Wu Wei | The Art of Effortless Living | Taoism - Alan Watts

the philosophy of the dao is one of the two great principal components of chinese thought there are of course quite a number of forms of chinese philosophy but there are two great currents which have thoroughly molded the culture of china and they are taoism and confucianism and they play a curious game with each other let me start by saying something about confucianism originating with kung fuzza or confucius uh who lived approximately a little after 630 bc he is often uh supposed to have been a contemporary of lao tza who is the supposed founder of the taoist way but it seems more likely that lauza lived later than 400 according to most modern scholars confucianism is not a religion it's a social ritual and a a way of ordering society so much so that the first great catholic missionary to china mateo ricci was a jesuit found it perfectly consistent with his catholicism to participate in confucian rituals because he saw them as something of a kind of national character as one might pay respect to the flag or something of that kind in our own times but he found that confucianism involved no conflict with catholicism no commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the catholic faith so confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of human relations including the government and the family based on the principle of uh what is called in chinese run although jaffu will notice that i never get my tones right [Laughter] which is an extraordinarily interesting word um i'm going to put some of these things on the whiteboard this is the word run in chinese and it's often translated benevolence but that's not a good translation at all this word means human-heartedness that's the nearest we can get to it in english and it was regarded by confucius is the highest of all virtues but one that he always refused to define it's above righteousness and justice and propriety and other great confucian virtues and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement including not only our virtuous side but also our passionate side also our appetites and our waywardness the hebrews have a term which they call the yetzer hara a r y-e-z-r-y-e-z-e-r-h-a-r-a which means the wayward inclination or what i like to call the element of irreducible rascality that god put into all human beings and put it there because it was a good thing it was good for humans to have these two elements in them and so uh a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of rascality just as one has to have salt and a stew confucius said the goody goodies are the thieves the virtue meaning that to try to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity to try to be something that isn't human so this gives confusion approach to life and justice and uh all those sort of things a kind of queer humor a sort of boys will be boys attitude which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems it was of course for this reason that the japanese buddhist priests who visited china to study buddhism especially zen priests introduced confucianism into japan because despite certain limitations that confucianism has and it needs it always needs the the dao philosophy as a counterbalance confucianism has been one of the most successful philosophies in all history for the regulation of governmental and family relationships but of course it is concerned with formality confucianism that prescribes all kinds of formal relationships linguistic ceremonial musical in etiquette in uh all the spheres of morals and for this reason has always been twitted by the taoists for being unnatural you need these two components you see and they play against each other beautifully in chinese society roughly speaking you see the confucian uh way of life is for people involved in the world the taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled now as we know in our own modern times there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular lifestyle say of the united states if you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the united states you go to high school and college and then you uh go into a profession or a business and you own a standard house and you raise a family and you have a car or two cars and uh do all that jazz but a lot of people don't want to live that way and there are lots of other ways of living besides that so you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern correspond to the confusions and those who are bohemians or bums or beatniks or whatever don't correspond with the pattern they are more like the taoists because the taoist is really actually in in chinese history taoism is a way of life for older people uh laoza the name given to the founder of taoism means the old boy and the legend is that he when he was born he was already had a white beard so it's sort of like this that when you have contributed to society when you've contributed children and brought them up and you have assumed a certain role in social life you then say now it's time for me to find out what it's all about who am i ultimately behind my outward personality what is the secret source of things and uh the latter half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out it's something to do when you have finished with the family business i'm not saying that that is a sort of unavoidable strict rule of course one can study the dao when very young because it contains all kinds of secrets in it as to the performance of every kind of art or craft or business or any occupation whatsoever but it does in in china in a way it plays that role of a kind of safety valve for uh the restrict more restricted way of life that confucianism prescribes and the there is a sort of type in china who's known as the old rogue um he's a sort of intellectual bum uh often found among scholars who is admired very much and who uh a type of character which had an enormous influence on the development of the ideals of zen buddhist life he is one you see who goes with nature rather than against nature well now first of all i'm going to talk about ideas which come strictly out of laotzer's book the dow de jing and of course the basic thing in the whole philosophy is the conception of dao this word has many meanings and