The Awesome Truth Series

[Reefs]

Alan Watts did a series of lectures in 1959 with the rather boring title "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" where he tries to explain deep existential truths in simple layman's terms to a TV audience. Which may seem like an impossible task, but the entire series (apparently 2 seasons, but only season 1 seems to have survived) actually turned out to be most excellent. Being a Taoist at heart and a fan of Zen, Watts manages to get straight to the heart of existential matters in a simple and elegant way. He knows how to build a context for understanding arcane matters so that even those who have never heard of Buddhism or Zen are able to grasp its essence. IMO, he did an awesome job in explaining the unexplainable, Eastern wisdom, to Western minds, hence the title of this thread.

Most of the episodes can still be found on youtube. I've watched a whole bunch of them and they are all very good. They basically cover everything that we discuss here on the forum, so there should be plenty to talk about.

I will post some videos and also add a transcript for each video later, of all the relevant parts, for those who only have a 56k internet connection or who just don't like to watch videos and prefer text. I would suggest though that you watch the videos because Watts tends to give a lot of illustrations in order to make his point and that, of course, gets lost in the text version.

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The Silent Mind (S01 E05)

[Reefs]

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

1. Straining the Senses

(03:54)

[…] fundamentally, meditation is not so much an exercise as it is a certain way of using one's mind or one's consciousness because normally most human beings, when they use their eyes or their ears, are constantly and chronically straining to see and to hear.

And when you come to think of it, that's very odd because our eyes don't work by effort. They don't have to go out and get the light. The light comes to them. And in the same way, sound comes to our ears. […] And so it's strange, isn't it, that we have acquired the habit of a constant and chronic effort to see clearly and to hear clearly. I think part of it comes from school.

[…] And it is through such conditioning like that, through being taught that we must try to see and try to hear in order to have clear sight and clear hearing that we learn constantly to strain our senses in their use.

But as a matter of fact, this impedes the clarity of our senses because if you will try staring hard at the book in front of or staring very hard at the TV screen you're looking at, you will find that it becomes fuzzy.


2. Straining the Mind

(07:11)

[…] Now, I don't think it's only that we have been taught by teachers and parents and so on to try to see and try to hear clearly. There are other factors in the problem.

And one of them is that while we are seeing and hearing, we are trying to make sense of our world by thinking about it. And the act of thinking also introduces an element of strain into the use of our minds.

And I think the reason for this is perhaps […] that thought is linear. You know, it goes one word after another. It's strung out in a line. We think—thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought—in a line like this, one after another.

Whereas, when we see, we see to what is going on entirely. We take in a volume when we see. We take in a great area.

Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line. But when we think, we get one thought after another. And so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing and using our mind as a whole. And this then requires a certain effort to make thought keep up with what we are seeing or what we are hearing.

[Reefs]

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

3. Abstractions vs. The Real Thing

(08:54)

Also, thought works by abstraction. What do I mean by "abstraction"? Well, a lot of Chinese characters are abstractions. If we take, for example, the Chinese character for man. It is written this way:

人

Now, that was originally the head and legs of a human figure. Something you know, like this, we draw an abstract figure of a man, everybody knows that's a man:




But as a matter of fact, it cuts out a great deal of man. This figure cuts out all the details and gives us a simple image which we can grasp all at once. And we have to do that in order to think, so that we can use a series of very simple or grasps of the world. And these are abstractions. And it is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think.

Now, thought, as I said, is slower because it goes in a line, thought after thought. And also, thought is abstract. That is to say, it lacks the full quality of real life just as this figure here is just a sort of skeleton, ball on top of sticks. And therefore, it lacks the vitality, the "aliveness" of a real man.

Now, the more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world that is, in some ways, unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life.


4. Addiction to Thinking – Coding Our Experience

(10:48)

And also, people tend to think all the time. This becomes for every civilized community, every civilized person a sort of habit, which is like constantly talking to yourself.

