Alan Watts

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (5) – The Physical World – Patterns

AW: So then, the physical world: we can’t even find any stuff out of which it’s made. We can only recognize each other, and I say “Well, I realize that I met you before, and that I see you again. But the thing that I recognize is not anything, really, except a consistent pattern.” Actually, the contents of your face—whatever they may be; the water, the carbons, the chemicals—are changing all the time. You’re like a whirlpool in a stream. The stream is doing this consistent whirlpooling and we always recognize—like at Niagara: the whirlpool is one of the sights, but the water is always moving on. And we are just like that, and everything is like that.

So there’s nothing in the physical world that is what you might call substantial. It’s pattern. And this is why it’s so spiritual. To be non-spiritual is not to see that; in other words, it is to impose upon the physical world the idea of thing-ness, of substantiality. That is to be—in the sense that the Hindus use it—that is “to be involved in matter;” to identify with the body. To believe that the body is something constant, something tangible. The body is really very intangible. You cannot pin it down; it’s all falling apart, furthermore. And we’re aging, getting older, and so, therefore, if you cling to the body you will be frustrated. So the whole point is that the material world—the world of nature—is marvelous so long as you don’t try to lean on it, so long as you don’t cling to it. And if you don’t cling to it you can have a wonderful time with it.

So one might say, then, that we are confused, through and through, about what we mean by the “material world.” In the first place, we confuse abstract symbols—that is to say, numbers and words and formulae—with physical events as we confuse money with consumable wealth. In the second place, we confuse physical events—the whole class and category of physical events—with matter. But matter, you see, is an idea; it’s a concept. It’s the concept of stuff, of something solid and permanent that you can catch hold of. Now, you just can’t catch hold of the physical world. The physical world is the most evasive, illusive process that there is. It will not be pinned down and, therefore, it fulfills all the requirements of spirit.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (6) – The Physical World – The Unspeakable

AW: So what I’m saying, then, is that the non-abstract world—which Korzybski called “unspeakable,”—is the spiritual world. And the spiritual world isn’t something kind of gaseous, abstract, formless (in that sense of “shapeless”), it’s formless in another sense: the formless world is the wiggly world. There really is no way that the physical world is. In other words, the nature of truth—I said in the beginning that somebody had said thoughts were made to conceal truth—this is a fact because there is no such thing as the truth that can be stated. In other words, ask the question “What is the true position of the stars in the Big Dipper?” Well, it depends where you’re looking at them from. And there is no absolute position. So, in the same way, a good accountant will tell you that any balance sheet is simply a matter of opinion. There’s no such thing as the true state of affairs of a business.

But we’re all hooked on the idea that there is an external, objective world which is a certain way, and that it really is that way. History, for example, is a matter of opinion. History is an art, not a science. It’s something constructed, which is accepted as a more or less satisfactory explanation of events which, as a matter of fact, don’t have an explanation at all. Most of what happens in history is completely irrational. But people always have to feel that they’ve got to find a meaning. For example: you get sick, and you’ve lived a very good life, and you’ve been helpful to other people and done all sorts of nice things. Then you get cancer. And you say to the clergyman, “Why did this have to happen to me?” And you’re looking for an explanation—and there isn’t one. It just happened that way. But people feel if they can’t find an explanation they feel very, very insecure. Why? Because they haven’t been able to straighten things out. The world is not that way.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (7) – The Truth that cannot be pinned down

AW: So the truth—what is going on—is, of course, a lot of wiggles. But the way it is is always in relation to the way you are. In other words, however hard I hit a skinless drum, it will make no noise, because noise is a relationship between a fist and a skin. So, in exactly the same way, light is a relationship between electrical energy and eyeballs. It is you, in other words, who evoke the world. And you evoke the world in accordance with what kind of a you you are; what kind of an organism. One organism evokes one world, another organism evokes another world. And so everything—reality is a kind of relationship.