the book of loud starts out by saying that the tao which can be spoken is not the eternal dao or uh you can there's a pan in there which you can't quite put into english you can't give all the meanings because the word tao means both the way or course of nature or of everything it also means to speak so uh the actual opening phrase of the book uh following this word dao is this and the character is repeated again you see and this this character means can be or can able something like that so the way which can be then give it its second meaning spoken described uttered but it also means the way that can be weighed not w-e-a-i-g-h but w-a-y-e-d you know you'd have to invent that word the way that can be traveled perhaps is not the eternal way in other words there is no way in which the dao or following the dao can uh there's no recipe for it i i can't give you any uh do-it-yourself instructions abcd as to how it's done it was like when louis armstrong was asked what is jazz he said if you have to ask you don't know [Laughter] now that's awkward isn't it but we can gather what it is uh by absorbing certain atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it and from the art and the poetry and all the expressions and the anecdotes and stories that illustrate the philosophy of the way so this word then the the way or the course of things is not uh you must understand this uh some christian missionaries translated dao as the logos taking as their point of departure the opening passage of saint john's gospel in the beginning was the word now if you look up a chinese translation of the bible it says in the beginning was the dao and the dao was with god and the dao was god the same was in the beginning with god all things were made by it and without it was not anything made that was made so they've substituted dao there now that make a very funny effect on a chinese philosopher because the idea of things being made by the dao is absurd the dao is not a manufacturer and it's not a governor it doesn't rule as it were in the position of a king although the book the tao de jing is written for many purposes but one of its important purposes is as a manual of guidance for a ruler and what it tells him is essentially rule by not ruling don't lord it over the people and so he says the great dao 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 good things are accomplished it lays no claim to them in other words the dao doesn't stand up and say i have made all of you i have filled this earth with its beauty and glory fall down before me in worship the dao having done anything you know always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgement because it loves obscurity and laodza said the dao is like water it's always seeks the low level which human beings abhor so it's a very mysterious idea dao then is not really equivalent with any western or hindu idea of god because god is always associated with being the lord even in india the brahman is often called the supreme lord although that would the term more strictly applicable to ishvara the manifestation of brahman in the form of a personal god but bhagavan the lord a krishna his his song is the bhagavad gita the song of the lord there's always the idea of the king and the ruler attached but not in the chinese dao philosophy the tao is not something different from nature from ourselves from our surrounding uh trees and waters and air the dao is the way all that behaves and so the chinese the basic chinese idea of the universe is really that it's an organism and as we shall see when we get onto dwanza who is the sort of elaborator of lauza he sees everything operating together so that nowhere can you find the controlling center there isn't any the world is a system of interrelated components none of which can survive without each other just as in the case of bees and flowers you will never find bees around in a place where there aren't flowers and you will never find flowers around in a place where there aren't bees or insects that do the equivalent job and what that tells us secretly is that although bees and flowers look different from each other they're inseparable they uh to use a very important taoist expression they arise mutually this is a one of the great phrases from the second chapter of laotz's book where he says uh this this character means uh to have or to be and this next one is a very important character in daoist philosophy it means no negative woo in chinese not to be and then this curious expression for which we don't have a really good corresponding idea in traditional western thought so to be and not to be mutually arise this character is based on the picture of a plant something that grows out of the ground so you could say positive and negative to be and not to be yes and no light and dark arise and mutually come into being there's none is uh cause and effect it's not that relationship at all it's like the egg in the hen so as the bees and the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low back and front long and short loud and soft all those experiences are experienceable only in terms of their polar experience so the chinese idea of nature is that all the various species arise mutually because they interdepend and this total system of interdependence is the dao it involves certain other things that go along with dao but this is this is this mutual arising is the key idea to the whole thing and it is uh if you want to understand uh chinese and oriental thought in general it is the most important thing to grasp because you see we think so much in terms of cause and effect we think of the universe uh today in aristotelian and newtonian ways and in that philosophy the world is all separated it's like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls and they don't move until struck by another or by a queue and so everything is going all over the place one thing starting off another in a mechanical way but of course from the standpoint of 20th century science we know perfectly well now that that's not the way it works we know enough about relationships to see that that mechanical model which newton devised was all right for certain purposes but it breaks down now because we understand relativity and we see how things go together in a kind of connected