You Are Your Reality - Alan Watts

we are playing a game then the game runs like this the only thing you really know is what you can put into words let's suppose I love some girl rapturously and somebody says to me would you really love her or how am I gonna prove this let's say write poetry tell us all how much you love her then we will believe you so if I'm an artist and I can put this into words and convince everybody that I've written the most ecstatic love letters ever written they say all right okay we will admit it you really do love her but supposing you're not very articulate are we going to tell you you don't level surely not you don't have to be Heloise and Abelard to be in love so the whole game that our culture is played is that nothing really happens unless it's in the newspaper so when we were at a party and there's a great party somebody said it's too bad there wasn't the tape recorder and so our children begin to feel that they don't exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers and the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime and then you'll be photographed then you'll appear in court and everybody will notice you it really happened if it was recorded in other words if you shout and the distance doesn't come back and echo it didn't happen well that's a real hang-up it's true the fun with echoes we all like singing in the bathtub because there's more resonance there and when we play a musical instrument like a violin or a cello it has a sounding box because that gives resonance to the sound and in the same way the cortex of the human brain enables us when we are happy to know that we are happy and that gives a certain resonance to it if you're happy and you don't know you're happy there's nobody home but this is the whole problem for us several thousand years ago human beings evolved the system of self-consciousness and they knew they they knew it was a young man who said though it seems that I know that I know what I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know you see and and this is that the human problem we know that we know and so that came a point in our evolution when we didn't guide life by just trusting our instincts and had to think about it and had to purposely arranged and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols accountancy calculation and so on and then we worried once you start thinking about things you worry as to whether you thought enough did you really take all the details into consideration was every fact properly reviewed and by Jove the more you think about it the more you realize that you really couldn't take everything into consideration because all the variables in any human decision are incalculable so you get anxiety and this though also this is the price you pay for knowing that you know for being able to think about thinking to feel about feeling and so you're in this funny position now then do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage what has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness a certain kind of reflexive consciousness being aware of being aware being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols such as words such as numbers you put as it were two lives together at once one representing the other the symbols representing the reality the money representing the wealth and if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary it doesn't have the same value you know people go to the supermarket and they get a whole carload of goodies and they drive it through and then the clerk fixes up the counter on this long tape comes out and you say thirty dollars please and everybody feels depressed as they they give away thirty dollars worth of paper but they got a cartload of goodies they don't think about that they think they just lost lost thirty dollars but you've got the real wealth in the cart all you parted with was a paper because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth it represents power potentiality whereas the wealth think oh well that's just necessary you got to eat I mean that's to be really mixed up so then if you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white self implies other life implies death or shall I say death implies life you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world not as something here on probation not as something that has arrived here by fluke but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental what you are basically deep deep down far far in is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself so say in Hindu mythology they say that the world is the drama of God God is not something in Hindu mythology with the white beard that sits on the throne and that has royal prerogatives God in in Indian mythology is the self satchitananda which means Sat that which is that which is consciousness that which is Ananda is bliss and in other words the that what exists reality itself is gorgeous it is the plenum the fullness of total joy wow-whee and all those stars if you look out in the sky as a firework display like you see on the 4th of July which is a great occasion for celebration the universe is a celebration it is that firework show to celebrate that existence is why are we and then they say but however there's no point just in sustaining bliss let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time or any length of time you wanted to have and you would naturally as you began on this adventure of Dreams you would fulfill all your wishes you would have every kind of pleasure who could conceive and after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say well that was pretty great but now let's um let's have a surprise let's have a dream which isn't under control well something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what its gonna be and you you would dig that and come out of that and say wow that was a close shave wasn't it and then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further and further out Gamble's as to what you would dream and finally you would dream where you are now you would dream the dream of living the life that you were