Alan Watts

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (16) – No Duality

AW: Preachers of all kinds stir people up in the beginning by alarming them about change. [And] it sounds terrible that everything is going to die and pass away, and here you are, thinking that happiness, sanity, and security consist in clinging on to things which can’t be clung to, and in any case there isn’t anybody to cling to them. The whole thing is a weaving of smoke.

But as soon as you really discover this, and you stop clinging to change, then everything is quite different. It becomes amazing. Not only do all your senses become more wide awake, not only do you feel almost that you’re walking on air, but you see, finally, that there is no duality; no difference between the ordinary world and the nirvāṇa world. They’re the same world, but what makes the difference is the point of view. And, of course, if you keep identifying yourself with some sort of stable entity that sits and watches the world go by, you don’t acknowledge your union, your inseparatability, from everything else that there is. You go by with all the rest of the things. But if you insist on trying to take a permanent stand, on trying to be a permanent witness of the flux, then it grates against you, and you feel very uncomfortable.

But it is a fundamental feeling in most of us that we are such witnesses. We feel that, behind the stream of our thoughts, of our feelings, and our experiences, there is something which is the thinker, the feeler, and the experiencer. Not recognizing that that is itself a thought, feeling, or experience, and it belongs within and not outside the changing panorama of experience. It’s what you call a cue signal. In other words, when you telephone, and your telephone conversation is being tape recorded, it’s the law that there shall be a beep every so many seconds. And that beep cues you in to the fact that this conversation is recorded. So, in a very similar way, in our everyday experience there’s a beep which tells us this is a continuous experience which is mine. Beep!

In the same way, for example, it is a cue signal when a composer arranges some music, and he keeps in it a recurrent theme, but he makes many variations on it. Or, more subtle still, he keeps within it a consistent style, so you know that it’s Mozart all the way along, because that sounds like Mozart. But there isn’t a constant noise going all the way through to tell you it’s continuous—although, in Hindu music, they do have something called the drone. There is, behind all the drums and every kind of singing, something that goes “Nnnneeeeeeoooooooiiiinnggg,” and it always sounds the note which is the tonic of the scale being used. But in Hindu music, that drone represents the eternal Self, the Brahman, behind all the changing forms of nature.

But that’s only a symbol. And to find out what is eternal you can’t make an image of it; you can’t hold on to it. And so it’s psychologically more conducive to liberation to remember that the thinker—or the feeler, or the experiencer—and the experiences are all together. They’re all one. But if, out of anxiety, you try to stabilize—keep permanent—the separate observer, you are in for conflict.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (17) – The Separate Observer

AW: Of course, the separate observer—the thinker of the thoughts—is an abstraction which we create out of memory. We think of the self—the ego, rather—as a repository of memories; a kind of safety deposit box, or record, or filing cabinet place, where all our experiences are stored. Now, that’s not a very good idea. It’s more that memory is a dynamic system, not a storage system. It’s a repetition of rhythms, and these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience. In other words, first of all, how do you distinguish between something known now, and a memory? Actually, you don’t know anything at all until you remember it. Because if something happens that is purely instantaneous—if a light flashes, or, to be more accurate, if there is a flash, lasting only one millionth of a second, you probably wouldn’t experience it, because it wouldn’t give you enough time to remember it.

We say in customary speech, “Well, it has to make an impression.” So, in a way, all present knowledge is memory, because you look at something, and for a while the rods and cones in your retina respond to that, and they do their stuff, it’s all vibration—and so as you look at things, they set up a series of echoes in your brain. And these echoes keep reverberating, because the brain is very complicated. First of all, everything you know is remembered, but there is a way in which we distinguish between seeing somebody here now, and the memory of having seen somebody else who’s not here now, but whom you did see in the past, and you know perfectly well, when you remember that other person’s face, it’s not an experience of the person being here. How is this? Because memory signals have a different cue attached to them than present-time signals. They come on a different kind of vibration. Sometimes, however, the wiring gets mixed up, and present experiences come to us with a memory cue attached to them, and then we have what is called a déjà vu experience: we’re quite sure we’ve experienced this thing before.