net rather than a chain of billiard balls banging each other around so in in the philosophy of the dao it is said uh it's always being said this is uh you read this in every art book about chinese art that in chinese painting man is always seen as in nature rather than dominating it you get a painting entitled poet drinking by moonlight and you see a great landscape and after some search for the magnifying glass at last you see the poet stuck away in a corner somewhere drinking wine whereas if we painted the subject poet drinking by moonlight the poet would be the most obvious thing in the picture uh there he would be dominating the whole thing the landscape off somewhere behind him but of all the chinese painters put man i mean the painters of the great classical tradition there are chinese painters who specialize in family portraits and do these very formal paintings of someone's ancestors sitting on a throne it's quite a different category but the taoist inspired painters zen inspired painters have this view of man as an integral part of nature something in it just as everything else is in it flowers and birds and not there sent into this world commissioned by some sort of supernatural being to come into this world and farm it and dominate it so then the whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating self-governing indeed democratic organism but it has a totality it all goes together and this totality is the dao so then we move to a second term that is extremely important um the expression the term that we translate nature when we translate chinese but this term expresses this whole point of view it doesn't say nature natura which means in a way class of things it means literally self so what is so of itself what happens of itself and thus spontaneity and in the doubting early on laozer says the dao's method is to be so of itself now we might translate that automatic were it not that the word automatic has a mechanical flavor as this is called or shizan in japanese means spontaneous yes it happens as your heart beats you don't do anything about it you don't force your heart to beat you don't make it beat it does it by itself now figure a world in which everything happens by itself it doesn't have to be controlled it's allowed the uh whereas you might say the idea of god involves the control of everything going on the idea of the tao is the ruler who abdicates and lets all the people trusts all the people to conduct their own affairs uh to let it all happen so this doesn't mean you see that there isn't a unified organism and everything is in chaos it means that the more liberty you give the more love you give the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place the more order you will have it is believed generally in india that when a person sets out on the way of liberation his first problem is to become free from his past karma the popular theory of karma the word that literally means action or doing in sanskrit so that when we say that something that happens to you is your karma it's like saying in english it's your own doing but in in popular indian belief a karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution such that all the bad things you do and all the good things you do have consequences which you have to inherit and so long as karmic energy remains stored up you have to work it out and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action which in sanskrit is called nishkama karma nishkama means without passion or without attachment karma action and so whether he whatever action he does he renounces the fruits of the action so that he acts in a way that doesn't generate future karma because future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming sangsara the round and keeps you being reincarnated now then in that case when the time comes that you start to get out of the chain of karma all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for payment in other words a person who begins say to study yoga is felt that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die or that he'll lose his money or all sorts of catastrophes will occur because uh the karmic debt is being cleared up and uh it there's in no hurry to be cleared up if you're just living along like anybody but if you embark on the spiritual life a certain hurry occurs and therefore since this is known uh it's rather discouraging to start these things the christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to be to change your life shall we say to turn over a new leaf you mustn't let the devil know because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power so for example if you have a bad habit say you drink too much and you make a new year's resolution that during this coming year you'll stop drinking that's a very very dangerous thing to do because the devil will immediately know about it and what will happen will be this he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless days and that will be awful you know just overwhelming and you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon so in that case you compromise with the devil and say just today i'm not going to drink you see but tomorrow maybe you know we'll go back then when tomorrow comes you say oh just another day let's try out that's all and the next day you say oh one more day won't make much difference so you only do it for the moment and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day but of course there's something still better than that and that is not to let the devil know anything and that means of course not to let yourself know one of the many meanings of that saying let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth is just this and that was why in uh zen discipline uh great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation as those of you know who read herregle's book zen in the art of archery it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying now there's a wonderful story you may also have read by a german writer von kleist about her a boxing match with a bear the man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation the only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so that would catch him and so this is one of the great great problems in the spiritual life or