actually living today that would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have of playing that you weren't God because the whole nature of the Godhead according to this idea is to play that he's not the first thing he says to himself his man get lost because he gives himself away the nature of love is self abandonment not clinging to oneself throwing yourself out as in for example in basketball you're always getting rid of the ball you say to the other fellow have a ball see and that keeps things moving that's the nature of life so in this idea then everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality not God in a politically kingly sense but God in the sense of being the self the deep down basic whatever there is and you're all that only you're pretending you're not and it's perfectly okay to pretend you're not to be absolutely convinced because this is the whole notion of drama when you come into the theater there is a proscenium arch and a stage and down there is the audience and everybody assumes their seats in the theater and are going to see a comedy a tragedy a thriller or whatever it is and they all know as they come in and pay their admissions that what is going to happen on the stage is not for real but the actors have a conspiracy against this because they are going to try and persuade the audience that what is happening on the stage is for real they want to get everybody sitting on the edge of their chairs they want to get you terrified or crying or laughing absolutely captivated by the drama and if a skillful human actor can take in an audience and make people cry I think what the cosmic actor can do why he can take himself in completely he can play so much for real what he really believes it is like you sitting in this room you think you're really here while you've persuaded yourself that way you've acted it so damn well that you know this is the real world but you're playing it because the audience and the actor is one cost behind the stage there's the greenroom I've seen obscene where the actors take off their masks you know that the word person means mask the persona which is the mask worn by actors in greco-roman drama because it has a megaphone type mouth which throws the sound out in an open-air theater so power through Sona but the sound comes through that's the mask how to be a real person how to be a genuine fake a mask so the dramatis personae at the beginning of a play is the list of masks that the actors will wear and so in the cost of forgetting that this this life is a drama of the word for the role the right word for the mask has come to mean who you are genuinely the person the proper person incidentally the word parson is derived from the word person the person of the village person around town the parson funny so anyway then this is the drama I'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it I want you to play with it I want you to think of its possibilities I'm not trying to prove it I'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about so then this means that you're not victims of a scheme of things of a mechanical world or of an autocratic God the life you're living is what you have put yourself into only you don't admit it because you want to play the game that it's happened to you in other words I got mixed up in this well my parents I had a father who got a hot pants over a girl and she was my mother and because he got the he was just a he was just a horny old man and as a result of that I got born and I blame him for it and say well that's your fault you got to look after me and he says I don't see why I should look after you you just a result and but let's suppose we admit that I really wanted to get born and that I was the ugly gleam in my father's eye when he approached my mother that was me I was desire and I deliberately got involved in this thing look at it that way instead and that even if I got myself into an awful mess and I got born with syphilis and the great Siberian itch and tuberculosis and in the Nazi concentration camp nevertheless this was a game which was a very far-out play it was a kind of cosmic masochism but I did it isn't that an optimal game rule for life because if you play life on the supposition that you're a helpless little puppet we've got involved or if you played on the supposition that it's a frightful serious risk and that we really ought to do something about it and so on it's a drag there's no point in going on living unless we make the assumption that the situation of life is optimal that really and truly we are all in the state of total bliss and delight but we are going to pretend we aren't just for kicks you play non bliss in order to be able to experience bliss and you go as far out as non bliss as you want to go and when you wake up it'll be great you know you can slam yourself on the head with a hammer because it's so nice when you stop and it makes you realize you see how great things are when you forget that that's the way it is and that's just like black and white you don't know black unless you know white you don't know white unless you know black this is simply fundamental so then here's the drama my metaphysics let me be perfectly frank with you ah that there is the central self you could call it God you can call it anything you like and it's all of us it's playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere and it's playing the game of hide-and-seek with itself it gets lost it gets involved in the forest out adventures but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself and when you are ready to wake up you're going to wake up and if you're not ready you're going to stay pretending that you're just a little poor little me and since you're all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture I assume that you're all on the process of waking up or else you're teasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation with waking up which you're not serious about but I assume here maybe you are not serious but sincere that you are ready to wake up so then when you're in the way of waking up and finding out who you really are you meet a