Alan Watts

[Reefs]

AW: I suppose most of you have heard of Zen. But before going on to explain any details about it I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist. I am not advocating Zen Buddhism. I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want to you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, let's say Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy...

That's the attitude!

[Reefs]

[Reefs]

This is from one of his talks. It's an absolutely brilliant analysis of the Zen way of teaching. It's rather long, so I will break it down into several sections.


Zen Teaching (1) – Goal and Method

AW: The object of buddhist discipline or methods of psychological training is to bring about a state of affairs in which the individual feels himself to be everything that there is, the whole cosmos focused, expressing itself here. In that way, your sense of identity would be turned inside out. You wouldn't forget who you were, you wouldn't forget your name and address, your telephone number, your social security number and what sort of role you're supposed to occupy in society. But you would know that this particular role that you play, this particular personality that you are, is superficial, and the real you is all that there is. And that inversion, turning upside down of the sense of identity, of the state of consciousness which the average person has, is the objective of buddhist disciplines.

The method of teaching something in Buddhism is rather different from methods of teaching which we use in the Western world. In the Western world, a good teacher is regarded as someone who makes the subject matter easy for the student, a person who explains things cleverly and clearly, so you can take a course in mathematics without tears. In the oriental world, they have an almost exactly opposite conception, and that is that a good teacher is a person who makes you find out something for yourself. In other words, learn to swim by throwing the baby into the water.

There's a story used in Zen about how a burglar taught his child to burgle. He took him one night on a bugling expedition and locked him up in a chest in the house that he was bugling and left him. And the poor little boy was all alone locked up in the chest. And he began to think, how on earth am I going to get out? So he suddenly called out “Fire! Fire!” and everybody began running all over the place, and they heard this shriek coming from inside the chest. And they unlocked it and he rushed out and shot out into the garden. And everybody was in hot pursuit calling out “Thief! Thief!”… And he went by a well, picked up a rock and dropped it in the well. And everybody thought the poor fellow has jumped into the well and committed suicide. And he got away. He got home, and his father said “Congratulations, you have learned the art!”

[Reefs]

Zen Teaching (2) – Nuts

AW: William Blake once said, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. And so the method of teaching used by these great eastern teachers is to make fools persist in their folly, but very rigorously, very consistently and very hard. So then, having given you the analogy, let's go to the specific situation. Supposing you want to study Buddhism under a Zen master, what will happen to you?

Well, first of all let's ask the question, why would you want to do this anyway? I can make the situation fairly universal, it might not be a Zen master that you go to, it might be a Methodist minister, it might be a Catholic priest, it might be a psychoanalyst. But what's the matter with you? Why do you go? And surely, the reason that we all would be seekers is that we feel some disquiet about ourselves. Many of us want to get rid of ourselves, we can't stand ourselves. And so we watch television and go to the movies, and read mystery stories and join churches in order to forget ourselves, in order to merge with something greater than ourselves. We want to get away from this ridiculous thing locked up in a bag of skin. So, I have a problem. I hurt. I suffer. I'm neurotic, or whatever it is. And one goes to the teacher and says: “My problem is me. Change me.”

Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he'll say: “Well, I have nothing to teach. There is no problem. Everything's perfectly clear.” And you think that one over, and you say: “He's probably being cagey. He's testing me out to see if I really want to be his student. So I know, according to everybody else who's been through this, that in order to get this man to take me on, I must persist.”

Do you know our saying that anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined? There's a double-take in that saying, you see. So in the same way, anybody who goes with a spiritual problem to a Zen master, defines himself as a nut. And the teacher does everything possible to make him as nutty as possible.

[Reefs]

Zen Teaching (3) – Nothing to teach

AW: But the teacher says quite honestly: “I haven't anything to tell you. I don't teach anything, I have no doctrine, I have nothing whatsoever to sell you.” So the student thinks: “This is very deep...” because this ‘nothing’ that he's talking about, this ‘nothing’ that he teaches, is what they call in Buddhism Shunyata. Shunyata is the Sanskrit word for nothingness. And it's supposed to be the ultimate reality.

But, as you know, if you know anything about these doctrines, this doesn't mean real nothingness, not kind of just nothing there at all, not just blank. But it means no-thingness. It's the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things. And that's something very deep and profound.

So he knows that when the teacher said “I have nothing to teach”, he meant this very esoteric no-thing. Well, he might also say then: “If you have nothing to teach, what are all these students doing around here?” And the teacher says: “They are not doing anything. They are just a lot of stupid people who live here.” And he knows again, this ‘stupid’ doesn't mean just straight stupid, but the highest stupidity of being people who are humble and don't have intellectual pride.