[…] our minds have to be silent some of the time if we are really to have anything to think about except thoughts. You know, there is a popular proverb which says that "talking to yourself is the first sign of madness." And there's some truth in this because constant thinking, as distinct from simply experiencing through our senses, constant thinking about our experiences, coding our experiences into words, into signs, into the symbols of thought is a buzz that goes on day and day out inside our heads except when we are sleeping.

And as a result of that, we begin to live in a world increasingly divorced from reality. And that is why in those oriental cultures in India and China and Japan, it has always been considered important for everybody to spend some of his time—by no means all of his time, but some of it—not thinking but simply in the attitude which was by that Chinese character which I at the beginning (觀), pronounced "guan" or quiet observation.

Remember this point, it's important. This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance, is a thing that human beings shouldn't do. On the contrary, it's a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking, unless we can have our minds silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.

And so this leads to a very common practice in Asia among Hindus, among Buddhists, among Taoists called meditation.

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

[shadowplay]

Jun 6, 2022 23:27:35 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

3. Abstractions vs. The Real Thing


Now, the more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world that is, in some ways, unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life.

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

Thanks for posting this. I think Watts nails it here but I’d go a bit further. I think that abstraction is the key element in terms of delusion. Without abstraction and representation what is (whatever that is) is not-two. That’s the default natural state of existence. Abstraction carves it up and re-presents it. That’s the primary distortion. Without it there would never be a question of separation.

If we simply think about this it won’t work - but if we just let go of our abstractions and mental representations, here it is - THIS - without a second.

[Reefs]

Jun 7, 2022 9:10:21 GMT -5 shadowplay said:

Jun 6, 2022 23:27:35 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

Thanks for posting this. I think Watts nails it here but I’d go a bit further. I think that abstraction is the key element in terms of delusion. Without abstraction and representation what is (whatever that is) is not-two. That’s the default natural state of existence. Abstraction carves it up and re-presents it. That’s the primary distortion. Without it there would never be a question of separation.

If we simply think about this it won’t work - but if we just let go of our abstractions and mental representations, here it is - THIS - without a second.

Yes, AW will address this at a later point in his lecture, about the knower and the known, the experiencer and the experienced and that artificial gap in between. Abstraction basically means standing apart from experience and looking at experience from an artificial witness position. That artificial witness perspective can never be real-time, immediate, here and now. Niz once said that the (false) witness perspective that many are so proud of having achieved, is actually still duality. Because there is the witness and then there is what is witnessed. And both are kept neatly apart at all times. That's the problem with the dream metaphor. It's only half circle and so it usually only encourages more thinking.

We had many discussions on the forum in the past about how mind is not an entity but a process, which we sometimes call minding. So IMO AW nails it with the term 'codifying', because that's essentially what this process is. To only perceive thru this process is not natural, it takes effort and it is draining our energies and life force. And as you are saying, the only way out of this is to just drop the hammer, to put down the painting brush or your coding tools and just look directly at what is actually there, instead of looking at the caricature of what is actually there that this codifying process we tend to call mind has created. People that are thinking all the time are only seeing caricatures. That's why UG told his followers, slapping his hand on a table "You see nothing! You don't see even this!"

[Reefs]

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

5. The Practice of Meditation – Leaving the Mind Alone

(13:19)

By sitting in the posture of meditation […] the object is simply to let one's mind alone, to experience but not to try to catch hold of one's experience in thoughts—simply, to think.

No, I wouldn't say "think." That's a word we use very ambiguously. When I use the word "think," I mean talk to yourself or bring a lot of images before your mind, which have nothing to do with what's right in front of you. So the function of this exercise, this posture is to let the whole world come to you without interfering with it in any way—just sitting like that.


6. The Purpose of Meditation – No Interruption (between the Knower and the Known)

(16:04)

You may say, well, that's a great waste of time. There are all sorts of interesting things in life to do. Why just spend some hours sitting? And the reason […] is that it is through this that one comes to have a contact no longer with the world of abstractions, no longer with the world of thought but with the world that actually is.

Now, as you do this, you'll begin to notice a rather curious change in your general feeling of life. You'll notice that there ceases to be what I would call an interruption or an interval between your experience and yourself. You see, in our ordinary way of using our minds, the chronic sense of strain, the chronic attempt to think about and make sense of what we are feeling is what we call our ego.