character called a guru at the Hindus say this word the teacher the awakener and what is the function of a guru he's the man who looks at you in the eye and says oh come of it I know who you ha you know you come to the Guru and say sir I have a problem I'm unhappy and I want to get one up on the universe or I want to become enlightened I want spiritual wisdom ah atchoo answers who are you you know Sri Ramana Maharshi that great Hindu sage of modern times people used to come to him and say master who was I in my last incarnation as if that mattered and he would say who is asking the question he look at you and say basically go right down to it you're looking at me you're looking out and you're unaware of what's behind your eyes go back in and find out who you are where the question comes from why you ask and if you've looked at a photograph of that man I have a gorgeous photograph of him and you look at those I walk by it every time I go out of the front door and I look at those eyes and the humor and lilting laugh but says Oh Shiva I recognize you when you come to my door and you say I'm so-and-so I say haha what a funny way God has come on today there are all sorts of tricks of course that gurus play they say well we're gonna put you through the mill and the reason they do that is simply that you won't wake up until you feel you've paid a price for it in other words the sense of guilt that one has or the sense of anxiety is simply the way one experiences keeping the game of disguise going on do you see that supposing you say I feel guilty Christianity makes you feel guilty for existing that somehow the very fact that you exist is in the front you are a fallen human being I remember as a child when we went the services of the church on Good Friday they gave us each a colored postcard with Jesus crucified on him and it said underneath this have I done for thee what doest thou for me you know you felt often you would nail that man to the cross because you eat steak you have crucified Christ cause it kill the bull after all you depend on it misra it's the same mystery and what are you going to do about that miss have I done for thee what does sow for me you feel awful that you just exist at all but that sense that sense of guilt is the veil across the sanctuary don't shoot down come in in order to you know in all mysteries when you're going to be initiated the somebody saying I don't you come in you got to fulfill this requirement of this requirement of this requirement of this requirement then we'll let you in and so you go you you go through the mill why because this is you are saying to yourself I won't wake up until I feel I deserve it I won't wake up until I've made it difficult for me to wake up so III invent for myself an elaborate system of delaying my waking up I put myself through this test in that Testament I feel it's been sufficiently arduous then I may at last admit to myself who I really am and draw aside the veil and realize that after all when all is said and done I am that I am which is the name of God and when it comes to it that's really rather funny they say in Zen when you attain Satori nothing has left you at that moment but to have a good laugh but naturally all masters Zen masters yoga masters every kind of master puts up a barrier and says to you you simply place your own gain you know we say anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined because you when you go to a psychiatrist you define yourself as somebody who ought to have his head examined same way the Zen masters say anybody who studies in or comes to his end master ought to be given thirty blows with a stick because he was stupid enough to pose the question that he had a problem but you're the problem you you put yourself in the situation so it's a question fundamentally do you define yourself as a victim of the world or as the world you can define yourself you see if you identify you with what you call the voluntary system of the nerves and say only that's me and that's really a rather limited amount of my total performance what I do voluntarily then you've defined yourself as the victim in the game and so you are able to feel that life was a trap something else whether it was God or whether it was fate or whether it was the big mechanism the system imposed this on you and you can say poor little me but you can eat equally well and with just as much disgust if occation define yourself not only as what you do voluntarily but also what you do involuntarily that's you to do you beat your heart or don't you or does it just happen to you and if you define yourself as the works there nobody's imposing on you you're not a victim you're doing it first you can't explain how you do it in words because words are too clumsy and it take too long to say you'll get bored with it but actually then you can say with with gusto I am responsible for this life whether comedy or tragedy I did it and it seems to me that that is a basis for behavior and going on which is more fundamentally joyous and profitable and great than defining ourselves as miserable victims or sinners or what have you out of your mind now continues with the next lecture from the nature of consciousness lecture series [Music] I was discussing an alternative myth to the ceramic and fully automatic models of the universe I'll call the dramatic myth the idea that life as we experience it's a big act and that behind this big act is the player and the player or the self as it's called in Hindu philosophy the up man is you only you are playing hide and seek since that is the essential game that's going on it's the game of games it's the basis of all games hide and seek and so since you are playing hide and seek you are deliberately although you can't admit this or won't admit it you are deliberately forgetting who you really are or what you really are and the knowledge that your essential self is the foundation of the universe the ground of beingness Tillich calls it is something you have as what the Germans call a hint ago danke the hint eggie danke is a thought way way way in the back of your mind way back here somewhere something that you know