But the problem that we don’t see—don’t ordinarily recognize—is that, although memory is a series of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them so that we don’t confuse them with present experience, they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience; they are all part of this constantly flowing life process, and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process, watching it go by. You’re all involved in it. Now, accepting that, you see—going with that; although, at first, it sounds like the knell of doom—is, if you don’t clutch it anymore, splendid. That’s why I said that death should be occasion for great celebration. That people should say “Happy death!” to you, and always surround death with joyous rites, because this is the opportunity for the greatest of all experiences, when you can finally let go because you know there’s nothing else to do.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (18) – Prajnaparamita

AW: In Buddhist philosophy this sort of annihilation of oneself, this acceptance of change, is the doctrine of the world as the void. This doctrine did not emerge very clearly, very prominently, in Buddhism until quite a while after Gautama the Buddha had lived. We begin to find this, though, becoming prominent about the year 100 B.C., and by 200 A.D. it had reached its peak. And it was developed by the Mahāyāna Buddhists, and it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature which goes by this complex name: Prajñāpāramitā. Now, ‘prajna’ means wisdom. ‘Paramita,’ a crossing over, or going beyond.

There is a small Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, a big Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, and then there’s a little short summary of the whole thing called the hṛdaya, or Heart Sutra, and that is recited by Buddhists all over Northern Asia, Tibet, China, and Japan, and it contains the saying, “That which is void is precisely the world of form, that which is form is precisely the void.” Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and so on, and it elaborates on this theme. It’s very short, but it’s always chanted at important Buddhist ceremonies. And so it is supposed—by scholars of all kinds who have a missionary background—that the Buddhists are nihilists; that they teach that the world is really nothing, there isn’t anything, and that there seems to be something is purely an illusion. But, of course, this philosophy is much more subtle than that.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (19) – Madhyamaka

AW: The main person who was responsible for developing and maturing this philosophy was Nagarjuna, and he lived about 200 A.D.—one of the most astonishing minds that the human race has ever produced. And the name of Nagarjuna’s school of thought is Madhyamaka, which means, really, the Doctrine of the Middle Way. But it’s sometimes also called the Doctrine of Emptiness, or Śūnyavāda, from the basic word śūnya, or sometimes śūnya has -ta added on the end, and that -ta means ‘-ness’—‘emptiness.’

Well, then, emptiness means, essentially, transience. That’s the first thing it means. Nothing to grasp, nothing permanent, nothing to hold on to. But it means this with special reference to ideas of reality, ideas of God, ideas of the Self, the Brahman, anything you like. What it means is that reality escapes all concepts. If you say there is a God, that’s a concept; if you say there is no God, that’s a concept. And Nagarjuna is saying that, always, your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve, or wrap it up in a parcel. So he invented a method of teaching Buddhism which was an extension of the dialectic method that the Buddha himself first used. And this became the great way of studying, especially at the University of Nalanda—which has been reestablished in modern times, but, of course, it was destroyed by the Muslims when they invaded India—the University of Nalanda, where the dialectic method of enlightenment was taught.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (20) – The Dialectic Method of Enlightenment

AW: The dialectic method is perfectly simple. It can be done with an individual student and a teacher, or with a group of students and a teacher. And you would be amazed how effective it is when it involves precious little more than discussion. Some of you, no doubt, have attended tea groups, blab-labs, in which people are there, and they don’t know quite why they’re there, and there’s some sort of a so-called resource person to disturb them. And after a while they get the most incredible emotions, and somebody tries to dominate the discussion of the group, say, and then the group kind of goes into the question of why he’s trying to dominate it, and so on and so forth.

Well, these were the original blab-labs, and they have been repeated in modern times with the most startling effects. That is to say, the teacher gradually elicits from his participant students what are their basic premises of life. What is your metaphysics, in the sense—I’m not using metaphysics in a kind of a spiritual sense, but what are your basic assumptions? What real ideas do you operate on as to what is right and what is wrong, what is the good life and what is not? What arguments are you going to argue strongest? Where do you take your stand?

The teacher soon finds this out, for each individual concerned, and then he demolishes it. He absolutely takes away that person’s compass. And so they start getting very frightened, and say to the teacher, “All right, I see now. Of course I can’t depend on this, but what should I depend on?” And unfortunately, the teacher doesn’t offer any alternative suggestions, but simply goes on to examine the question, “Why do you think you have to have something to depend on?” Now, this is kept up over quite a period, and the only thing that keeps the students from going insane is the presence of a teacher who seems to be perfectly happy, but is not proposing any ideas. He’s only demolishing them.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (21) – Voiding the World

AW: So we get, finally—not quite finally—to the void; the śūnya. And what then? When you get to the void there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief. That’s nirvāṇa. “Whew,” as I gave a proper English translation of nirvāṇa. “Aaaah. Great.” So they are liberated, and yet they can’t quite say why or what it is that they found out, so they call it the void. But Nagarjuna went on to say, “You mustn’t cling to the void.” You have to void the void. And so the void of nonvoid is the great state, as it were, of Nagarjuna’s Buddhism. But you must remember that all that has been voided, all that has been denied, are those concepts in which one has hitherto attempted to pin down what is real.