So once one gets rid of the idea of “the truth” as some way the world is in a fixed sense—say “it is that way,” see?—then you get to another idea of the truth altogether: the idea of a truth that cannot be stated, the truth that cannot be pinned down. And then, that is the kind of truth that is God when we speak of God as the reality that exceeds all thoughts, that surpasses all definitions, that is infinite, unbounded, eternal, immeasurable in terms of time. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about a gaseous vertebrate or a huge, vast void without any wiggles in it. All gas. We’ll put it another way altogether: the truth that cannot be pinned.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (8) – You are what you are

AW: I was explaining the problem of how thoughts protect us from truth and what to do about it, and showing various ways in which the symbolizing process—which we call thinking; the use of signs, words, symbols, numbers to represent what’s going on in the external world or the world of nature—leads us into a curious confusion that we confuse the symbolic process with the actual world. And the temptation to do this arises from the extraordinary relative success that we have had in controlling the world of nature with the power of thought.

Human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible. You know—as the proverb says—you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. You can struggle, and tug, and pull until you’re blue in the face, and nothing happens except that you’ve exhausted yourself. All sensible people therefore begin in life with two fundamental presuppositions: you are not going to improve the world, and you are not going to improve yourself. You are just what you are. And once you have accepted that situation, you have an enormous amount of energy available to do things that can be done. And everybody else, looking at you from an external point of view, will say, “My God, how much so-and-so has improved!” But I know—I mean, hundreds of my friends are at work on enterprises to improve themselves—by one religion or another, one therapy or another, this system, that system—and I’m desperately trying to free people from this. And I suppose that makes me a messiah of some kind.

But the thing is that you can’t do it for one very simple reason which is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved. In other words, there isn’t any real distinction between ‘bad me’ and ‘good I,’ between the ‘higher self’ which is spiritual and the ‘lower self’ which is animal. It’s all of a piece; you are this organism, this integrated, fascinating energy pattern. And as Archimedes said: “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth.” But there isn’t one.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (9) – Preoccupation with Time

AW: All the troubles going on in the world now are being supervised by people with very good intentions. They’re attempts to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this and prevent that possible horrendous damage. And the more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. And it gets worse. And maybe that’s the way it’s got to be. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right. But simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.

This is an argument against all kinds of do-gooding. What I’m saying is: don’t take me too seriously. I’m pitching a case for the fact that civilization has been a mistake; that it would be much better to leave everything alone. That the wild animals are wiser than we in that they—putting it in our crude and not very exact language—they just follow their instincts. And if a moth mistakes a flame for the signal on which it gets a mating call and flies into the flame, so what? That just keeps the moth population down. And a moth doesn’t worry. You know, it doesn’t go buzzing around in a state of anxiety, wondering whether this sex call is the real thing or just a flame. It doesn’t think consciously about the future—at least, we suppose this is so. Maybe it does. But we suppose that it doesn’t and, therefore, it isn’t troubled. But the species of moths goes on and on and on, and so far as we know it’s been around for an incredibly long time, and may be even longer than we have. Bees, ants—creatures of this kind—they have long since escaped from history, so far as we can see. In other words, they live a settled existence which you might consider rather boring because it doesn’t have constant change in the way that we do. They live the same rhythm again and again and again, but because they don’t bother to remember it consciously it never gets boring. And because they don’t bother to predict, they’re never in a state of anxiety. And yet they survive.

Now we—who “look before and after,” as Emerson says, and predict, and are always concerned whether this generation is gonna be better or worse than the one that came before—we are tormented. And—because of this tremendous preoccupation with time—we don’t realize how beautiful we are, in spite of ourselves. Because the conscious radar is a troubleshooter: it’s always on the watch out for variations in the environment which may bring about disaster. And so our consciousness is, from one day’s end to another, entirely occupied with time and with planning, and with what has been and with what will be. And since troubleshooting is its function, we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble. And we ignore in this preoccupation with conscious attention how marvelously we get on, how—for most of the time—our physical organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship, how our body relates by all sorts of unconscious responses to the physical environment. So that if you became aware of all the adjustment processes that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism, you would find yourself in the middle of great music. And, of course, this occasionally happens.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (10) – Trying to say what can’t be said

AW: The mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of your true physical relationship to the universe. And you’re amazed—thunderstruck—by the feeling that, underneath everything that goes on in this world, the fundamental thing is a state of unbelievable bliss.

But the thing is that one’s self is certainly not the stream of consciousness. One’s self is everything that goes on underneath that, and of which the stream of consciousness is a mere—well, it has about the same relation to one’s self as the bookkeeping does to a business. And if you’re selling grocery, there’s very little resemblance between your books and what you move over your shelves and counters. It’s just a record of it, and that’s what our consciousness keeps.