So finally, the student having gone out of his way to define himself as a damn fool in need of help, he's absolutely worked himself into this situation, he's defined himself as a nut. And then the teacher accepts him. And the teacher says: Now I'm going to ask you a question. I want to know who you are before your father and mother conceived you.” That is to say, who are you? Who is this thing called your ego, your soul, your ‘I’ or identity for whom your parents provided a body? Show me that. And he says further: “I don't want any words, I want it to be shown.”

So the student may open his mouth to make an answer, but the teacher says “Ah, not yet. You're not ready.” And he takes him back and introduces him to the chief student, all those so-called Zen monks who live together. And the chief student says: “Now, what we do here is so-and-so, we have this discipline, but the main part of the discipline is meditation. And we all sit cross-legged in a row. And you sit cross-legged and you learn how to breathe and be still. In other words, to do nothing. But you mustn't go to sleep, and you mustn't get into a trance. You have to stay wide-awake, not thinking anything, but perfectly doing nothing. And there's a monk walking down all the time with a flat stick. And if you go to sleep, or if you get into a trance, or if you get dreamy, he hits you on the back so that you'll stay quite clear and wide awake, but still doing nothing. And the idea is that out of a state of profoundly doing nothing, you will be able to tell the teacher who you really are.”

In other words, the question ‘Who are you before your father and mother conceived you?’ is a request for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity. As if I were to say to you: “Will you be absolutely genuine with me? No deception, please. I want you to do something that expresses you without the slightest deception. No more role acting, no more playing games with me. I want to see YOU!”

[Reefs]

Zen Teaching (4) – The Challenge

AW: Now, imagine, could you really be that honest with somebody else, especially a spiritual teacher? And you know, he looks right through you, he sees all your secret thoughts. And he knows the very second when you've been a little bit phony. And that bugs you. Just like the psychiatrist. You're sitting there, discussing your problems with him and you start picking your nose. And the psychiatrist suddenly says to you: “Is your finger comfortable there? You like that?” And you know your Freudian slip is showing - what do fingers symbolize, what do nostrils symbolize? Oh, oh… And then you say quickly, putting your hand down, you say: “Oh no, it's nothing, it's nothing. I was just picking my nose.” And the analyst says: “Oh, really? Then why are you justifying it? Why are you trying to explain it away?”

He has you everywhere you turn, you see. Well, that's the whole art of psychoanalysis. And in Zen it's the same thing. In other words, when you're challenged to be perfectly genuine, it's like I would say to you: “Now look, if you come here tonight at exactly midnight and put your hands on this stage, you can wish and have granted any wish you want, provided you don't think of a green elephant.” And so everybody will come, they'll put their hands here and they will be very careful not to think about a green elephant. Well, now do you see the point that - if we transfer this to the dimension of spirituality where the highest ideal is to be unselfish to let go of oneself - when you are trying to be unselfish, you're doing it for selfish reasons. You can't be unselfish by a decision of the will anymore than you can decide not to think of a green elephant.

There is a story about Confucius who one day met Laozi, who was a great Chinese philosopher. And Laozi said: “Sir, what is your system?” And Confucius said: “It is charity, love of one's neighbor and elimination of self-interest.” Laozi said: “Stuff and nonsense! Your elimination of self is a positive manifestation of self. Look at the universe, the stars keep their order, the trees and plants grow upwards without exception, the waters flow. Be like this. All your nonsense about elimination of self is like beating a drum in search of a fugitive.”

So in this way, these are all examples of that trickery the master is playing on you. You came to him with the idea in your mind that you are a separate, independent, isolated individual. And what he's simply saying to you is: “Show me this individual!”

[Reefs]

Zen Teaching (5) – No Way Out

AW: I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan and he got pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is. And on his way to an interview with the master, to give an answer to the problem, he noticed a very a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden. And he swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono. And then he went in to the master to give the answer of who he was, and he suddenly produced the bullfrog. And the master said: “Too intellectual!” In other words: “This answer is too contrived. It's too much like Zen. You've been reading too many books. It's not the genuine thing.”

So after a while, what happens is this: When the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his true self, not only is there no way of doing it, there is also no way of doing it by not doing it. You can't do it by doing something, you can't do it by not doing something.

