am I going to do with this guy so he took him down into a basement and said look here are all all the potatoes that have come in from this Harvest and I want you to sort them into three groups those that we we sell those that we use for seeding and those that we throw away so he left him at that at the end of the day the laborer came back and said well that's enough mister I quit oh he said you can't quit I've never had such an excellent worker I'll raise your salary I'll do anything to keep you around here I said no it's all right mending fences and chopping wood but this potato business is decision after decision after decision after decision so when we decide we're always worrying did I think this over long enough did I take enough data into consideration and if you think it through you find you never could take enough data into consideration the data for a decision in any given situation is infinite so what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this and then when the time comes to act you make a snap judgment I mean I'm speaking a little extremely uh making some fun of it and uh so on because after all uh we we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds but we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming outright it's amazing how often it works but Warriors are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen so then when you make a decision and it works out all right I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control but somehow or other you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate Authority it's why very great businessmen are those who can delegate Authority trust others to work for them because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism delegation of authority it loves and nourishes all things but does not Lord it over them and you see then what what is happening is this the more you let go of it and trust it as if it were quite other than you the more you realize the Inseparable identity of self and other to go back if you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self no go if on the other hand you you find it through giving self that is control over to other and trusting that you may make a mistake you may make a bad gamble but in the long run you're acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution this is the way biological evolution goes on constant delegation of authority it's why obviously the democracy is superior to the monarchy was the tville who said that democracy is always right but for the wrong reasons because there is operating in a democracy the principle that Buckminster Fuller calls Synergy and Synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members because that's goes back again to this point that we are always entering a new environment we don't ever know fully what the new environment is because the only environments we know are the past ones there is always then operating in uh the development of cellular life on any level a new way of organization higher than any existing form and we're not aware of it until after it's happened if you ever saw for example the film contiki uh this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsawood raft to sail from South America to the Pacific Islands but once he had set this in motion he discovered that all sorts of unexpected factors cooperated with him that when the wood got wet it expanded so that the ties bit into it and held it completely secure he had never expected that and he found that as he sailed along a flying fish would simply a light flat on the deck every morning for breakfast that all kinds of Natural Factors it was just he he he touched a key where he was flowing with the course of nature and everything cooperated with him cuz he had touched the key he had made the Act of Faith and he was just picking up in other words a practice which had been uh hundreds and hundreds of years ago had been followed by others who had worked it out by their great ecological awareness so we do come out out of this uh way of of thinking to something which has I I would say the most enormously creative and revolutionary social consequences that it has become not virtuous not self-sacrificing and not anything like that it has become the hardest practical politics to let go control to others to give up trying to dominate the scene also in a parallel way it has become at this time in our history very much hard practical politics to learn how to enjoy ourselves you can go to the Protestant people with their Protestant ethic who uh are against this kind of thing and now say to them with great Le it is your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy yourself why because in an age of leisure people have really got to know how to enjoy themselves because if they don't they'll smash the whole future of the human race so you a Utopia has become uh not some sort of a dream but an urgent necessity we can can't do without it because if we try to do without it what's going to happen is that we are going to terminate our race in a mutual Massacre of scapegoats and so the present paranoia in the United States that is going on where everybody is thinking up a new scapegoat and how great it will be to demolish them or get them out of power all all kind of bickering and uh right and left politics has become irrelevant because we now have the opportunity of uh trusting our own intelligence our own technology to take the risk of doing what we want which will work to the extent that we realize that what I want basically what I really want is what you want and I don't know what you want surprised me but that's my that's the kinship between I and thou so when I ask I go right down to the question should we started with what do I want the answer is I don't know when bodh dhama was asked who are you which is another form of the same question he said I don't know planting flowers to which the butterflies come bodh Dharma says I know not I don't know what Happ when you don't know what you want you've re reached the state of desirelessness when you really don't know you see there's a there's a beginning stage of not knowing and there's an ending stage of not knowing in the beginning stage you don't know what you want because you haven't thought about it or you've only thought superficially then when you somebody forces you to think about it and go through and say yeah I think I'd like this I think I'd like that I think I'd like the other as the middle stage then you get beyond that say is that what I really want in the end you say no I don't think that's it I might be satisfied with it for a while and I wouldn't turn my nose up at it but it's not really what I want why don't you really know what you want two reasons that you don't really know what you want number one you have it number two you don't know yourself cuz you never can the godhead is never an object of its own knowledge just as a knife doesn't cut itself Fire doesn't burn itself light doesn't illumin itself it's always an endless mystery to itself I don't know and this I don't know uttered in the infinite interior of the spirit this I don't know is the same thing as I love I let go I don't try to force or control it's the same thing as humility and so the panad say if you think that you understand Brahma you do not understand and you have yet to be instructed further if you know that you do not understand then you truly understand for the Brahman is unknown to those who know it and known to those who know it not and the principle is that any time you as it were voluntarily let up control in other words cease to cling to yourself you have an acccess of power because you're wasting energy all