If you say, "I experienced my own existence. I am aware constantly of a knower behind, I'm receiving all that is known," then you get this chronic sensation of there being an I, a self who has all these experiences. And that I or self is what we call the ego.

And this chronic sense of strain, you might call it our psychological blocking against our experience, the thing that seems to divide us from an external world, from the whole universe. But when, in this way, the interval begins to diminish, we begin to experience our world.

As ourselves, there is no interval, there is no interruption between the knower and the known. Just as when we are completely absorbed listening to music or dancing to music, we are not aware of our separation from it. We go right with it. And so in the same way, when the mind responds instantly to what the senses bring, it seems almost as if the mind and what it experiences were one and the same.

[Reefs]

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

7. “If a Tree falls in the Forest…”

Now, in a way, of course, this [i.e. the mind and what it experiences are one and the same] is actually true. We can understand this theoretically, but we don't ordinarily really feel it. For example, you know the old saying, "If a tree falls in a forest with nobody listening to it, will there be any noise?" Perhaps you know the limerick in which this problem is posed:

There was a young man who said,
“God, I find it exceedingly odd
that a tree as a tree
simply ceases to be
when there's no one around in the quad.”

And the answer was,
“Young man, your astonishment's odd.
I am always around in the quad.
So the tree as a tree
never ceases to be
since observed by,
yours faithfully, God.”

But this is a great philosophical puzzle for the Western world. Does what we know depend on there being a knower?

Now, in a way, obviously, it does because when a tree falls in the forest, it certainly makes vibrations in the air. But those vibrations in the air do not become noise unless they vibrate an eardrum.

So in the same way, the light from the sun does not become light unless it falls on an eye, an eyeball. And two, we could say the external world is full of hard things. But nothing is hard except in relation to the soft surface of the human skin. Nothing is heavy except in relation to human muscles. So if there is not a human organism, the world does not appear to us at all as having any of the characteristics which we attach to an external world. In other words, we could say the sun is light but only because of eyes. Rocks are hard but only because of soft fingers. Falling rocks are noisy but only because of sensitive human ears.

We cannot form any idea at all of what the world would be like without an observing mind. Even such things as duration, the span of time depend upon the human mind to appreciate them. Space depends on a human mind to observe the world from a particular position, and so know that there are things which are distant from it. Without this mind, there could not be any world that we could think about or conceive or imagine in any way whatsoever. And so this shows, in a very clear way, that our mind and the external world go together. They are inseparable differences.


8. Inseparable Differences - Unity/Oneness

You remember in a recent program how I tried to illustrate the idea of inseparable differences by taking a coin or an object here, like a cigar, which has two distinct ends, but you cannot separate those ends.

This is very important. It's worth repeating because it's quite fundamental.

If I would want to take one of these ends off and break the thing and throw it away, it would still have another end. There would still be two ends there. I could never get rid of the situation of it having two ends.



So you see that, although the two ends are different, there is just one object. And so in the same way, although there is a difference in a way between the knower and the known, between man and the world, nevertheless, these two go together. And they are fundamentally inseparable.

And therefore, when our consciousness is responding instantly, without any interval or interruption, without any, shall we say, stopping to think about it, then we have a situation in which we are actually realizing, we are actually feeling the true physical relationship which exists between man and his environment. And this we could call the experience of oneness or unity with the universe which is the function of meditation.

[laughter]

Jun 6, 2022 23:27:35 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

3. Abstractions vs. The Real Thing

(08:54)

Also, thought works by abstraction. What do I mean by "abstraction"? Well, a lot of Chinese characters are abstractions. If we take, for example, the Chinese character for man. It is written this way:

人

Now, that was originally the head and legs of a human figure. Something you know, like this, we draw an abstract figure of a man, everybody knows that's a man:




But as a matter of fact, it cuts out a great deal of man. This figure cuts out all the details and gives us a simple image which we can grasp all at once. And we have to do that in order to think, so that we can use a series of very simple or grasps of the world. And these are abstractions. And it is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think.

