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A
Teaching meditation is its own skill. You don't need to be a master practitioner to begin learning how to guide others, but you do need real training. Join Buddhist teacher David Nichtern and Professor Robert Thurman for a free online discussion on Tuesday, May 26th at 6:00pm Eastern Time exploring the role of the teacher in the Buddhist tradition, why lineage and transmission matter, and what it means to skillfully support others in meditation practice. Today they'll also discuss Dharma moon and Tibet House's mindfulness meditation teacher training program beginning in June 2026. You'll have a chance to ask questions, meet the teaching team and find out whether the program might be a good fit for you. Visit dharmamoon.comfriend that's dharmamoon.comfriend for more information and to reserve your spot for the free event on Tuesday, May 26th.
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Welcome again to the Alan Watts Podcast Being in the Way. I'm your host Mark Watts, and today we've got some more treats for you from the archives Today is a talk from 1963 called what Am I? And it's one of a number of talks that came to us from a group of recordings made between 1962 and 1963. These are recent discoveries from the Blasdell Institute, and these offer a fresh look at some of what we consider to be my father's signature comparisons between spotlight and floodlight, between prickles and goo. Some of these things that we hear a good bit later in the 60s, but here they are for the first time from the early 60s.
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Yesterday afternoon I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of illusion. The question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not, that is to say, whether the plot is comic or tragic. And if it's tragic, you see, is it must we say that it's ultimately tragic? And the question of who are you and are we to say that I myself right down at root, am just a little kind of jerk of some kind that really has nothing to do with this cosmos, but just arises in it and is here on sufferance for a short period and then absolutely nothing follows, you see, or the alternative to that is what I really am, the same as the whole thing, that is the works, the it or whatever you want to call it, Brahman, God, the Dao, the great void, the Buddha, nature, I don't care, the self, anything, any name you want. And. Whereas that attitude, you can look at it from various points of view, in judging it, you can say its wishful thinking, you can say that it's insufferable pride. But the point of the matter is, as I tried to show, any other way of looking at things is kind of schizoid. It looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a barren tree. They just got settled there, you know, they don't belong. The sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Well, where is this other domain and how does it relate to this one? Are they separate? I showed you that even when we say that two domains are the poles apart, the very fact that they're poles shows that they have a hidden connection. And the hidden connection is the big thing in life. All you junkies know that. And so, in other words, we get a pattern of organization that is radial rather than an assemblage, as if the universe were really a multiverse. A lot of things that got collected together out of the infinite wastes of space and sort of began to maunder around each other. Whereas the other pattern, which is so much more sensible, is central and radial. And I showed you how the crystals and the stars and the octopuses and even the human beings are all radial structures. Of course, we don't see our radial relationship to the totality of the universe because it isn't obvious. It's obvious that a tree is an arm of the Earth reaching up and waving at the sky. And a mountain is another kind of radiation from the Earth. And so is a leg from a body and hair and things like that. But what makes human beings, as the highest of the mammals, so conscious of being independent is that they are topologically an enclosed surface, you see, which wanders around independently of the ground. What we don't notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all. That wandering around is something that is entirely related to there being some ground. In other words, when you run up a hill, the hill also runs you up it. The hill rises and lifts you as you run, you see? And if you understand that, you don't take a hostile attitude to mountains and hills. You're grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air. Because that's presumably why you went up, that the thing was high. It was lifted up. You wanted to be lifted up. It lifted you up. You had to cooperate. Of course. I always like the illustration that I've used before. Perhaps you haven't heard it of the thistle down. The thistle down two comes moving through the sky. I once was playing with the thing, you know, and just came out of the blue Sky. And I caught it like that, pulled it under my nose, and I. It started to pull to get away, see? Looks as if it were a butterfly or something that pulls away when you catch it by the leg. And I thought, oh, no, of course that's not the thistle down.
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It's the wind.