In Zen Buddhist texts they say, “You cannot nail a peg into the sky.” And so, to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called ‘a man not depending on anything.’ And when you’re not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn’t hung on anything—which is the universe. Which doesn’t hang, you see. Where would it hang? It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping; there will never be the crash of it landing on a concrete floor somewhere. But the reason for that is that it won’t crash below because it doesn’t hang above. And so there is a poem, in Chinese, which speaks of such a person as having above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (22) – Images of God/The Void

AW: To people like us, who are accustomed to rich imageries of the divine; the loving father in heaven, who has laid down the eternal laws, we feel we know where we are, and that it’s all been written down, and that, in heaven, the Lord God is resplendent with glory, with all the colors of the rainbow, with all the saints and angels around, and everything like that; we feel that it’s positive, that we’ve got a real rip-roaring gutsy religion full of color and so on. But it doesn’t work that way.

The more clear your image of God, the less powerful it is, because you’re clinging to it; the more it’s an idol. But voiding it completely isn’t going to turn it into what you think of as void. What would you think of as void? Being lost in a fog, so that it’s white all around, and you can’t see in any direction. Being in the darkness. Or the color of your head as perceived by your eyes. That’s probably the best illustration that we would think of as a void; because it isn’t black, it isn’t white, it isn’t anything. But that’s still not the void. Take the lesson from the head. How does your head look to your eyes? Well, I tell you: it looks like what you see out in front of you, because all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. So it’s the same with this.

And so, for this reason, the great sixth patriarch, Huineng, in China, said it was a great mistake for those who are practicing Buddhist meditation to try to make their minds empty. And a lot of people tried to do that. They sat down and tried to have no thoughts whatever in their minds. Not only no thoughts, but no sense experiences, so they’d close their eyes, they’d plug up their ears, and generally go in for sensory deprivation.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (23) – Weightlessness

AW: Sensory deprivation, if you know how to handle it, can be quite interesting. It’ll have the same sort of results as taking LSD, or something like that, and there are special labs made nowdays where you can be sensorily deprived to an amazing degree. But if you’re a good yogi this doesn’t bother you at all. Sends some people crazy. But if you dig this world, you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene, especially if they get you into a condition of weightlessness.

Can you become weightless here? I said that the person who really accepts transience begins to feel weightless. When [D.T.] Suzuki was asked, “What is it like to have experienced satori?”— enlightenment—he said, “It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, but about two inches off the ground.” Zhuang Zhou, the Taoist, said, “It is easy enough to stand still, the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground.” Now why do you feel so heavy? It isn’t just a matter of gravitation and weight. It is that you feel that you are carrying your body around. So there is a kōan in Zen Buddhism: “Who is it that carries this corpse around?” Common speech expresses this all of the time: life is a drag. I feel like I’m just dragging myself around. My body is a burden to me. To whom? To whom? That’s the question, you see? And when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden, the body isn’t a burden. But so long as you fight it, it is.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (24) – Doubling and Trembling

AW: So then, when there is nobody left to resist the thing that we call change—which is simply another word for life—and when we dispel the illusion that we think our thoughts, instead of being just a stream of thoughts, and that we feel our feelings, instead of being just feelings; it’s like saying, you know, to feel the feelings is a redundant expression. It’s like saying, “Actually, I hear sounds,” for there are no sounds which are not heard. Hearing is sound. Seeing is sight. You don’t see sights. Sight-seeing is a ridiculous word! You could say just either ‘sighting,’ or ‘seeing,’ one or the other, but sightseeing is nonsense!