deep down but to can't admit so in a way then in in order to bring this to the front in order to know that that is the case you have to be kidding out of your game you see the problem is this we identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us we have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary and we feel in control of those and then over against that there is all those things that are involuntary but the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary because for example when you move your hand you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it but then ask yourself how do you decide when you decide to open your hand do you first decide to decide you don't do you you just decide and how do you do that and if you don't know how you do it is it voluntary or involuntary let's consider breathing you can feel that you breathe deliberately you can control your breath but when you don't think about it it goes on is it voluntary or involuntary and so we come to have a very arbitrary definition himself that much of my activity which I feel I do and that then doesn't include breathing most of the time it doesn't include the heartbeats it doesn't include the activity of the glands it doesn't include digestion it doesn't include how you shape your bones circulate your blood do you or do not do these things now if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself very strange thing happens you find that your body knows that you are one with the universe in other words that the so called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the Stars shank if you find out that it's you who circulates your blood you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the Sun because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that's going on just as the waves are continuous with the ocean your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos and it's all you only you're playing the game the journey this bit of it but as I tried to explain there are in physical reality no such things as separate events so then remember also when I tried to work towards a definition of omnipotence omnipotent is not knowing how everything is done it's just doing it you don't have to translate it into language look supposing when you got up in the morning you had to switch your brain on and you had to think and do as a deliberate process waking up all the circuits that you need for active life during the day why you would never get done because you have to do all those things at once how can a centipede control 100 legs at once because it doesn't think about it and so in the same way you are unconsciously performing all the various activities of your organism only unconsciously isn't a good word because it sounds sort of dead super consciously would be better give it a plus rather than a minus because what a consciousness is is simply a sort of specialized form of awareness when you look around the room you are conscious of as much as you can notice and you see an enormous number of things which you don't notice if for example I looked at a girl here and somebody asked me later what was she wearing I may not know although I've seen because I didn't attend but I was aware you see and perhaps if I could under hypnosis be asked this question where I would get my conscious attention out of the way through being in the hypnotic state I could recall what pressure she was wearing so then just in the same way as you don't focus your attention on how you make your thyroid gland function so in the same way you don't have any attention focused on how you shine the Sun so then let me connect this with the problem of birth and death which puzzles people enormous lis of course because in order to understand what what the self is you have to remember that it doesn't need to remember anything just like you don't need to know how you work your thyroid gland so then when you die you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence because that's not an experience a lot of people are afraid that when they die they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever and I'm sort of undergo that but one of the most interesting things in the world this is a yoga this is a way of realization try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up think about that children think about it it's one of the great wonders of life what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up and if you think long enough about that something will happen to you you will find out among other things that it'll pose the next question to you what was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep that was when you were born you see you you can't have an experience of nothing nature abhors a vacuum so after you are dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born in other words we all know very well that after people die other people are born and they're all you only you could only experience it one at a time everybody is I you all know you are you and wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't make any difference you are all of them and when they come into being that's you coming into be you know that very well only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland or whatever else it is in your organism you don't have to know how to shine the Sun you just do it like you breathe isn't it doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it you never learn the picture this miracle well the point is that from a strictly physical scientific standpoint this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that's going on and if I am my foot I am the Sun only we've got this little partial view we've got the idea that no I'm just something in this body the ego that's a joke the ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention it's like a radar on a ship the radar on a ship is a troubleshooter is there anything in the way and conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment like a radar does and note for any trouble making changes and if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety and the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism you realize that as the first thing how harmonious it all is because your organism is a miracle of harmony all this thing functioning together even those copper schools and creatures that are fighting each other in the bloodstream and eating each other up if they weren't doing that you wouldn't be healthy so what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level and you begin to realize that and you begin to be aware too that the discards of your life and the Discogs of people's life which are a fight at one level at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious and you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is at that level as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves the markings in marble the way a cat moves and that this world is really okay and can't be anything else because otherwise it couldn't exist but the reality underneath physical existence or which really is physical existence because in my philosophy there's no difference between the physical and the spiritual these are absolutely out of date categories it's all process it isn't stuff on the one hand and form on the other it's just it is pattern life is pattern it is a dance of energy so I will never invoke spooky knowledge now that is to say that I've had a private revelation or that I have sensory vibrations going on a plane which you don't have everything is standing right out in the open and it's just a question of how look at it so you do discover when you realize this the most extraordinary thing to me that I never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe wherein God is say brilliant light only somehow veiled hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around you so far so good but the truth is funnier than that it is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now that the experience you are having which you call ordinary everyday consciousness pretending you're not it that experience is exactly the same thing as it there's no difference at all and when you find that out you laugh yourself silly that's the great discovery in other words when you really start to see things and you look at an old paper cup and you go into the nature of what it is to see what vision is or what smell is or what touches you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos nothing could be brighter ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter only they're hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out but it is actually see the source of all light is in the eye if there were no eyes in this world the Sun would not be light you evoke light out of the universe in the same way you by virtue of having a soft skin evoke hardness out of wood wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin it's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air you by being this organism call into being the whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything you see but in in the mythology that we've sold ourselves on during the end of the 19th century when people discovered how big the universe was and that we live on a little planet in the solar system on the edge of the galaxy which is a minor galaxy everybody thought uh we're really unimportant after all god isn't there and doesn't love us and nature doesn't give a damn and we put ourselves down you see but actually it's this little funny microbe tiny thing crawling on this little planet it's way out somewhere who has the ingenuity by the nature of this magnificent organic structure to evoke the whole universe out of what would otherwise be mere quanta it's jazz going on but do you see this little little ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this this little organism on this little planet is what the whole show is growing there and so realizing its own presence well now here's the problem if this is the state of affairs which is so and if the the consciousness state you're in at this moment is the same thing as what we might call the divine state if you do anything to make it different it shows you don't understand that it's so so the moment you start practicing yoga or praying or meditating or indulging in some sort of spiritual cultivation you are getting in your own way the Buddha said we suffer because we desire if you can give up desire you won't suffer but he didn't say that as the last word he said that as the opening step of a dialogue because the if he if you say that to someone they're going to come back after a while and say yes but I'm now desiring not to desire and so the Buddha will answer well at last you're beginning to understand the point because you can't give up desire why would you try to do that it's already designed so in the same way you say you ought to be unselfish or to give up your ego let go relax why do you want to do that just because it's another way of beating the game isn't it the moment you see you hypothesize that you are different from the universe you want to get one up on it but if you try to get one up on the universe and you're in competition with it it means you don't understand you are it you think there's a real difference between self and other but self what you call yourself and what you call other are mutually necessary to each other like back and front they're really one but just as a magnet polarizes itself in north and south but it's all one magnet so experience polarizes itself as self and other but it's all one so if you try to make the north pole and get the mastery of it or the south pole get the mastery of the north pole you show you don't know what's going on a guru or teacher who wants to get this across to somebody because he knows it himself and when you know it you know you like others to see to so what he does is he gets you into being ridiculous harder and more assiduously than usual in other words if you are in a contest with the universe he's going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous and so he sets you such tasks as saying now of course in order to be a true person you must give up yourself be unselfish so the Lord sits steps down out of heaven and