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Well, which was it? You know, in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen, there were two monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind, whether it was the wind or the flag that was moving. And he said, it's neither. It's the mind. And so, in a way, the same thing was true about the thistle down. The mind is the moving thing, because which point of view will you take? Which attitude of mind will you take towards this? Is it the wind moving the thistle down, or is it the thistle down that is moving itself with the wind? After all, when you see a sailing boat and there's a man in the sailing boat who is moving the boat, is it the wind moving the boat, or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a sail, much smarter way of getting around than rowing. You don't have to work. It's intelligence, you see, the mind that moves the boat. And so in the same way I thought, you know, this thistledown has some kind of intelligence. It's radial, it's organized, it's beautiful. And it's used that to sail itself with the wind, to enable itself to pull, like a little organism playing with the wind. And so, in just the same way, each one of us uses the universe to get around, and the universe uses us to play with and to make games and patterns and to do its stuff. So because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin, that is a very deceptive thing, because the skin is not really the boundary of man. You notice that in various periods of art, human beings have been shaped in different ways and have been more or less transparent at some times, at other times opaque. And sometimes the emphasis has been on the state of mind which this human being is in. At other times, the emphasis is on the bodily conformations and so on. In the work of painters today, one sees images that, at first sight, one doesn't recognize as being human. There was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years ago called the New Image of Man. And these things didn't look like human beings at all. Some of them did. But. But that's because what does a human being look like? That depends on your point of view. You see, if you are prejudiced that a human being is only what is inside his skin, then you think that when anybody paints the human being beyond those boundaries that he's lost the image of man. He hasn't necessarily lost it at all.
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You see,
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there's an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man. I don't know if you've ever heard that said, that man is the microcosm and that the universe as a whole is the macrocosm. Now, as you plumb out into the
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universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the
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depths that at first sight seem utterly remote.
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How could they have anything to do with us?
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They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body, you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. Look at a spermatozoon under a microscope, that little tadpole. And how can that have any connection with a grown human being? It's so unlike, you see. It's foreign feeling.
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And you get the creep sometimes, the foreign feeling about yourself. If you feel your own pulse. Or if you're able to look at an X ray in some way of your inner organs working. See, they're all strangers to us.
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We don't know about them.
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And they give us the creeps as if they were, you know, coming across some weird insects in the dark. That sort of feeling.
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But
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what we will always find out in the end, you see, when we meet the very strange thing and we look into the distant reaches of space.
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Space.
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There will one day be the dawning recognition. That's me.
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Why, that's me. And the.
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The whole game of the universe, you see, is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can. That's how one keeps variety going. That's how one keeps wonder going.
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And all kinds of exciting developments. How different can you get? In the beginning, the Lord said, get lost to himself, you see. So
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we.
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We shall find, for example,
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that space
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that you see all around you and containing you. And you can in feel space in many ways. Space is not only something that comes through the eyes. The movement of your arms, if with closed eyes for a blind person, is his way of knowing space. And you can hear space audibly. Lots of sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces. And silence that goes with sound corresponds to space. And even St. Thomas Aquinas, that old Catholic theologian, said that good derives its virtue from evil, just as it is the silent pause that gives sweetness to the chant. So, but space, you see, that seems to contain space is one's mind. This was common sense to people living in the early Renaissance, for example, at the time of Dante. There are many references in Dante's poetry to the identity of mind and space. And in likewise, in a 8th century
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text in China, the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, he likens the nature of mind to the nature of space. He says, just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the people and the mountains and the forests, so the nature of mind, the nature of consciousness, the nature
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of oneself contains all these things. So
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you see that if you think that way, you have an image of
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man that is global,
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that is very
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different from the image in which man
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is defined as bounded by his skin. That's a prejudice. We think. Now, for example, I have my own private thoughts. Well, nobody has private thoughts
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because one
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thinks in images and words. And these words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in which you live. We think thoughts, the domain of mind is very similar to the grid structure of an electric power supply system.