Let me, to make this clearer, put it into Christian terms: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ Now, what are you going to do about that? If you try very hard to love God, and you ask yourself: “Why am I doing this?” you'll find out you're doing it because you want to be on the side of the big battalions, you want to be right. After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, isn't he? If you don't love him, you're going to be in a pretty sad state. So you realize, I'm loving him just because I'm afraid of what will happen to me if I don't. Then you think: “That's a pretty lousy love, isn't it?” and you think: “That's a bad motivation. I wish I could change that. I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart.” But why do you want to change? See, I realize that, the reason I want to have a different kind of motive, is that I've got the same motive! So I say: “Oh heaven's sake, God, I'm a mess! Will you help me out?” And then he reminds you, why are you doing that? Now you're just giving up - you're asking someone else to take over your problem.

So, you suddenly find you're stuck. So in this way, what is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He can't gulp it down, and he can't spit it out. Or it's like a mosquito biting an iron bull, it's the nature of a mosquito to bite and it's the nature of an iron bull to be unbitable. And both go on doing their thing that is their nature. And so nothing can happen. Absolutely you're up against it. Absolutely no answer to this problem. No way out.

[Reefs]

Zen Teaching (6) – Satori

AW: Now what does that mean? If I can't do the right thing by doing, and if I can't do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I, who is said to do all this, I'm a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it. Because it isn't there.

So you recover from this illusion, you suddenly wake up and think: “Phew, what a relief!” And they call that Satori. That's awakening, the first step in awakening. Let me try and translate this: When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him, genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it. So it isn't there! And when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a new sense of identity. And you realize that what you are is, as I said, the whole world of nature doing THIS.

Now, that's a difficult thing for many Western people, because it suggests to them a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces. So in the same way, when your own sense of identity changes from being the separate individual to being what the entire cosmos is doing at this place, you become not a puppet but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever. This is the same paradox which the Christian knows in the form ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.’

Now I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western world today, because we have developed an immensely powerful technology, we have stronger means of changing the physical universe than has ever existed before. How are we going to use it? There is a Chinese proverb, that if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.

Let us assume that our technological knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are going to use this knowledge? Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it or people who love the physical world and feel that the physical world is their own personal body, an extension the whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply once extended body.

The important lesson in other words is, technology and its powers must be handled by true materialists. And true materialists are people who love material, who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals, and above all the earth and treat it with the reverence that is due to one's own body.

[bryan]

Alan Watts didn't believe his own words, hence being a boozer

[Reefs]

Aug 8, 2019 18:38:14 GMT -5 bryan said:

Alan Watts didn't believe his own words, hence being a boozer

Yeah, definitely something strange going on there.

[bryan]

Aug 8, 2019 22:46:09 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Aug 8, 2019 18:38:14 GMT -5 bryan said:

Alan Watts didn't believe his own words, hence being a boozer

Yeah, definitely something strange going on there.

Kind of easy to figure out

He was connected to Aldous Huxley(Brave New World) and Tavistock mind control institute as an MKULTRA ASSET

Agenda agenda agenda

[Reefs]

Thing-ifying (1) - Who is it that knows there is no ego?

AW: Who is it that knows there is no ego? You must realize that this is a problem created linguistically, that language based on the sentence composed of subject, verb and predicate, contains the hidden belief system that events are started by nouns, by things. And so it’s very important to understand that, in the real universe, there are no things at all. And this startles people, because we think of the universe as the sum-total of things.

But when you go into the question what do you mean by a thing?— I got once, in a class of high school kids, an Italian girl who said a thing is a noun. Well, she was getting warm. A thing is a think. It’s almost the same word. It’s a unit of thought in the same way that an inch is a unit of linear measure. Or a pound a unit of weight. And so in various languages this comes out. In German you’ve got Ding: thing, denken: to think. In Latin, res: thing, reor: to think. So when we reify, that means to thing-ify. And A. N. Whitehead used to talk about the fallacy of misplaced concretion. Thing-ifying what isn't there.

But it's easy to understand this; although it's a little bit of a shock to our common sense. For purposes of description, we must break the world down into some sort of units. This is the basis of calculus. How do you measure a curve? Well, you treat it as a set of points, and in this way, measure it. Although it isn't a set of points. There is no such thing as a point. Euclid defined a point as that which has position but no magnitude. I think it's right, isn't it, that in modern mathematics one doesn't define a point at all. You just assume. It's an axiom.