says first and Great Commandment is thou shalt love the Lord thy God you must love me well that's a double bind you can't love on purpose you can't be sincere purposely it's like trying not to think of a green elephant while taking medicine but if a person really tries to do it so you know this is where Christianity is rigged you should be very sorry for your sins and though everybody knows they're not but they think they ought to be and so they go around trying to be penitent or trying to be humble and they know the more assiduously they practice it the funnier and funnier the whole thing gets and so in this way it's a what it's called the technique of reduction absurdum if you think you have a problem you see and that you're an ego and that you're in difficulty the answer that the Zen master makes to you is show me your ego I want to see this thing that has a problem when Bodhidharma the legendary founder of Zen came to China a disciple came to him and said I have no peace of mind please pacify my mind and bodhidharma said bring out your mind here before me and I'll pacify it well he said when I look for it I can't find it so bodhidharma said there it specified see because when you look for your own mind that is to say your own particular eyes center of being which is separate from everything else you won't be able to find it if the only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look for it hard enough to find out that it doesn't there and so everybody says alright know yourself look within find out who you are because the harder you look you won't be able to find it and then you realize that it isn't there at all there isn't a separate view your mind is what there is everything but the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible that's one way I didn't say the only way but it is one way and so almost all spiritual disciplines meditations prayers etc etc our ways of persisting in folly doing resolutely and consistently what you're doing already so if a person believes that the earth is flat you can't talk him out of that he knows it's flat look around with a window and see it's obviously it looks flat so the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say well let's go and find the edge and in order to find the edge you've got to be very careful not to walk in circles and you'll never find it that way so we got to go consistently in a straight line do you west along the same line of latitude and eventually when we get back to where we started from you've convinced the guy that the earth is round but that's the that's the only way that'll tell that'll teach him because people can't be talked out of illusions well now there is another possibility however but this is more difficult to describe let's say we take us the basics opposition which is the thing that one sees in the experience of Satori or Awakening or whatever you want to call it now this now moment in which I'm talking and you're listening is eternity that although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary and that we may not feel very well and that we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on and that it ought to be changed this is it so you don't need to do anything at all but the difficulty about explaining that is that don't you you mustn't try not to do anything because that's doing something and how to explain that because there's nothing to explain and still it is the way it is now and if you understand that it will automatically wake you up [Applause] that's why Zen teachers use shock treatment too sometimes why they hit people or shout at them or create a sudden surprise because it is that jolt that suddenly brings you here see there's no road to here because you're already there and if you ask me how am I going to get here it'll be like the famous story of the American tourists in England who are some yokel the way to upper Tottenham a little village and the yokels scratched his head and you said well sir I do know where it is but if I were you I wouldn't start from here [Laughter] so you see when you ask how do i attain the knowledge of God how do i attain nirvana liberation all I can say is it's the wrong question why do you want to attain it because the very fact that you're wanting to attain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting that you already have it but of course yeah it's it's up to you yeah it's your privilege to pretend that you don't that's your game that's your life game that's what makes you think you're an ego and when you want to wake up you will just like that if you're not awake it shows you don't want to you're still playing the hide part of the game you're still as it were the the the self pretending it's not the self that's what you want to do so you see in that way too you're already there when you understand this if anything happens and some people misinterpret it you will discover as this happens that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior disappears you will realize that what you described as things under your own will feel exactly the same as things going on outside you you watch other people moving and you know you're doing that just like you're breathing or circulating your blood if you don't understand what's going on you're liable to get crazy at this point and to feel that you are God in the Jehova sense just say that you actually have power over other people so that you could alter what they're doing and that you are omnipotent in a very crude literal kind of Bible sense you see and a lot of people feel that and they go crazy that put them away they think they're Jesus Christ and that everybody ought to fall down and worship that's only they got their wires crossed they haven't been able to this experience happen to them but they don't know how to interpret it so be careful of that young calls it inflation people who get the holy man syndrome that I've suddenly discovered that I'm the Lord and the time above good and evil and so on and that therefore I start giving myself airs and graces but the point is everybody else is too if you discover that you're that then you ought to know that everybody