whatever you want to call it is to be able to have intention and act simultaneous by this means you escape karma and you escape the devil so uh you might say that the taoist is uh exemplary in this respect that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement of simply supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars you can go to the back end and you can unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding but the simplest of all ways of unloading is to uncouple between the engine in the first car and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once and it is in that sort of way you see that the taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it and so it has the reputation you see of being the easy way there are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult and one of the great gambits of a man like gurjev was to make it all seem as difficult as possible because that challenge the vanity of his students if some teacher some guru says really this isn't difficult at all that's perfectly easy [Music] some people will say oh he's not really the real thing uh we want something tough and difficult and i when when we see somebody starts out giving you a discipline that's very very weird and rigid people think now there is the thing that that man means business see and so they flatter themselves by going to such a guy that they are serious students whereas the other people are only dabblers and so on uh all right if you have to do it that way that's the way you have to do it but uh the taoists has is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort because that's what it is taoism is in that sense what everybody is looking for the easy way in the shortcut using cleverness instead of muscle so the question naturally arises isn't it cheating when in any game somebody really starts using his intelligence he will very likely be accused of cheating and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do you see the the inferior intelligence will always accuse the superior intelligence of cheating that's its way of saving face you beat me by means that weren't fair we were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles and you know we were pushing against it like this this this and uh this would prove who had the strongest muscles but then you introduced some gimmick into it some judo trick or something like that you see and you're not playing fair so in the uh whole domain of [Applause] ways of liberation there are roots for the stupid people and roots for the intelligent people and the latter are faster this was perfectly clearly explained by huinang the sixth patriarch of zen in china in his sutra where he says the difference between the gradual school and the southern school is they both arrive at the same point but the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast witted people can you in other words find a way that sees into your own nature that sees into the dao immediately [Applause] and at the end of this morning's talk i pointed out to you the immediate way the way through now when you know that this moment is the tao and this moment uh is by its considered by itself [Applause] without past and without future eternal neither coming into being nor going out of being there there is nirvana and there is a whole chinese philosophy of time based on this uh it hasn't to my knowledge been very much discussed by taoist writers it's been more discussed by buddhist writers but it's all based on the same thing [Applause] dogen the great 13th century japanese zen buddhist studied in china and he wrote a book called shobo genzo heroshi recently said to me in japan that's a terrible book because it tells you everything it gives the whole secret away but in the course of this book he says you don't there is no such thing as a progression in time the spring does not become the summer there is first spring and then there is summer so in the same way you now do not become you later this is t.s eliot's idea in uh four quartets where he says that the person who has settled down in the train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the platform and therefore also you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door these states are separate each in its own place there was the coming in at the door person [Applause] but there is actually only the here and now sitting person and the person sitting here and now is not the person who will die because we are all a constant flux and the continuity of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole you know it goes round and round and round and the whole thing seems to be going up or going down whichever the case may be but actually nothing is going up or down so when you throw a pebble into the pond and you make a concentric rings of waves there is an illusion that the water is flowing outwards and no water is flowing outwards at all water is only going up and down what appears to move outward is the wave not the water so this kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming to go along in a course of time it doesn't really happen the buddhists say suffering exists but no one who suffers deeds exist but no doers are found a path there is but no one who follows it and nirvana is but no one who attains it so in this way they look upon the continuity of life as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and in the dark were it and the illusion of a circle is created whereas there is only the one point of fire the argument then is so long as you're in the present there aren't any problems the problems exist only when you allow presence to amalgamate there's a way of putting this in chinese which is rather interesting they have a very interesting sign this it's pronounced in japanese nin and the top part of the character uh means now and the bottom part means the mind heart the shin and so this is as it were an instant of thought in sanskrit they use it they use this character as the equivalent for the sanskrit word shana then if you put if you double this character put it twice or three times and i'll write the chinese for ditto means thought after thought after thought now the the zen master joshu was once asked what is the mind of a child and he said a ball in a mountain stream what do you