← Alan Watts Being in the Way
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Is this a summer to survive or a summer to thrive? For some, summer is their favorite season. Travel picks up, kids are out of school, and adventure is the focus for others. Juggling it all can be tough and lead to overwhelm and counting down the minutes until the kids are back in school. And many worry they're wasting the precious days of sunshine. Don't forget to take care of yourself during this busy season. Therapy can help you understand your needs, feel more confident setting boundaries, and create a version of summer that feels right for you. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served more than 6 million people globally. They do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. If you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer, find support in therapy, sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Alan that's better. H E L P.com Alan.
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Welcome to Being in the Way, the Alan Watts Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Watts, and today we're going to be listening to some unique recordings drawn from the Alan Watts archives. Today's selection was drawn from the Nature of Consciousness, a seminar that he gave at the Esalen Institute. And this is the second session from that seminar from the late 60s. This is Alan Watts in the Nature of Consciousness.
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I was discussing an alternative myth to the ceramic and fully automatic models of the universe. I'll call the dramaticness, 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 atman 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, 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 being, as Tillich calls it, is something you have as what the Germans call a hinter gedanka. A hinter gedanka is a thought way, way, way in the back of your mind, way back here somewhere, something that you know deep down but can't admit. So in a way, then, in order to bring this to the front. In order to know that that is the case, you have to be kidded out of your game. You see, the problem is 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 of self. 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 you not do these things? Now, if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself, a 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 shining. 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, that you're only 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. Omnipotence 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 a hundred 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. Superconsciously 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 look 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 dress 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 enormously, 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 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 will 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 can't have an experience of nothing. Nature abhors a vacuum. So after you're 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 can 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 being. 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 learned, but you're 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. But 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, as the first thing, how harmonious it all is. Because your organism is a miracle of harmony. All this thing functioning together. Even those corpuscles 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 discords of your life and the discords 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. It 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, 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. It's just a question of how you 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. Let's say we take as the basic supposition, which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening or whatever you want to call it, that this now moment, in which I'm talking and you are 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. It is the way it is now. And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up. That's why Zen teachers use shock treatment to sometimes while 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 tourist in England who asked some yokel the way to Upper Tuddenham little village. And the yokel scratched his head and he said, well, sir, I do know where it is, but if I were you, I wouldn't start from. 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 there. You already have it. But of course, it's. It's up to you. 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 Hyde part of the game. You're still, as it were, 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, a funny thing 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 describe 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 Jehovah sense. 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. They have to 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 happened to them. But they don't know how to interpret it. So be careful of that. Jung calls it inflation. People who get the holy man syndrome. That I suddenly discovered that I'm the Lord. And that I'm 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. You can't see at all. Turn around, you see something else in front of you. But behind the eyes, there 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 the. This room is back here in the nervous system where the optical nerves are at the back of the head. It'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. 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 there's simultaneously an act of selling and vice versa. So the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional. The environment grows the organism, and in turn, the organism creates the environment. The organism turns the sun into light. But it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there 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. I 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 it went bang in the beginning, if that's the way it started, organisms like us, us sitting here were involved in it. You see, look here. Let's take the propagation of an electric current. I can have an 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. Here's the positive pole. Here's the negative pole. Now, before that switch closes, 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 a long run. But the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning. In a similar way, although 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 the current round the wire takes a little time, but it's already implied. It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, 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 re examination of our common sense. We've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem. Unquestioned, obvious, and our speech reflects them. The commonest phrases face the facts as if they were outside you, as if life was 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, as you question 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're 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.
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Today's podcast was produced in conjunction with the Be Here Now Podcast Network. And our music is from the Rhythm Experience by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records. Today's selection was taken from the Nature of Consciousness. Thank you for joining us. And if you'd like more information about Alan Watts, Please visit Alan Watts.org.
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