Now, thought, as I said, is slower because it goes in a line, thought after thought. And also, thought is abstract. That is to say, it lacks the full quality of real life just as this figure here is just a sort of skeleton, ball on top of sticks. And therefore, it lacks the vitality, the "aliveness" of a real man.

Now, the more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world that is, in some ways, unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life.


4. Addiction to Thinking – Coding Our Experience

(10:48)

And also, people tend to think all the time. This becomes for every civilized community, every civilized person a sort of habit, which is like constantly talking to yourself.

[…] our minds have to be silent some of the time if we are really to have anything to think about except thoughts. You know, there is a popular proverb which says that "talking to yourself is the first sign of madness." And there's some truth in this because constant thinking, as distinct from simply experiencing through our senses, constant thinking about our experiences, coding our experiences into words, into signs, into the symbols of thought is a buzz that goes on day and day out inside our heads except when we are sleeping.

And as a result of that, we begin to live in a world increasingly divorced from reality. And that is why in those oriental cultures in India and China and Japan, it has always been considered important for everybody to spend some of his time—by no means all of his time, but some of it—not thinking but simply in the attitude which was by that Chinese character which I at the beginning (觀), pronounced "guan" or quiet observation.

Remember this point, it's important. This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance, is a thing that human beings shouldn't do. On the contrary, it's a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking, unless we can have our minds silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.

And so this leads to a very common practice in Asia among Hindus, among Buddhists, among Taoists called meditation.

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

Still useful sometimes though.

[laughter]

Jun 7, 2022 9:10:21 GMT -5 shadowplay said:

Jun 6, 2022 23:27:35 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

Thanks for posting this. I think Watts nails it here but I’d go a bit further. I think that abstraction is the key element in terms of delusion. Without abstraction and representation what is (whatever that is) is not-two. That’s the default natural state of existence. Abstraction carves it up and re-presents it. That’s the primary distortion. Without it there would never be a question of separation.

If we simply think about this it won’t work - but if we just let go of our abstractions and mental representations, here it is - THIS - without a second.

The only useful thought about this is to recognize the limits of thinking. Even intellectually!

ZD wrote a few times about a book, I think it was called The Laws of Form, that defines a sort of fundamental "duality operator". As I joked with E' years ago, "the first cut is the deepest".

[sree]

Jun 6, 2022 23:27:35 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

3. Abstractions vs. The Real Thing

(08:54)

Also, thought works by abstraction. What do I mean by "abstraction"? Well, a lot of Chinese characters are abstractions. If we take, for example, the Chinese character for man. It is written this way:

人

Now, that was originally the head and legs of a human figure. Something you know, like this, we draw an abstract figure of a man, everybody knows that's a man:




But as a matter of fact, it cuts out a great deal of man. This figure cuts out all the details and gives us a simple image which we can grasp all at once. And we have to do that in order to think, so that we can use a series of very simple or grasps of the world. And these are abstractions. And it is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think.

Now, thought, as I said, is slower because it goes in a line, thought after thought. And also, thought is abstract. That is to say, it lacks the full quality of real life just as this figure here is just a sort of skeleton, ball on top of sticks. And therefore, it lacks the vitality, the "aliveness" of a real man.

Now, the more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world that is, in some ways, unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life.


4. Addiction to Thinking – Coding Our Experience

(10:48)

And also, people tend to think all the time. This becomes for every civilized community, every civilized person a sort of habit, which is like constantly talking to yourself.

[…] our minds have to be silent some of the time if we are really to have anything to think about except thoughts. You know, there is a popular proverb which says that "talking to yourself is the first sign of madness." And there's some truth in this because constant thinking, as distinct from simply experiencing through our senses, constant thinking about our experiences, coding our experiences into words, into signs, into the symbols of thought is a buzz that goes on day and day out inside our heads except when we are sleeping.

And as a result of that, we begin to live in a world increasingly divorced from reality. And that is why in those oriental cultures in India and China and Japan, it has always been considered important for everybody to spend some of his time—by no means all of his time, but some of it—not thinking but simply in the attitude which was by that Chinese character which I at the beginning (觀), pronounced "guan" or quiet observation.