mean by a ball in a mountain stream he said thought after thought after thought with no block [Applause] so he was using of course the mind of the child as the innocent mind the mind of a person who's enlightened [Applause] one thought follows another without hesitation the thought arises it doesn't wait to arise as when you clap your hands the sound issues without hesitation when you strike flint the spark comes out it doesn't wait to come out and that means that there's no block so thought thought thought describes what we call in our world the stream of consciousness blocking consists in letting the the stream become connected chained together in such a way that when the present thought arises it seems to be dragging its past or resisting its future saying i don't want to go when then the connection the dragging it's better to call it of these thoughts drops you've broken the chain of karma if you think of this in comparison with certain problems in music it's very interesting because when we listen to music we hear melody only because we remember the sequence we hear the intervals between the tones but more than that we remember the tones that led up to the one we are now hearing and we are trained musically to anticipate certain consequences and to the extent that we get the consequences we anticipate we feel that we understand the music but to the extent that the composer does not adhere to the rules and gives us unexpected consequences we feel that we don't understand the music and if he gives us harmonic relationships which we are not trained to accept that is to say to expect we say well this man is just writing uh garbage but of course it becomes apparent that the perception of music the ability to hear melody will depend upon a relationship between past present and future sounds and you might say well you're talking about a way of living that would be equivalent to listening to music with a tone deaf mind so that you would reduce you would eliminate the melody and have only noise and so in your taoist way of life you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless present moments up to a point that's true that is in a way what buddhists and uh also mean by seeing things in their suchness what is so bad about dying for example it's really no problem when you die you just drop there that's all there is to it but what makes it a problem is that you're dragging a past and all those things you've done all those achievements you've made all these relationships and people that you've accumulated as your friends all that has to go see it isn't here now i mean a few friends might be around you but uh all that past that identifies you as who you are which is simply memory all that has to go and we feel just terrible about that but if we didn't if we were just dying that's all death wouldn't be a problem so likewise the chores of everyday life they become intolerable when everything ties together all the past in the future you feel it dragging at you every way supposing you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning let's take today right here and now here we are in this paradise of the place big sir and some of us have got to go to work on monday is that a problem for many people it is it spoils the taste of what's going on now when we wake up in bed on monday morning and think of the various hurdles we've got to jump that day uh immediately we feel sad and bored and bothered whereas actually we're just lying in bed [Laughter] so the taoist trick says simply live now and there will be no problems that's the meaning of the zen saying when you are hungry eat when you are tired sleep when you walk walk when you sit sit rinzai the great tang dynasty master said in the practice of buddhism there is no place for using effort sleep when you're tired move your bowels eat when you're hungry that's all the ignorant will laugh at me but the wise will understand and so also the meaning of this wonderful zen saying day that's the character for the sun day that is good day every day is a good day on condition you see that day day is like nine they come one after another and yet there's only this one you don't link them this as i said intimated just a moment ago seems to be an atomization of life things just do what they do the flower goes poof and people go this way go that way and so on and that's that's that's what's happening it has no meaning it has no destination it has no value it's just like that and when you see that you see it's a great relief that's all it is but then when you are firmly established in suchness in that it's just this moment you can begin again to play with the connections only you've seen through them and but now you see uh they don't haunt you because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on from moment to moment who originated at some time in the past and will die at some time in the future all that's disappeared so you can have enormous fun anticipating the future remembering the past and uh playing all kinds of continuities this is the meaning of that famous zen saying about mountains or mountains to the naive man mountains our mountains waters our waters to the intermediate student mountains are no longer mountains waters are no longer waters in other words they've all dissolved into the point instant to the kashana but for the fully perfected student mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters in the philosophy of the dao it is said it's always being said this is you read this in every art book about chinese art that in chinese painting man is always seen as in nature rather than dominating it you get a painting entitled poet drinking by moonlight and you see a great landscape and after some search for the magnifying glass at last you see the poet stuck away in a corner somewhere drinking wine whereas if we painted the subject poet drinking by moonlight the poet would be the most obvious thing in the picture uh there he would be dominating the whole thing the landscape off somewhere behind him but of all the chinese painters put man i mean the painters of the great classical tradition there are chinese painters who specialize in family portraits and do these very formal paintings of someone's ancestor sitting on a throne it's quite a different category but the