Alan Watts

[Reefs]

The Bhagavad Gita (4) – Atman


A: How can one reach the truth if one is born in illusion?

Slowly, Krishna led Arjuna through all the fibers of his spirit, he showed him the deepest movements of his being and his true battlefield, where you need neither warriors nor arrows. For each man must fight alone. It's the most secret knowledge. He showed him the whole of Truth, he taught him how the world unfolds.

A: Tell me who you are. I'm shaken to the depth. I'm afraid.

K: I am all that you think, all that you say, everything hangs on me, like pearls on a thread. I am the Earth’s scent and the fire’s heat, I am appearance and disappearance. I am the trickster's hoax. I am the radiance of all that shines. I am time grown old. All beings fall into the night and all beings are brought back to daylight.
I have already defeated all these warriors. He who thinks he can kill and he who thinks he can be killed, both are mistaken. No weapon compares the life that informs you. No fire can burn it. No water can drain it. No wind can make it dry. Have no fear and rise up, because I love you.
Now you can dominate your mysterious and incomprehensible spirit. You can see its other side. Act as you must act. I myself am never without action. Rise up!

A: My illusion is dissolved. My errors destroyed. By your grace now I am firm. My doubts are dispersed.


AW: Now, what is Shri Krishna talking about here?

[According to] the fundamental doctrine of the Hindus, the innermost reality of man is not quite what we, who have been brought up in a Christian tradition, call the soul. We have an inherited teaching of course, of an immortal and individual soul, which is the root principle of every human being.

But in the Hindu doctrines, the soul is not individual. The soul is supra-individual, or as they would say in their technical language, the Atman, the soul or self (self is really a better translation than soul), the Atman is identical with Brahman. And Brahman is the name which they use for the Ultimate Reality which underlies this whole universe.

[Reefs]

The Bhagavad Gita (5) – Brahman

AW: Now, I don't want you to think of Brahman as a sort of vast blob of perfectly transparent jello which penetrates the whole world. I think that's what many people imagine when they hear this kind of thing. The whole point of the Brahman idea is missed when you form any image of it in your mind at all -- even jello, even empty space or boundless light.

Brahman is what we ourselves really are, what this whole universe is, fundamentally and actually. There is no way of thinking about, of imagining that. A very simple reason that as water cannot rise higher than its own level, thought cannot think what is higher than thinking. It cannot conceive the mind which thinks, and still less the power which generates the mind. Our symbols for ideas about the supreme reality are vaguish and voidish, not at all because that reality is vague and void, but because thought and imagination are annihilated in trying to grasp it.

And thus, it is through the realization that he is that eternal Now, not his past, that Arjuna is able to act in a free way, in an unmotivated way. And thus go into battle, not because he is moved to fight by hate, by squeamishness or fear, but because he carries out his appointed place in a society in which it's his vocation to be a warrior.

We may think it regrettable that societies exist in which there is a vocation to be a warrior, but let's not be sentimental in this respect also. Because every one of us is unable to live at all without killing something.

Some of us would like to rule out altogether the killing of our fellow men. But in the Hindu view of life, there isn't this rigid distinction between man on the one hand and animals and plants on the other, which exist for us in the West.
Therefore, there are times in the Hindu view when killing is an unavoidable condition of being alive. And this is one of the problems which the Gita sets itself to solve.

[Reefs]

Higher Self, Lower Self (1)

AW: They speak in Zen—they use a phrase to “have a mind of no deliberation.” And they also speak of a kind of person, a man who doesn’t depend on anything—that is to say, on a formula, on a theory, on a belief—to govern his action. And this person who doesn’t stick anywhere is like Dante’s image at the end of the Paradiso, where he says—in the presence of the vision of God—“But my volition now and my desires were moved as a wheel revolving evenly by love that moves the sun and other stars.” And the image of the wheel which is not too tight on its axle, and not too loose—that is really with the axle—is the Zen principle of ‘not being attached;’ ‘not being sticky.’

It’s very difficult for us to function in that way because we’ve been brought up to believe that there are two sides to ourselves. One, the animal side, and the other, the human and civilized side. And these are expressed in what Freud calls the Pleasure Principle, which he classifies with the animal side—with the Id—and the other the Reality Principle, which he puts on the side of society and the super-ego. And man is so split, that he is in a constant fight between these two. Theosophists sometimes speak of our having two selves: the higher self, which is spiritual, and the lower self, which is merely psychic; the Ego. And therefore, the problem of life is to make the ‘oneself,’ the ‘higher one,’ take charge of the lower, as a rider takes charge of a horse.

[Reefs]

Higher Self, Lower Self (2)

AW: But the problem that constantly arises is: how do you know that what you think is your higher self isn’t really your lower self in disguise? When a thief is robbing a house and the police enter on the ground floor, the thief goes up to the second floor, and when the police follow up the stairs he goes higher and higher until, at last, he gets out to the rooftop. And in the same way, when one really feels oneself to be the lower self, that is to say, to be a separate Ego, and then the moralists come along — they are, of course, the police — and say, “You ought not to be selfish!” then the Ego dissembles and tries to pretend that he’s a good person after all.

And therefore, one of the ways of doing this is for the Ego to say, “I believe I have a higher self.”

And I would say, “Why do you believe that? Do you know the higher self?”

“No. If I knew it I would behave differently. But I’m trying to get there.”

“Well, why are you trying to get there?”

“Well, then the police wouldn’t come around. Then the moralists wouldn’t preach at me. Then I could feel that I was doing my duty, behaving as a proper member of society.”

But all this is a great phony front. If you don’t know that there is a higher self and you believe that there is one, on whose authority do you believe this? You say, “Oh, such and such a teacher — Buddha, Jesus, Shankara, the Upanishads — said that we have a higher self, and I believe it.”

[Reefs]

Higher Self, Lower Self (3)


AW: So, in Zen, a duality between higher self and lower self is not made. Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self. If you believe that there is no really lower self—that there is only the higher self, but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through—the very fact that you think that it has to try to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self. If you think you have a lower self—or an ego—to get rid of, and then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that.


So this tremendous schizophrenia in human beings—of thinking that they are rider and horse, soul in command of body, or will in command of passions, wrestling with them—all that kind of split thinking simply aggravates the problem, and we get more and more split. And so we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict, which they will never, never resolve. Because the true self—either you know it or you don’t. If you do know it, then you know it’s the only one; and the other, so-called lower self, just ceases to be a problem. It becomes something like a mirage. And you don’t go around hitting at mirages with a stick, or trying to put reigns on them. You just know that they are mirages and walk straight through them.