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You know, what happens is there's a
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network of power stations and transformers so arranged that if one of them gives out and fails to supply a certain area immediately, the grid connects them with other sources of power. Well, in rather a similar way, our minds are connected. Let's take one very obvious example of
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it, what
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Northrop Fry calls the order of words. It's his theory that as a scholar of literature and the history of literature, he can take any piece of writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was written, because everything that is written and said is inescapably related
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to the whole order of words.
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And it's amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away. Because he can say, well, obviously he
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has read this thinking, say, of a particular novelist or poet, so it must come after the date when that novel was published. But he couldn't possibly use an expression like that to say, for example, that it was a capital day. He would never, he would never use that expression living, say, in contemporary 20th century America. That's a Victorianism or it's an Edwardian way of talking. And so in, by all sorts of little clues like that, the scholar can pin down a piece of writing to when it was written. You see, that is because every individual piece of writing is a function of all writing that's being done. Well, now That's a very specific and almost crude illustration of something that's going on in a far more complicated way than that. It isn't only all writing, all thinking is being done in relation to the total order of thought. And in a still more subtle way, all living is being done in relation to the total order of life, to what the Chardin calls the biosphere. And it goes way beyond that because of the vast interplay of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields which embrace everything that there is. That is why the ancients, when a person was born, cast his horoscope, that was a map of the universe at the time of that person's birth, and therefore it was a drawing of his soul. Because the soul is not inside the body, the body is inside the soul. The soul, your soul, is the whole universe as it is focused upon your organism. Now, of course, astrology is a very primitive science, and it interpreted the influence of the universe upon the individual in very crude ways. And it works mostly by good guesswork on the part of the astrologer. If you know how to tell fortunes at a fair, you will find out a great deal about how all these predictive psychic sciences work, because the client invariably gives himself away, Either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his anxiety to conceal it. They work equally well now, but. But there is, you see, underneath the astrological notion a sound idea that the true map of the soul is the picture of the universe surrounding the individual. It isn't necessarily the. Your soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born. You see, it goes along all the time you live because the whole thing expresses itself through you. And therefore, in that sense, the map of the stars, the horoscope, etc,
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was
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an image of man in just the same way as we regard a picture of the human body as an image of man. And it's an image from a different point of view. It's a bigger image. It shows, in other words, that your mind is very largely outside your body. After all, it's inside too. It's simultaneous. You see, I cannot think, I can't have a mind without seeing, feeling and relating to other people, without all the social institutions, not only language, but the laws, the customs, the gestures, the rituals by which we relate to each other. All those things compose the mind. For the mind is a huge network of. Of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity. Mind and matter are, of course, polar. They go together. There are two ways of thinking about the same thing. Or shall we say two dimensions of
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the same thing, just like length and breadth, or just, shall we say, like shape and color. You see, nobody ever saw a shape that wasn't colored. Nobody ever saw a color that wasn't shaped. And yet we can see there's a very clear difference between color and shape. But they always go together, they're always found together. Well, that's the same sort of relationship between mind and matter. And the difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other and saying, well, the world is only material, or saying, on the other hand, that it's only mental is the same difference you would have in trying to
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reduce all shapes to colors. They're all colors to shapes.