the time in self-defense trying to manage things trying to force things to conform to your will the moment you stop doing that that wasted energy is available and therefore you are in that sense having that energy available you are one with the Divine principle you have the energy when you're trying however to act as if you were God that is to say you don't trust anybody and you're the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line you lose the Divine energy because what you're doing is simply defending yourself so then the principle is the more you give it away the more it comes back now say I don't have the courage to give it away I'm afraid and you can only overcome that by realizing you better give it away because there's nowh holding on to it the meaning of the fact you see that everything is dissolving constantly that we're all falling apart we're all in a process of constant death and that uh the worldly hope Men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers and like snow upon the desert's Dusty face lighting a little hour or two is gone you know all that Omar Kayan Jazz you know the cloudcap towers the gorgeous palaces the great Globe itself I all which it inherit shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind all falling apart everything is that's the the great assistance to you see that that fact that everything is in Decay is is your helper that is allowing you that you don't have to let go because there's nothing to hold on to it's achieved for you in other words by the process of nature so once you see that uh you just don't have a prayer and it's all washed up and that you will vanish and leave not a rack behind and you really get with that suddenly you find you have the power this enormous access of energy but it's not power that came to you because you grabbed it came in entirely the opposite way and power that comes to you in that opposite way is power with which you can be trusted of course what we've been talking about is not so much a set of ideas as an experience or shall we say experiencing and uh this kind of seminar in comparison with uh encounter groups or workshops of various kinds or experiments in sensory awareness is now being called a conceptual seminar although I'm not talking about Concepts but the crucial question arises that an understanding a real feeling understanding of the Polar relationship between the individual and the world is something that operates uh as we say in your bones and isn't just a view that you hold or a belief that you hold it's so curious that the emphasis of the western tradition in religion is primarily upon right belief do you believe in the right dogmas and the right doctrines and only secondarily upon right action because what you believe is in Christianity at any rate far more important than what you do because one is saved through faith not by works and early in its history the Christian Church re rejected the movement in the church which had been known as gnosticism from the Greek gnosis which means knowledge and in a way there were some sound reasons for doing so because the gnostics were what I would call anti materialists they divided human beings into three classes that were called respectively pneumatic psychic and hilik the last one being h y l i c from the Greek Hy or they would call it now el el meaning wood so the people were spiritual psychological and wooden and uh that is to say the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality and most closely identified with their bodies and Orthodox Christianity re rejected this sort of Distinction because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence is not inconsistent with spirituality this is something which most Christians have forgotten but they do believe as the central principle of Christianity in What's called the Incarnation that in uh the Jesus of Nazareth almighty God did in fact become material become human and by this process initiated a transformation of the cosmos in the words of St athanasius God became man that man might become God and you don't hear that from the pulpit very often the Christian Church therefore emphasized pistus or faith as against gnosis or knowledge because they said you can never know God God could never become an object of knowledge and in this funny roundabout way the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus only the Hindus do call this knowledge of God through faith they call it Gana which is the same as the Greek word gnosis but just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things he just says he doesn't know but the original word agnosia in Greek meant a special kind of knowledge it was called the dark knowledge of God the knowledge of God In The Cloud of Unknowing to use the title of a mystical Treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk this monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote Under the name of dianis the areopagite dianis Was A fifth or sixth Century Syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from poery who got it from plotinus who was a neoplatonist and who probably got uh a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of Alexandria and Alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous Exchange Place between East and West Buddhist monks visited Alexandria it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know all Rome's gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed they bought too much luxury from India India in exchange got Roman architecture and uh you'll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples but Alexandria was the great center for the gnostics and for Christian Theology and some of the greatest theologians Clement origin athanasius St sirel all worked out of Alexandria but now going back to this strange monk dianus it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowled as the knowledge of God by Faith by agnosia really by unknowing and he in a book which he wrote very short book called the theologia mystica he wrote A Treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the upanishads in certain parts of it the last section of it reads like the manduk upanishad because it's a series of negations it says what God is Not and he goes very far because he says that God is not one says our idea of unity Falls far short of what God is so does our idea of Trinity so does our idea of spirit our idea of Mind of justice of love all these things are not really God and he says in another place if anybody having seen God understood what he had seen what he would have seen would not have been God but some creature of God less than God some some sort of angel or something like that it's perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of dianis the areopagite he became identified you see with St Paul's first convert in Athens and Legend has it that he was the first Bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul and where he's known as St Dennis but St Thomas aquinus looked upon the writings of dianis the areopagite as having the highest Authority and you could if all the texts of Dian isis's work had been lost you could restore most of it from quotations in St Thomas [Music]

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Keywords: Alan Watts, Trust the Universe, philosophy, spirituality, letting go, inner peace, life flow, wisdom, universal harmony, self-discovery, spiritual growth, philosophical insights, surrender, control illusion, beauty of uncertainty, inspirational talk, motivational speech, profound wisdom, timeless teachings, spiritual guidance

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Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2024