A poet is always trying to describe what cannot be said. And he gets close. He often really gives the illusion that he’s made it. And that’s a great thing: to be able to say what can’t be said. I’m trying to say, to express, the mystical experience—and it just can’t be done. And therefore, everything I’m saying to you is a very elaborate deception. I’m weaving all kinds of intricate nonsense patterns which sound as if they were about to make sense, and they don’t really. But, you see, we could take that to another level and say, “Well, that’s just life!”

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (11) – Overcoming Slavery to Words & Yoga Mantra

AW: Once I was talking with Fritz Perls at the Esalen Institute and he said, “The trouble with you is you’re all words. Why don’t you practice what you preach?” So I said, “I don’t preach. And furthermore, don’t put words down. Because the patterns that people make with words are just like the patterns of ferns, or of the marks on seashells. They are a dance. And they’re just as much a legitimate form of life as flowers.” He said, “You’re impossible!” But, you see, that’s very important.

And that is why—in certain forms of methods of meditation and religious rituals—we use words in a way that is not ordinarily in accord with the use of words. Words are normally used to convey information. But in religious rituals words are not used to convey information: words are used musically for the sake of sound. And this is a method of liberating oneself from enthrallment with words. When you say any ordinary word—just take a word like “body,”—and you say it once, and it seems to be quite sensible. But say it four or five times: body, body, body, body, body, body. And you think, “What a funny noise.”

And so in one of the great methods of meditation—which is called mantra yoga—the use of sound for liberating consciousness is precisely that. You take all sorts of nonsense and chant it. And you concentrate on these sounds quite apart from anything that they may mean. This is why the Catholic Church has made a ghastly mistake in having Mass celebrated in the vernacular. Now everybody knows what it means, and it really wasn’t so hard after all. And—while it was in a tongue that was completely incomprehensible—have this sense of mystery to it. And furthermore, if you knew how to use it as a sādhanā; a method of meditation—you could do very well. All monks were trained when they recited the Divine Office. They would explain to a novice: “Don’t think about the meaning of the words. Just say the words with your mouth and keep your consciousness on the presence of God.” They used it that way.

So it’s a very good thing, then, to use words in this way to overcome slavery to words. I’ve just written a book of nonsense ditties which are to be used in this way. To get the rhythm going—which is an incantation. Which is a way of getting beyond the bondage of thought. Because you cannot think without words. You can use numbers and a few things like that. But if you preoccupy your consciousness with meaningless words, that very simply stops you from thinking. And then you dig the sound. Do you know what it is, to dig the sound of anything? Anybody who’s had a psychedelic experience knows exactly what this means. That you—I can only call it “you go down into sound,” and you listen to that vibration, and you go into it, and into it, and into it, and you suddenly realize that that vibration that you’re listening to—or singing—is what there is. That’s the energy of the cosmos. That’s what’s going on. And everything that’s going on is a kind of a pulsation of energy, which in Buddhism is called “suchness” or “thatness”—tathātā. You see? What’s da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da. And that’s what we’re all doing. Only: we look around and, you know, here we all are with people. We’ve got faces on, and we talk, and we’re supposed to be making sense, but actually we’re just going da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-d-da-da in very complicated ways. And playing this life-game. And the thing is that if we don’t get with it, it passes us by. That’s alright! You can miss the bus; it’s your privilege. But it really is a great deal to go with the dance and know that that’s what you’re doing, instead of agonizing about the whole thing.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (12) – How to get un-bamboozled & Krishnamurti

AW: We’ve been discussing the ways in which thought can conceal truth, and so now we have to come to the other aspect of the problem, which is: how to get un-bamboozled. And I often say that, in a way, this is the wrong question because it reminds me of the famous tale about the American tourist in England who wanted to find a way to obscure a little village called Upper Tuddenham. And he asked a local yokel the way, and the man scratched his head and said, “Well, sir, I do know the way, but if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.” And the problem, therefore, of what to do is, in a way, the wrong question. Because—as I pointed out—you have to begin with the assumption that you can’t do anything. You can’t change yourself because the whole idea involves a sort of schizy situation where this “I” is going to change “me.” And this is where the genius of Krishnamurti comes out, where he won’t give anyone a method. And, actually, he gets you into the meditation process by pretending not to. He’s a real tricky character! Very, very great guru, except that nobody really knows what to do with him. Because whenever you suggest that there might be something that you could do to bring your mind to tranquility or your heart to the knowledge of the ultimate reality, he says simply, “Well, why do you want to? Find out why you want to.” And then he gives you a kōan. And, in a way, this gets you meditating naturally instead of it being a kind of artificial process; you get so bugged by this questioning that you are involved in the kōan process right away.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (13) – The Yoga Sutras