So we keep doubling our words, and this doubling is comparable to oscillation in an electrical system where there’s too much feedback. Where, you remember, in the old-fashioned telephone—where the receiver was separate from the mouthpiece, the transmitter—if you wanted to annoy someone who was abusing you on the telephone, you could make them listen to themselves by putting the receiver to the mouthpiece. But it actually didn’t have that effect; it set up oscillation. It started a howl that could be very, very hard on the ears. Same way if you turn a television camera at the monitor—that is to say, the television set in the studio—the whole thing will start to jiggle. The visual picture will be of oscillation. And the same thing happens here. When you get to think that you think your thoughts, the ‘you’ standing aside the thoughts has the same sort of consequence as seeing double, and then you think, “Can I observe the thinker thinking the thoughts?” Or, “I am worried, and I ought not to worry. But because I can’t stop worrying, I’m worried because I worry.” And you see where that could lead to. It leads to exactly the same situation that happens in the telephone, and that is what we call anxiety; trembling.

But his discipline that we’re talking about, of Nagarjuna’s, abolishes anxiety because you discover that no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen. In other words, from the first standpoint, the worst is going to happen: you’re all going to die. And don’t just put it off in the back of your mind and say, “I’ll consider that later.” It’s the most important thing to consider now, because it is the mercy of nature, because it’s going to enable you to let go and not defend yourself all the time; waste all energies in self-defense.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (25) – Thunderous Silence

AW: So this doctrine of the void is really the basis of the whole Mahāyāna movement in Buddhism. It’s marvelous. The void is, of course, in Buddhist imagery, symbolized by a mirror, because a mirror has no color and yet reflects all colors. When Huineng said that you shouldn’t just try to cultivate a blank mind, what he said was this: the void—śūnyatā—is like space. Now, space contains everything—the mountains, the oceans, the stars, the good people and the bad people, the plants, the animals, everything. The mind in us—the true mind—is like that. You will find that when Buddhists use the word ‘mind’—they’ve several words for ‘mind,’ but I’m not going into the technicality at the moment—they mean ‘space.’ See, space is your mind. It’s very difficult for us to see that because we think we’re in space, and look out at it. There are various kinds of space. There’s visual space: distance. There is audible space: silence. There is temporal space: as we say, between times. There is musical space: so-called distance between intervals, or the intervals between tones, rather; quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space. There’s tangible space. But all these spaces are the mind. They’re the dimensions of consciousness.

And so, this great space which every one of us apprehends from a slightly different point of view—in which the universe moves—this is the mind. So it’s represented by a mirror, because although the mirror has no color, it is for that reason able to receive all the different colors. Meister Eckhart said, “In order to see color, my eye has to be free from color.” So, in the same way, in order not only to see, but also to hear, to think, to feel, you have to have an empty head. And the reason why you are not aware of your brain cells—you’re only aware of your brain cells if you get a tumor or something in the brain, when it gets sick—but in the ordinary way, you are totally unconscious of your brain cells; they’re void. And for that reason you see everything else.

So that’s the central principle of the Mahāyāna. And it works in such a way that it releases people from the notion that Buddhism is clinging to the void. This was very important when Buddhism went into China. The Chinese really dug this, because Chinese are a very practical people, and when they found these Hindu Buddhist monks trying to empty their minds and to sit perfectly still and not to engage in any family activities—they were celibates—Chinese thought they were crazy. Why do that? And so the Chinese reformed Buddhism, and they allowed Buddhist priests to marry. And in fact, what they especially enjoyed was a sūtra that came from India, in which a layman—who was a wealthy merchant called Vimalakīrti—out-argued all the other disciples of Buddha. And of course—you know, these are these dialectic arguments that are very, very intense things—if you win the argument, everybody else has to be your disciple. So Vimalakīrti, the layman, won the debate, even with Mañjuśrī, who is the bodhisattva of supreme wisdom. They all had a contest to define the void, and all of them gave their definitions. Finally, Mañjuśrī gave his, and Vimalakīrti was asked, then, for his definition, and he said nothing, and so he won the whole argument. The thunderous silence.

[THE END]

[Reefs]

The Symbolic and The Real (1) – Definitions

AW: I think one of the very best illustrations of the difference between symbol and reality is the difference between money and wealth—and a lot of people don’t know the difference. Nowadays, we’re all accustomed to shopping in a supermarket. And when we go there we get a great cartful of produce and groceries and liquor and what have you. You take it through the cashier’s… gangway-place—you know?—and she taps away on her machine, and she produces an enormously long strip of paper and tears it off, and says, “Thirty dollars, please.” And most people, at that moment, feel slightly depressed because they had to get rid of thirty dollars! And that’s a very strange and odd reaction, because you got rid of paper. And in exchange for this paper you got wealth: real edible food, usable things—riches—and you should go home in a very happy mood that you got this great bundle of stuff. But somehow, the loss of money hurts us a little bit.