So when you ask, “How many things is a person; an individual organism?” Well, it depends on what point of view you're going to take in describing it. In the normal way, we describe one body as a body. And that is a thing. Physiology describes it as many organs. Physics describes it as many molecules, or atoms, or electrons, mesons, protons, what have you. And sociology will look upon you as only a part-thing, because the sociologist likes to have his unit be a group, a society.

[Reefs]

Thing-ifying (2) - Rorschach Blot

AW: And so it goes. It depends—It's the way you look at it, and the way you describe it, so that the way of describing always varies according to the use you want to make; so that the world is not unlike a Rorschach blot. We are living in a Rorschach blot. Only, urban people have difficulty in realizing this. Because urban people live in a straightened out world. And we call them “straights”, or “squares”, because they think in very simplistic terms.

Euclid had a very simple mind, and, therefore, he discussed geometry, which wasn't a measure of the Earth at all. The word geometry, phrased from the Greek gios (γηός): “the world,” “the Earth,” and metro (μετρώ), which means “to measure”. Now, the Greek word for “measure,” from which we get “metric,” “meter,” comes from the Sanskrit root mātr (मातृ), which also means “to measure.” And derived from that is the Sanskrit word māyā (माया), which means “illusion” as well as “imagination.” So “figuring it out” is the measuring of the world; the metering. And meter is also the Greek word for “mother,” and is, of course, the root of the word “matter,” “material.” And so, when we ask, “Does it matter?” we are asking, “does it measure up to anything?”

Well, we come to the conclusion that there is no matter. There's form. It's the form that matters, or you could say the universe is a matter of form. And in Sanskrit there is no word for “matter.” The word rūpa (रूप), which is used for the material or physical world, means “form.” And so you get nāmarūpa (नामरूप) as the full name for what we call “physical reality.” Nāma means “name,” rūpa “form,” so: “it is named 'form.'” And so Lao-Tzu (老子), in writing the Tao Te Ching (道德經), says, “The nameless (or the no-name) is the basis of Heaven and Earth. But the named is the mother of ten thousand things.”

So in the sense, then, of this, you can understand the saying, “In the beginning was the Word.” All things were made by Him, and without Him there's not anything made that was made. Because you don't get things until you start naming. Because then you point out, on the universal Rorschach blot, this wiggle. What do you mean, this wiggle? Where does one wiggle begin and the other end?

This is a matter of arbitrary definition. Where does your head end and your neck begin? We know vaguely. But you can't be precise about it. Because you can look at the head and the neck as continuous. You can start here and say, “well, it's all one thing up from here to here,” see? Or you can start here and say, “no, it's all one thing from here to here.” Et cetera. Because it's all arbitrary. And the value of it is that, by description, and by conventional decisions as to where to draw the line, we can communicate in language. And this is socially valuable.

[Reefs]

Thing-ifying (3) – Separating out independent things

AW: But we must not be deluded by what we are doing. Because if we do truly believe that the world is a lot of separate things, we believe that we can take them apart and have this without that. And so, when you apply this, say, to medicine, and you get a medical specialist who knows all about the heart and nothing about the lungs, he starts interfering with the human body as if it were an automobile with replaceable parts. He says, “We'll take this out.” Just a little mechanical work; get a wrench, and a screwdriver, and so on—only, the surgical equivalents—and he would take this out. So there's a tumor, and we take it out. Alright, if he's not terribly careful, a metastatic consequence follows that some of the cancerous cells will go into the bloodstream through the cutting, and the cancer will spread all over the body.

Now, let's take the bees and the flowers. In a world of no bees there's no flowers; in a world of no flowers—no bees. Because bees and flowers are aspects of the same organism, or organization. They go together, so I invent the word goeswith to indicate organic relationships. And we as human beings, obviously, we gowith an enormous cosmos of geological, botanical, and zoological events. And we are entirely dependent on them, and we cannot treat them as really and truly separate species. The bees are as much a part of us as they are a part of the flowers, because we need vegetables—and we can't have those without bees or other insects. So what we've got is a universe that all hangs together, and where each so-called part of it implies all the other parts. There is really and truly no way of separating out independent things.

So I think that we are living in an intensely interconnected universe. Only, our language system has broken it up for purposes of discussion. And we spend so much time in discussion that we form the false impression that the world is broken up in the way language breaks it up, and it isn't!

And so all these conventions of language in which we think, even if we're quite illiterate—illiterate people think in words just as much as literate people. In other words, an ordinary ignoramus is just as much, if not more, under the spell of words than an intellectual.

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