AW: I think that all ways of meditation can be followed. And because even if some of them are folly—to quote Blake again—the fool who persists in his folly will become wise. All that’s required that you keep at it. So I want to talk about the various central methods of meditation, and we’ll begin—why not—with the Yoga Sūtra, Patañjali, where in the first he says, “Now, yoga is explained.” This is the first verse. And the commentators point out that the word “now” means that this is a discourse following other discourses. Something has gone before; certain things you have to have mastered before you try yoga. And this is in line with the Hindu view of life that life is divided into ashramas, or stages: that you start out with the stage called brahmacharya, which is the studentship, and then you become a gr̥hastha, which is householder. And only after you’ve fulfilled the life of the householder do you take up yoga. And this is, of course, also in line with Jung’s views that spiritual awakening belongs properly to the second half of life.

But you mustn’t take that literally. The stages of life can be lived simultaneously, and they don’t necessarily follow each other in chronological order. And today, the predominance of interest in yoga in the West is among young people. And these are the people who are now the new saṃnyāsa; the “wandering monks,” the drop-outs. After all, a saṃnyāsa is a drop-out—only a high-class drop-out. But he has—in India, of course—fulfilled his social debts. He has raised a family, established his work, and put his oldest son in charge of the business.

Now, the next verse of the Yoga Sūtra says, “Yogas citta vritti nirodha.” And this is a complicated thing to translate. It says “Yoga is the cessation of turnings of the mind.” Vritti means “to turn,” to be turbulent. When you talk about a cakravartin as a great ruler, a great king, means “one who turns the wheel.” Vartin is the same as vritti. And a vartin is one who turns; a vritti is a turning, a wave. Like a wave rolls over and splashes. Citta means, approximately, “consciousness.” It refers to the basic awareness that we have, whether it is strictly conscious or subconscious. Citta means something like—let’s suppose we make the mind analogous to a mirror, a reflecting mirror. The mirror itself would correspond to what is meant in Sanskrit by citta. You see, we’re not aware of the color of the lens of our eye, and so we just name that color transparent. If it had a color, we wouldn’t know it, and so we don’t. But you can’t really altogether ignore the background of vision because it’s very important, even though you never see it. It’s basic to all that you see, just as the diaphragm in the speaker of the radio is basic to all that you hear on the radio. But so, in the same way, there is something basic to all our sensations, and that is citta.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (14) – Nirvikalpa Samadhi

AW: So now, there are two schools of thought. One who says that yoga—that “citta vritti nirodha,” the cessation of the turnings in the citta—is the elimination of all sense experience and all thought and all feeling whatsoever from consciousness. And when one speaks, then, of the goal of yoga as being samādhi—and particularly what is called asamprajnata samādhi, which means “samādhi without a seed in it,” or nirvikalpa samādhi—nirvikalpa is a moot word. Some people think that that means this total elimination of all contents from consciousness. It’s like when you get into a sensory deprivation chamber and you learn to relax the muscles of your tongue, and the muscles of your eyes, and you really go blank. But I think that is a false interpretation. Nirvikalpa means, strictly, “without concept.” Vikalpa means a “concept,” having an idea. And that’s a symbolic thing. It doesn’t mean having no sensation.