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Shape and color are made for each
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other like a marriage made in heaven. They go together so perfectly and yet stay so marvelously different. That's why the Buddhists say difference is identity, identity is difference. It sounds goofy, but it makes a great deal of sense because what it's saying is a relational thing that you don't know what identity is unless you know what difference is. And you don't know what difference is unless you know what identity is. That relationship between so called opposites is called in the Chinese technical Taoist vocabulary, mutual arising. So they say, to be and not to be arise mutually. High and low are mutually posited, long and short are mutually delineated, and so on. Now. What we see then is the totality of the cosmos, focused at each point, you see, gives rise to the illusion of the independence of the point from the whole. Just as the human being, by virtue of having an enclosed epidermis and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground, presents the illusion of being separate. And so that's why I asked Varda to do these demonstrations last night, because he showed visually the interdependence of the figure and the background and how the two play together, how you can switch from paying attention to one to paying attention to the other. And in each case it's significant. That is an art that we have lost in our day to day perception of life. And it leads, practically speaking, to the serious problem of ecological blindness, that is to say, to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer from, especially in our culture, that they are inseparably related to their physical environment. It looks as if we aren't. It looks as if we can go out with bulldozers and insecticides and every kind of a gadget and make over our physical environment as it suits our whims. But then we discover, to our consternation, that we've upset all sorts of balances. That the house we made such a nice flat lot for on the hillside suddenly slides down the hill when there's a rainstorm. Because we took away all the shrubbery that was binding the hill together. And, you know, this happens in Hollywood every day. And.
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And nobody ever seems to learn.
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And that's. You see this immense importance of overcoming the illusion of separateness. But people are afraid of that because they think it's communistic. They think that the west, the. The grand style, the great thing about Western civilization is its stress on individual personality and its value. And that we have created the ideal of personal integrity. That is to say that the most important thing in the world is the individual. All collective it is. Corporations, states and so on exist as servants of the individual. And if they get in his way and they interfere with his private enterprise, whatever that may be, it's a bad thing. Man, the individual is the crown of creation from this point of view. And therefore, when anybody suggests that individual
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man is not what you thought was an individual, but is in some way united with. Grounded in the totality, then if you're this kind of rugged individualist, you mix up your vocabulary and you call the totality the collective. Now, the collective and the totality are two completely different things. The idea of collectivism is based on individualism. It's the idea that the society of mankind and the physical environment beyond it is a collection with nothing of the kind. That's a. That's the. The idea of cosmic flotsam and jetsam that all floated together into a collection.
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And that's the obverse of individualism. You know, American individualism is the same
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philosophy as Marxist collectivism seen from the other side.
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Because they're both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality. Now, what people don't understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter of being isolated. It's a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one's relationship to the whole surrounding cosmos. Let's suppose that I'm preparing to make a date with some lady and she's such an individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself. She never thinks about anything that isn't herself. But she's an awful bore. She has nothing to say. She's not interested in any books, in any landscapes, in any works of art, in any literature, in any other people. She's a total bore. But the more on the other hand, she would be Interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself, the more of a colorful personality she becomes. So the rule is to get away, you see, from these ideas of the individual as finding his individuality and uniqueness through independence, but rather finding his individuality and uniqueness through being related. Because, you see, that's what makes us look at it. Look at the word relation from another point of view when we talk about our friends and relations. Supposing I come across some individual who I can't make out what kind of a thing he is. I can't make out where he came from. His accent isn't American, it isn't British. It isn't particularly Middle Western. It certainly doesn't have the overtones of New York or New England. He just talks flat. And as to his style of clothing, it's utterly nondescript.
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Well, I think this is pretty much of a bore.
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What I like to see in an
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individuality, in a physical individual, is ways that I can relate him to his ancestry. That he has this little subtle accent or this mannerism or this eccentricity or whatever it is that connects him with a great background, you see. But it's his connection with his background that makes him so significant. If I can't see that connection, he becomes uninteresting.
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So there is no thought in this approach to devalue the individual. What really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or political philosophy that overstresses his isolation. And this is something that Californians in particular need to take note of. And because many, many people feel, you see, that the development of technology and of centralized government is a direct threat to the value of personality. Well, in some ways it is, but that is only because. Technology is being dependent on the old individualist dash, collectivist point of view.
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They're the same.
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So then, you see, this is then the illusion created that the individual is operating all by himself, that actions and thoughts and deeds proceed solely from inside his skin. So that we can say, there's where it started, you see. Well, that's the game of praising and blaming. The game of who started it? Who can we give candy to? Who can we bang on the head? In other words, somebody has to be it,
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as in the farmer in the dell, you know? And finally you get the end. The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone Hi ho, the Dario. The cheese stands alone.