else is well for example let's see how in other ways you might realize this most people think when they open their eyes and look around that what they are seeing is outside it seems doesn't it that you are behind your eyes and that behind the eyes there is a blank if you can't see it all turn around you see something else in front of you but behind the eyes that seems to be something that has no color it isn't dark it isn't light it's just it's there from a tactile standpoint you can feel it with your fingers although you don't get inside it but what is that behind your eyes you see well actually when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around that's how it feels inside your head the color of this room is back here in the nervous system where the optical nerves are at the back of the head that's in there it's what you're experiencing what you see out here is a neurological experience now if that hits you and you feel sensuously that that's so you may think that then they then therefore the external world is all inside my skull but you've got to correct that with the thought that your skull is also in the external world so you suddenly begin to feel well wow what a kind of a situation is this it's inside me and I'm inside it and it's inside me and I'm inside it but that's the way it is this is the what you could call transaction rather than interaction between the individual and the world just like for example in buying and selling there cannot be an act of buying unless the simultaneously an act of selling vice-versa so the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional the environment grows the organism and in term the organism creates the environment the organism turns the Sun into light but it requires there to be an environment containing a Sun for them to be an organism at all and the answer to it is simply they're all one process and it isn't that organisms by chance came into this world put it rather that this world is the sort of environment which grows organisms it was that way from the beginning just in the same way for you mean the organisms may in time have arrived in the scene or out of the scene later than the beginning of the scene but from the moment that went bang in the beginning if that's the way it started organisms like us are sitting here were involved in it you see look here let's take the cue the propagation of an electric current I can have a electric current running through a wire that goes all the way around the earth and here we have our power source and here we have a switch alright here's the positive pole here's the negative pole now before that switch closes there is the current doesn't exactly behave like water in a pipe there isn't current here waiting to jump the gap as soon as the switch is closed the current doesn't even start until the switch is closed from the positive pole it never starts unless the point of arrival is there now it'll take an interval for that current to get going and circuit if it's going all the way around the earth it's the long run but the but the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning in a similar way although in in the development of any physical system there may be billions of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life that billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of a current around the wire takes it at a time but it's already implied it takes time for an acorn to turn into a note but the oak is already implied in the Acorn and so in any lump of rock floating about in space there is implicit human intelligence sometime somehow somewhere they all go together so don't differentiate yourself and stand off against this and say I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk rocks and stuff it all goes together those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails you need rocks what are you going to stand on what I think you know awakening really involves is a reexamination of our common sense we've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned obvious and our speech reflexive communist phrases place the facts as if they were outside you as if life or something you simply encountered as a foreigner face the facts our common sense has been rigged you see so that we feel strangers and aliens in this world and this is terribly plausible simply because it's what we're used to that's the only reason but when you really start questioning this say is that the way I have to assume life is I know everybody does but does that make it true it doesn't necessarily it ain't necessarily so and so then you is as you questioned this basic assumption that underlies our culture you find you get a new kind of common sense it becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe for example people used to believe that the people who lived in the Antipodes would fall off and that was scary but then when somebody sailed around the world and we all got used to it and now we travel around in jet planes and everything we have no problem about feeling that the earth is globular none whatever we got used to it so in the same way Einstein's relativity theories the curvature of the propagation of light that began to bother people when Einstein started talking like that but now we're all used to it well in a few years it will be a matter of common sense to very many people that they are one with the universe it'll be so simple and then maybe if that happens we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense with love instead of with hate for our environment

Channel: Motivation Tapes

Views: 168,803

Rating: 4.8965425 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Watts, Reality, out of your mind, persona, mask, personal development, life coaching, self help, success, self improvement, wisdom, happiness, zen, alan watts out of your mind, out of your mind part 2, alan watts universe, alan watts wisdom, conciousness, you are your reality, you are determining your reality, alan watts speech, alan watts dont control it, self actualisation

Id: 1veg7C_7LuM

Length: 64min 21sec (3861 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018