And they make a great point of this in the instruction about practicing meditation in Zen. They say quite definitely, “Don’t shut your eyes. Don’t close your ears. But simply: eliminate thought.” If you cut out your sensation input entirely and have a blank mind, then you’re no better than a log. In that case, logs and rocks would be Buddhas. They have various poetic phrases in Zen to indicate the nature of samādhi. One is the moon in the water. There’s a verse which says, “All waters contain the moon. Not a mountain, but the clouds encircle it.” So “all waters contain the moon” means that whenever the moon rises, instantly, it is in all waters. They didn’t know, of course—in those days—anything about the speed of light. But they felt that the moon comes into the water when the moon is in the sky in exactly the same way as, when the hands are clapped, the sound issues without a moment’s hesitation. And so another verse says, “The geese do not intend to cast their reflection. The water has no mind to receive their image.” It’s zzwht, there. Like that.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (15) – Buddha Mind & Cause and Effect

AW: And so the ideal of samādhi is for you to have a mind like that—what they call a “mind of no hesitation.” A mind which doesn’t stop to say whether this should or should not be reflected. And so they would go on to explain the basic nature of your mind is like that from the beginning. That’s what it is to have a mind. That’s what Zen master Bankei would call the “unborn mind,” or the “Buddha mind” in every one of us that we all have as a natural gift. And so he says when you hear a crow go caw, you know immediately it’s a crow. And so, in the same way, when Bankei was once giving a talk, there was a Nichiren priest and this priest was heckling him in the back and he said, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.” And Bankei said, “Come closer and I’ll explain it.” And this man began to weave his way through the crowd. And Bankei said, “Come closer still.” “Still closer. Come right here.” And he came right up. And Bankei said, “You see? You understand me perfectly!”

So the feeling, then, is that the nirvikalpa samādhi is this state of just perfectly clear consciousness which responds to everything going on without labeling it, without categorizing it. And even to say “respond” isn’t quite right because that means as if consciousness was something that is pushed by life and then reacts to it. Action and reaction, like cause and effect. The crow caws, and the ears vibrate: cause and effect. That’s not the Buddhist theory. The Buddhist theory is not cause and effect, it is called pratītyasamutpāda. And that means “interdependent origination.” In other words: when the wind blows, the trees move. This is not two events, but one. Wind blowing and trees waving are all the same process. And so the verse says, “The tree displays the bodily power of the wind.” It manifests it. Because nobody would know there was any wind blowing unless the trees were waving. Nobody would know there was any light shining unless there was something reflecting it. They really go together. So the tree displays the bodily power of the wind, the water exhibits the spiritual nature of the moon. Because when the water flows and ripples, it breaks the moon into thousands of pieces. So that is the spiritual power: the one becomes many.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (16) – Looking for your Mind

AW: So what we are looking at is a state of consciousness which is like that—which is one with the whole thing going on. And this is saying the same thing as Krishnamurti says when he tries to explain that there really is no feeler separate from our feelings and no thinker separate from our thoughts. There is simply a process going on. And so, in the same way, Huineng—the Sixth Patriarch—prefers not to use the image of the mirror for the mind, but he prefers the image of space. That’s why, when his rival for the patriarchy made up the poem which explained that “the mind is a mirror and we must wipe it to keep off the dust,” Huineng countered this by saying “there isn’t any mirror, and so whereon can the dust fall?” So this is saying that you will never, never be able to discover a thinker other than thoughts, a feeler other than feelings, a sensor other than sensations. That’s the meaning of the dialogue between Bodhidarma and Eka. When Eka said, “I haven’t any peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” And Bodhidarma said, “Bring out your mind in front of me, and I will pacify it.” Eka said, “When I look for it, I can’t find it.” Bodhidarma said, “There! It is pacified.”

So Eka was looking for his mind. It’s like “Who are you?”—the question that the Maharshi Ramana always asked to anybody who said, “Maharshi, who was I in my last incarnation?” And he would always reply, “Who’s asking the question?” Which is the same as Krishnamurti’s “Why do you want to know?” Because this throws the question back at the questioner. Who are you? Who has the problem? And you look, and you look, and you look, and you can’t find it. Hume, the British philosopher, really went through the same experience, because when he tried to find out what was his consciousness he couldn’t find anything but sensations, or images, in his head.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (17) – Mutual Arising