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Well, why?
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Who started it? The group.
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Well,
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another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility if they see through the illusion of separateness,
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The truth of the matter is actually that
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no philosophy of history has really succeeded in making anybody more or less responsible. In other words, let's say that you are a Christian, a Catholic of the old fashioned medieval type, who believes that you've got an individual soul with free will and that you're under responsibility to
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God to obey his law.
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And that if you don't, the most disastrous consequences imaginable will befall you. You'll fry in hell forever. There's no evidence whatsoever that believing in that made people any more virtuous than they are today.
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None at all.
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Indeed, clergy who believed in all this
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owned whorehouses and all kinds of things. They were just as contemptuous of law and order as anybody could be now. And part of the reason was of course that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty like the H bomb. It's just too big to think about and really brings justice into disrespect because it uses such crude and clumsy methods. You know, it's like using a hit, a steam hammer to drive in tax. Responsibility is a thing like a nice face which you either have or haven't. Certain backgrounds, certain interests, certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings. And they, they live that way not because they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible. It's because they're intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all round. That's all there is to it. And of course that's all is a big all. But you, you won't. In other, what I'm saying is the people who are frightened that people will, other people will abandon responsibility, never did have any way of thinking that would guarantee that people would be responsible. There is no such guarantee.
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If there were, we should be automata.
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Now I want to switch to another aspect of illusion.
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The quickness of the hand deceives the eye.
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And that is of course the great
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illusion
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of what we call matter.
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Density, impenetrability, opacity. I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter because I'm a materialist. That is to say, I like material. And though I may seem to you to be quite self contradictory.
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For example, a wine should have body, pure alcohol doesn't. And it's terribly important in human character for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism between sensuality and spirituality. You see, people who are purely sensuous
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and materialistic get very boring.
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You can fill your lives with all good things with alpha Romeos and Hi, Fi's. And wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and Criss crafts and dry martinis and Chanel number five, you know. And after a while, if that's all you've got, it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the martinis taste like medicine. And somehow, bleh. You get a distaste for life and even for mountains and trees and waters. And then on the other hand, the purely spiritual approach to things is too rarefied, too earnest, too abstract, too purely Euclidean.
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And the people who are intensely spiritual and don't have any sensuality are always desperately serious, colorless, lacking in humor, and never are able to meet one as man to man with a kind of a friendly leer in the eye that's terribly important. They live at a level of the frantic intensity.
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I see. These two extremes need each other. Say spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp, and sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars, you know, to wonder about the sensualist as such.
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The materialist as such, has no wonder. And the mystic, the pure mystic, has no body.
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He is pure alcohol
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spirit.
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So
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if then one should say that material is an illusion, this seems to be selling out to the spirit people
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and to the mystics. And so Christian Scientists are, generally speaking, as personalities totally lacking in materialism. And they're prissy and lacking in color. And their churches are very, very disagreeable. They're all reading desks and they're too bookish. And they. They have no ritual, no ceremonies, no. No verve. You see, it's all cerebral. And likewise,
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when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism, they go into the same ultra mysticism. They start disbelieving in all material pleasures as crutches. And it's very bad to have crutches, you see. You shouldn't take aspirin when you've got a headache. You shouldn't wear glasses. You shouldn't show dependence on anything. You mustn't like your food too much because that's becoming gluttonous. So you eat very plain food, which is not spiced, and you eat it out of a sense of duty, that is, to keep the body functioning. You drink only water because other drinks might cause certain dependencies and give you too much pleasure. And because the idea is, you see,
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you've got to control your mind and
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keep it absolutely calm and still so that you are not dependent on matter. And that's altogether the wrong approach because, well, I mean, it is a game. You can play it is one of these possible things. I mean, you can play the Jehovah's Witness game. You can play the three speed and three seed in the Spirit Baptist game. All these are various things which you could play. Just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or fishing or something like that. But what happens is, you see that the notion that the material world is an illusion is turned into a judgment of value. If it's an illusion, therefore, it's bad. I ought not to be under this illusion. Well, the reality of the matter is that if you see that the material world is an illusion, you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn't. A true materialist, therefore, is one who knows that material is an illusion. Then he's not afraid of it. Then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest. Because, you see, if you're a false material, the fake materialist, what's happened? You borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac. An impressive house, ranch style, with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool. And you've bought a lot of stock. And you somehow wangled the money and borrowed it. And you keep lying awake nights wondering
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if you're going to make the payments. Well, there's no point in that at all. What. How can you possibly enjoy all this jazz if that's the kind of jazz you want to enjoy? You've got to worry about whether you pay for it or not. And you get hopelessly involved. You get commitments here, commitments there. And finally you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself. The only way to enjoy material and.