The relationship of money to wealth is very much the same kind of relationship that words have to reality. But when I use this word, “reality,” what on earth am I talking about? If I produce any kind of object in front of you, and I ask you, “What is it?” and I show it to you, most people would say, “Well, that’s a quarter.” But, obviously, it isn’t. Because the quarter, when you say, “It’s a quarter”—“quarter” is a noise, isn’t it? Quarter: that’s a noise. It’s a noise you make with your mouth. What noise is this? [Alan flips the quarter.] That doesn’t sound like “quarter,” does it? You think it does? A dime would make the same sound.

And so we would distinguish between a world of physical events—physical reality—and on the other hand a world of names, and numbers, and noises, and signs which refer to physical reality. And the fact that we can arrange this in this way, the fact that we can make symbols for the world of physical events, is the thing that peculiarly characterizes human beings, makes them different from almost all animals, and is the root and ground of civilization and culture.

[Reefs]

The Symbolic and The Real (2) – Self-Consciousness

AW: Being able to make a world of symbols standing over against the world of physical events depends upon being able to stand aside from things and look at them, and also to stand aside from ourselves and look at ourselves. There is something in the nervous system in man, some function of the cortex in the brain, which enables him to do just that. There was a young man who said:

“Though it seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see
Is the ‘I’ that knows ‘me’
When I know that I know that I know.”

And that’s what we call self-consciousness. And self-consciousness entirely depends upon something in us which enables us to stand aside from the immediate situation. For example, you may be happy. And in the middle of being happy you say, “My God, I’m happy!” That disconcerts some people, because the minute they begin to know that they’re happy it starts to disappear. They wonder how long they’re going to keep it. But if you were happy and you didn’t know you were happy, wouldn’t that be too bad? There’d be nobody home to enjoy it. Knowing that you know is like singing in the bathtub. Everybody has a good voice in the bathroom because the bathroom gives you resonance. It gives you echoes. It amplifies the sound in the same way as a great cathedral amplifies the sound of a choir. And so in just that way we have an echo system inside our skulls so that we know when we’re happy, we know when we’re sad. And when we exist, we know we exist.

[stardustpilgrim]

Oct 13, 2020 5:44:57 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Symbolic and The Real (2) – Self-Consciousness

AW: Being able to make a world of symbols standing over against the world of physical events depends upon being able to stand aside from things and look at them, and also to stand aside from ourselves and look at ourselves. There is something in the nervous system in man, some function of the cortex in the brain, which enables him to do just that. There was a young man who said:

“Though it seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see
Is the ‘I’ that knows ‘me’
When I know that I know that I know.”

And that’s what we call self-consciousness. And self-consciousness entirely depends upon something in us which enables us to stand aside from the immediate situation. For example, you may be happy. And in the middle of being happy you say, “My God, I’m happy!” That disconcerts some people, because the minute they begin to know that they’re happy it starts to disappear. They wonder how long they’re going to keep it. But if you were happy and you didn’t know you were happy, wouldn’t that be too bad? There’d be nobody home to enjoy it. Knowing that you know is like singing in the bathtub. Everybody has a good voice in the bathroom because the bathroom gives you resonance. It gives you echoes. It amplifies the sound in the same way as a great cathedral amplifies the sound of a choir. And so in just that way we have an echo system inside our skulls so that we know when we’re happy, we know when we’re sad. And when we exist, we know we exist.

To add and clarify, there is a distinction, between self-reflection and self-consciousness, the two are vastly different.

[Reefs]

Oct 13, 2020 13:09:45 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

To add and clarify, there is a distinction, between self-reflection and self-consciousness, the two are vastly different.

Can there be self-reflection without self-consciousness?

[stardustpilgrim]

Oct 15, 2020 11:13:33 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Oct 13, 2020 13:09:45 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

To add and clarify, there is a distinction, between self-reflection and self-consciousness, the two are vastly different.

Can there be self-reflection without self-consciousness?

Yes. You know what autopilot is? Of course (I would think you do). self-reflection can occur on autopilot. Being self-conscious is the anthesis of autopilot (FAIAP).