AW: Our conscious relationship to the world is a transactional relationship in which you can speak about the subjective standpoint and the objective standpoint. But really, you’ve got one continuum in which these two standpoints are simply opposite ends of a diameter. You go with it, it goes with you, and vice versa. So this is the whole meaning of the Taoist idea that is called “mutual arising.” When Lao Tzu says that “to be” and “not to be” arise mutually, that “difficult” and “easy” suggest each other, “high” and “low” subtend each other, and so on—he’s describing this polar relationship. So you don’t get a confrontation, you don’t get a kind of a meeting from things that impinge on each other from entirely separate situations. You get the opposite sort of thing where, when a flower buds and the bud breaks, the petals expand. And it’s true—you have the petals on the far left and you have the petals on the far right. But they arise together. That’s how all life is happening. When you come into being, the universe comes into being. When you go out of being, the universe goes out of being. And that’s true for everyone. Not only people—all sentient beings whatsoever. So without the being—the sentient being—there is no cosmos. All we are saying in talking about a cosmos that existed before any sentient beings existed is we’re simply describing what would have happened if there had been any sentient beings around. It’s a kind of extrapolation.

So that relativity of the sentient being and the universe is basic to Buddhistic philosophy that the one implies the other. Because this is the philosophy called jiji muge (事事无碍): that between thing-event and thing-event there is no barrier. This is the philosophy of the mutual interdependence of all things and events. That the moment there is anything at all, it implies everything else. So, in the same way with laser beam photography: you can take a tiny fragment of a photographic negative, and by laser beam photography you can restore the whole negative from which it was cut. Because the crystalline structure of any part of the negative is in an inseparable relationship with its whole area. So you can imply it. You’ll get a picture which is (around the area that you have taken out) very clearly definite, and as it moves away from it the outlines will become a little vaguer, but you’ll be able to see everything that was there. It’s fantastic. So in the same way, every hair on your head—this is the real meaning of the saying that the hairs of your head are all numbered—that every hair on your head implies all galaxies because it wouldn’t exist without all the galaxies. Nor would all galaxies exist without the hair, or without the hair having existed. It doesn’t make any difference.

[ouroboros]

Watsy's having a sterling week!

I'm gathering he was perhaps more insightful than I'd even realised, and clearly had great ability to connect the dots from various teachings. To survey the perennial philosophy. Some really good bigger picture stuff being expressed there.

That last section reminds me of the premise, 'samsara exists only so long as there are beings subject to ongoing ignorance'. It engenders that. Because like the cosmos at large, samsara, rather than a place as such, in many respects is better viewed as a state of being. It leads me to contemplate what would remain subsequent to that premise. I don't have an answer btw. Other than a certain confidence it's not nothingness, and an inkling that it's perhaps something altogether more divine.

I recall I didn't actually rez with Watts' rendition of samsara. It seemed neither broad nor deep enough. But rather too cosmetic in the context in which he used it. I questioned a degree of 'lifestyle investment bias'. But he's certainly set the stage quite well there to begin to be able to conceive of bhava and loka more auspiciously, and even how conceptions of heaven and hell may play out karmically. As merely patterns within a larger 'cosmological experientiality'.

But I digress.

[Reefs]

Jun 16, 2021 10:55:58 GMT -5 ouroboros said:

Watsy's having a sterling week!

I'm gathering he was perhaps more insightful than I'd even realised, and clearly had great ability to connect the dots from various teachings. To survey the perennial philosophy. Some really good bigger picture stuff being expressed there.

That last section reminds me of the premise, 'samsara exists only so long as there are beings subject to ongoing ignorance'. It engenders that. Because like the cosmos at large, samsara, rather than a place as such, in many respects is better viewed as a state of being. It leads me to contemplate what would remain subsequent to that premise. I don't have an answer btw. Other than a certain confidence it's not nothingness, and an inkling that it's perhaps something altogether more divine.

I recall I didn't actually rez with Watts' rendition of samsara. It seemed neither broad nor deep enough. But rather too cosmetic in the context in which he used it. I questioned a degree of 'lifestyle investment bias'. But he's certainly set the stage quite well there to begin to be able to conceive of bhava and loka more auspiciously, and even how conceptions of heaven and hell may play out karmically. As merely patterns within a larger 'cosmological experientiality'.

But I digress.

I think at heart he's a Taoist, with a bit of Buddhism thrown into the mix - which is basically the original Chinese Zen aka Chan. And I have to confess that I, too, misjudged his depth of understanding in the beginning. But when I saw him connecting the dots between these various traditions - Western, Indian, Chinese - with such ease and clarity, I got hooked.