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Is to disbelieve in it, just as one can disbelieve in money.
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Then you.
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You can have zest for it, you see. Otherwise, it's much better to be poor. I mean, if you. If you have no taste for the. This kind of life and no real interest in it, but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons, it's much better to stay poor, not have any of that stuff at all.
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So
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then this is the important thing I'm trying to say. Material is an illusion, but a great illusion.
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And the point is to swing it and not to run away from it on the one hand or to get
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stuck on it in the other. Then you can play with it just like a wheel going round. The wheel is too loose on the axle. It wobbles all over the place.
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If it's too tight, it won't revolve. But you kind of sit loose, you see, to this thing not too loose though.
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Now, in what way then is the material world an illusion?
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Well, we know a lot about this
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now from our physics,
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and we know
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that what we call solidity is force contained force, the agitation of particles or
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waveicles or whatever they are at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations. So that when I put my foot
- [43:31]
D
on the floor, the reason it doesn't go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can penetrate. Like an airplane propeller, you can't put your head through it without getting it chopped off.
- [43:51]
C
Only that if it were going faster
- [43:53]
D
still, it wouldn't even cut your head off.
- [43:55]
C
It would just be like banging your
- [43:56]
D
head against a brick wall.
- [43:59]
C
And it has to be going fast too.
- [44:01]
D
Within an extraordinarily small and restricted space. The airplane propeller is whizzing around through a considerable space in relation to the size of a head. But if it were going much faster, but through much smaller spaces, you see, then it would be like banging your head against the brick wall. So what we've got in our so called physical objective world is the. A behavior of energy where the. Where matter arises from it through its behavior in restricted spaces. Density is a quality of space rather than a quality of matter. You see what I mean? I gave the illustration of the airplane propeller to try and show that. So that. All this is an electronic, diaphanous world, very similar to other creations of electronic patterns. The dance of forms on the TV screen, the rainbow, The aurora borealis, it's all fundamentally like that, only we are of the same kind of jazz. You see, our bodies are. This dance feels real words, it feels solid because we are something of the same kind.
- [45:48]
C
If we were on a different wavelength, we'd walk right through it in the same way as radio waves come right through the house. They are of such a nature that they can penetrate the. In the spaces, the interstices, or in some way jazz signals through and. But we are on the same wavelength, you see, as the wall, and so don't go through it. But nevertheless, the whole cosmos is therefore a function of energy, or you could say of light, something like light, and therefore we and it are all diaphanous. Now, it's easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren't so dense. There's only one other creature as intelligent as man, and this lives in a medium that is less dense. And this is the dolphin. The dolphin is a mammal and many millions of years ago, it seems that dolphins were living on the land.
- [47:07]
D
But they are very clever.