taoist inspired painters zen inspired painters have this view of man as an integral part of nature something in it just as everything else is in it flowers and birds and not there sent into this world commissioned by some sort of supernatural being to come into this world and farm it and dominated the whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating self-governing indeed democratic organism but it has a totality it all goes together and this totality is the dao when we speak in taoism of following the course of nature following the way what it means is is more like this doing things in accordance with the grain it doesn't mean you don't cut wood but it means that you cut wood along the lines where wood is most easy to cut and you interact with other people along lines which are the most uh genial and this then is the great fundamental principle which is called uh will way not to force anything i think that's the best translation it's often called not doing not acting not interfering but not to force seems to me to hit the nail on the head like don't ever force a lock while you bend the key or break the lock you jiggle until it revolves so we'll way is always to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist don't impose on any situation a kind of interference that is not really in accordance with the situation for example we have a slum and that people are in difficulty and so on and they need better housing now if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down and you were right put in its place uh some architects imaginative notions of what is a super efficient high-rise apartment building to store people you create total mess utter chaos islam has what we would call an ecology it has a very complex system of relationships going in it by which the thing is already a going concern even though it isn't going very well anybody who wants to alter that situation must first of all become sensitive to all the conditions and relationships going on there it's terribly important then to have this feeling of the interdependence of every form of life upon every other form of life uh how we for example cultivate animals that we eat uh look after them and build them up and see that they breed in reasonable quantities we don't do it too well as a matter of fact especially uh troubles are arising about supplies of fish in the ocean all sorts of things but you have to see that life that the so-called conflict of various species with each other is not actually a competition it's a very strange system of interrelationship of things feeding on each other and cultivating each other at the same time the idea of the friendly enemy the necessary adversary who is part of you you have conflicts going on in your own body all kinds of microorganisms are eating each other up and if that wasn't happening you wouldn't be healthy so all those interrelationships whether they appear to be friendly relationships as between bees and flowers or conflicting relationships as between birds and worms they are actually forms of cooperation and that is mutual arising you have to understand this as the basis apply this not forcing anything and you get spontaneity a life which is so of itself which is natural which is not forced which is not unduly self-conscious now another term that is important although i'm not aware that this word occurs in laozi's book it's found in greater use at a much later time in chinese thought in a philosophy that is called neoconfusion and it's also used in buddhism but it is a very useful word for understanding uh the sort of order that all this constitutes it's the word lee and this means originally the markings in jade or perhaps the grain in wood or the fiber and muscle uh it is translated nowadays in most dictionaries as reason or principle but this isn't a very good translation joseph needham suggested that organic pattern was an ideal translation for this word now you see the markings in jade are always regarded as beautiful you might say if you look down at the water here when you see the the waves break there are patterns in the foam now if you watch those patterns you know they never make an aesthetic mistake never but they are not symmetrical and they're very difficult to describe they're wiggly so are the markings in jade so is the grain in wood but we love the grain in wood and you see jaffu has done these paintings of rocks based on examples i think in the chinese book called the mustard seed garden these all exhibit lee that is to say they are forms which we know are orderly and we can distinguish them from messes quite clearly and so in the same way the foam patterns the rock patterns the patterns of the vegetation are once extraordinarily orderly but they don't have an obvious order nobody can ever pin it down that's what i'd like to say you know that there is order there there's something quite different from a mess but there's no way of really getting it now in order to be able to paint that sort of way or to live that sort of way or to deliver justice that way if you were a judge you have to have it innately you have to have an essential sense of lee and uh there's no way of prescribing it this is the very devil for teachers because you see all our universities and schools are trying to teach creativity that's the great thing these days you know and you hear it the essel and uh all sorts of people are giving courses and workshops and creativity now the trouble is this if we found out a method whereby we could teach creativity and everybody could just explain how it was done it would no longer be of interest what always is an essential element in the creative is the mysterious the dark it's like the black and lacquer the impenetrable and yet the the profound depth out of which glorious things come but nobody can see why there's a poem which says that when the bird calls the mountain becomes more mysterious you imagine for example you're in a mountain valley and everything is very silent and suddenly a crow a squawks somewhere you don't know where that crow is and that little sound emphasizes the silence now all those things have in the music an element of mystery there's a chinese poem which puts it this way it is a poem written by a man who has gone to find a sage in the mountains and uh the sage