- [47:10]
C
And they decided that the land was no place to live because getting food was difficult and you had to lug yourself around and there were many, many bad shows about the land. It had very curious changes of temperature. You became unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot. And you had in fact to work. Well, no sensible person ever works. I never work. I get paid for playing. And everybody should do that. That's the, the mark of an educated man is that eventually he gets a job where he's paid for playing. And a worker or a proletarian isn't necessarily a poor man. Lots of poor. I mean a poor man like say, Salig Morgan Rath or Eric Barker around here, they're not proletarians. A proletarian is a person who is fettered to the process of work, that is to say to doing chores every day that he really doesn't like and that aren't in the least interesting in order to go on living. So the port, the, the dolphins decided this is ridiculous, this land existence. And they went back to the water. And it's pretty easy to fish. You see, there are plenty of fish in the water and things to eat. As we know, the ocean is the greatest food supply in the world. And when they'd eaten a few fish or whatever they need, they decided just to have a ball. So the dolphin can get abreast of a ship, get one of the, the wakes coming out on the side, can set its tail at an angle of 26 degrees. No. And be pushed along by the ship. And it's not going anywhere. There's no reason to go along there, as you know, as if it had to get to another part of the sea. The sea is pretty much the same all through, but they're just going boom. And they chatter and dance and, and they're, they're, they're really highly civilized beings. And so please don't anybody ever kill dolphins or be unkind to dolphins because they're exemplary, high minded creatures. And we shall soon discover this. As soon as we can set up communication with them, they will tell us all about it. And we will then invent new style of civilization based on frolic. But you see, they, they, they dance in the, in the mode of water. Now, human beings, as Toynbee has pointed out, as their civilization progresses, they begin to lose their roots. And they are less and less tied to the land. They go into the air and what's going to happen.
- [50:05]
D
As if man develops without blowing himself to bits, he can get over the hurdle, you see, that dangerous point is that gradually all roads are going to disappear
- [50:18]
C
and the earth will have centers of human habitation, you see, but no roads. They'll be as obsolete as railroad tracks because everybody will fly.
- [50:28]
D
And once you. The medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of water. And as we fly, you see, on
- [50:36]
C
the land, your values are all values of permanent solidity, firmness. They're architectonic in the sense of our
- [50:45]
D
great stone structures, pyramids and things like that. But in the air and on the water, all values are fluid. And what you have to know to be a good airman is, of course,
- [50:58]
C
stars,
- [51:02]
D
like white throats and other migrating birds migrate by the stars, imagine. But once you start relating yourself to the stars, you realize that you're living
- [51:14]
C
in a universe where directions are all
- [51:18]
D
relative
- [51:21]
C
and you become a being capable
- [51:22]
D
of existing in non solidity. And that's why Buckminster Fuller, you know, believed that all technics and really all culture came from the sea. The men who first learned to sail were the wise men. He has a fantastic idea that there were initiates, great priests who were ships captains, and that although some of their humble seamen didn't know all the secrets, that these priests were the first people who knew that the world was round.
- [51:59]
C
And that that gives one an entirely
- [52:03]
D
different theology, you see, than if you believe that the world is flat.
- [52:10]
C
And
- [52:12]
D
so from the priests of the ocean, the landsmen learned how to use cranes, blocks and tackles, how to build what a good house an overturned ship made. And so to this day, a cathedral has a nave as its central auditorium. Nave from Latin novice ship, showing the connections between ships and the first temples. And so Fuller goes on to say, now if you're a good architect, as the ancient architects learned from the ocean, first thing you should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane factory and understand the, the. The beautiful thing that man has made in a fine, fine airplane, you see, which is as great as a bird in its own way, because that's the architecture of insecurity.
- [53:15]
C
And that really lives with insecurity. Well, let's have an intermission and then we can.
- [53:29]
B
You've been listening to Alan Watts, courtesy of the Alan Watts Organization. And today's podcast was produced in conjunction with the Ram Dass Be Here now network. Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain from Moment Records. It's the Rhythm Experience album. And if you want to learn more about Alan Watts and his works and his biography, please Visit us@AlanWatts.org on the web. Thank you for joining us.