has a little hut at the foot of the mountain and a boy there who is his servant i asked the boy beneath the pines he said the master's gone alone herb gathering somewhere on the mount cloud hidden whereabouts unknown in zen training in its initial stages the master discourages intellectualization you know you come in with a lot of ideas but uh this difficulty you have is not going to be solved by ideas it's not going to be solved by talk and intellectualization so in the same way this is discouraged because intellectualization sets up a kind of interval or lack of rapport between you and your life you think about things so much that you get into the state where you're eating the menu instead of the dinner you're valuing the money more than the wealth you are confusing as kojimsky would say the map with the territory and what they want to do is to get you into the territory to get you into relationship with what is as distinct from ideas about what is and this is an important preliminary discipline but later on you can realize that the process of thinking is also what is thoughts in their own domain are as real as rocks words have their own reality as much as sky and water thoughts about things are in them their own turn things and so they lead you eventually to the point where you intellectualize and think in an immediate way let's go on and ask then a further problem how about thinking about thinking [Applause] wouldn't that be pretty far off here's a person removed from life because he's in the intellectual world and he's all in a living in symbols he's a kind of a kind of a living bookworm now what about a librarian a person who writes books about books a bibliographer uh a classifier of classifications that's a pretty dusty occupation and as we know uh sometimes librarians seem to be very dusty people they uh seem way removed from life all tied up in their categories and catalogs and musts and mustn'ts and uh that too you see is also its own level of reality and thinking about thinking can be lived with just as much direct fresh spontaneity as just living without thinking but in order to live it with full spontaneity you have to be in a position where you no longer feel the symbol the thought the idea the word as a block to life no longer feel it and something you are using as a sort of means of escape to be able to use the symbol not as means of escape you have to know in the first place that you can't escape and not only that you can't escape but there is no one to escape there is no one to be delivered from the prison of life that then the the liberation of the mind from identifying itself with symbols is the same process exactly as breaking up the links between the successive moments the illusion of a self a continuing self that travels from moment to moment and picks them all up corresponding to the illusion of the moving water in the wave and the moving line the the the solid circle created by the moving cigarette point in the dark this is the meaning then that there is no one who perceives anything no one who experiences anything there is simply seeing and experiencing the we introduce all these redundancies through talk we talk about seeing sights hearing sounds feeling feelings all that is irrelevant there are sights there are sounds there are feelings you don't feel a feeling the feeling itself already contains the feeling of it do you see that's very simple to have sight you don't need something to be seen on the one hand and a seer of something to be seen on the other and then some some mysterious way they come together the seer and the scene the noah and the known are what we call terms terms mean ends and they are what in mathematical language are called limits now when we take a stick the stick has its two ends they are the terms of the stick but the ends of the stick do not exist as sort of separate points which encounter each other on the occasion of meeting at a stick they are actually abstract points the ends themselves considered as themselves are purely geometrical they are euclidean imaginations the reality is the stick you see so in the same way with that phenomenon called experience the reality is not an encounter of the noah and the known the reality is an experience which can be termed as having two aspects two ends the knower and the known but that's only a figure of speech neurologically this is true everything that you see is yourself what you are aware of is a state of your nervous system and there is no other knowledge whatsoever that doesn't mean that your nervous system is the only existing reality and that there is nothing beyond your nervous system but it does mean that all knowledge is knowledge of you and that therefore in some mysterious way you are not different from the external world that you know if you see then that what you experience and you are the same thing then realize also going beyond that that you are in the external world you're looking at you see i'm in your external world you're in my external world but i'm in the same world you are my inside is not separable from the outside world it's something the so-called outside world is doing just as it's doing the tree and the ocean and everything else that is in the outside world now isn't that great you see we've completely got rid of the person in the trap [Applause] the one who either dominates the world or suffers under it it's vanished it never was there and when it's when that happens you see you can play any life game you want to link the past and the present and the future together roles but you know you've seen through this great what do they call it the great social lie that one accumulates owns experiences memories sights sounds and from that other people possessions songs building up always this idea of oneself as the haver of all this you

Channel: YOUNIVERSAL WISDOM

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Keywords: Alan Watts, Taoism, Tao, Tao : The Watercourse Way, Philosophy of Tao, Tao Te Ching, Dao De Ching, The way, The way of nature, Daode Jing, Wisdom of Alan Watts, In Nothing Everything Exists, Nothing is the source of everything, Lao Tzu, Confucious, The Way Is To Be, Dao, Daoism, Wu Wei, Yin Yang

Id: _wG5SbG5DuQ

Length: 75min 18sec (4518 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021