Remember this point, it's important. This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance, is a thing that human beings shouldn't do. On the contrary, it's a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking, unless we can have our minds silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.

And so this leads to a very common practice in Asia among Hindus, among Buddhists, among Taoists called meditation.

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

First of all, the character 觀 means whatever you use it to convey within the concept of "to observe". The Chinese script cannot be compared and translated to the English language except at the colloquial level for everyday use. Classical Chinese is inaccessible even to the native Chinese intellectual, least of all to an American Chinese professor of Confucian studies at Harvard University.

Secondly, in ancient China, spiritualism (Buddhism and Taoism) was disdained and regarded as superstitious practices of coarse minds. To a large extent, it was an opiate that robbed China of her technological vitality and contributed to the cultural debasement of the Chinese people. The Cultural Revolution was a drastic response to rid the nation of its influence and, at the same time,  stamp out endemic addiction to opium supplied by the west.

Civilization arrived in China long before we got off the ground to climb onto a horse to move around. The Chinese were doing a lot of thinking even back then. Sun Tzu's Art of War is required reading on military strategy at West Point.  

This argument against linguistic symbolism - comparing a real man to a stick figure - is crooked thinking.

Instead of applauding human ingenuity in the invention of language to facilitate speedy communication of ideas, we condemn it as a cause of the loss of our vitality as real living beings in a real world. Pointing to what I want on the menu saves the restauranteur from having to serve up a whole banquet just for me to show him what I want. And I guarantee you that the abstraction "roasted duck breast" would be devoured with all my senses acutely attentive without any interference of thought when the food arrives.

Where is laughter when I need him?

[sree]

Jun 6, 2022 13:27:01 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

1. Straining the Senses

(03:54)

[…] fundamentally, meditation is not so much an exercise as it is a certain way of using one's mind or one's consciousness because normally most human beings, when they use their eyes or their ears, are constantly and chronically straining to see and to hear.

And when you come to think of it, that's very odd because our eyes don't work by effort. They don't have to go out and get the light. The light comes to them. And in the same way, sound comes to our ears. […] And so it's strange, isn't it, that we have acquired the habit of a constant and chronic effort to see clearly and to hear clearly. I think part of it comes from school.

[…] And it is through such conditioning like that, through being taught that we must try to see and try to hear in order to have clear sight and clear hearing that we learn constantly to strain our senses in their use.

But as a matter of fact, this impedes the clarity of our senses because if you will try staring hard at the book in front of or staring very hard at the TV screen you're looking at, you will find that it becomes fuzzy.


2. Straining the Mind

(07:11)

[…] Now, I don't think it's only that we have been taught by teachers and parents and so on to try to see and try to hear clearly. There are other factors in the problem.

And one of them is that while we are seeing and hearing, we are trying to make sense of our world by thinking about it. And the act of thinking also introduces an element of strain into the use of our minds.

And I think the reason for this is perhaps […] that thought is linear. You know, it goes one word after another. It's strung out in a line. We think—thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought—in a line like this, one after another.

Whereas, when we see, we see to what is going on entirely. We take in a volume when we see. We take in a great area.

Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line. But when we think, we get one thought after another. And so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing and using our mind as a whole. And this then requires a certain effort to make thought keep up with what we are seeing or what we are hearing.

I have to agree with Watts that institutionalized education in our school system is harmful. It is an unnatural and cruel way to force-feed knowledge into children to train them to fit in the society we have created. Traditionally, kids seamlessly learn a trade doing what their parents do: catching fish at sea as fishermen, or planting crops and harvesting produce from the land. But our pace of life has increased exponentially since the Middle Ages. And if you don't strain to see and hear, you are not going to make it.

We don't try to make sense of the world by thinking about it. We pretty much know all we need to know what the world is by the time we graduate high school. And those who don't graduate don't care. The people who try to make sense of our world by thinking about it do that by choice for a living as professionals in academia or industry. And they love doing it to push our pace of life to an ever-higher speed. And we don't have a choice. I have been pestered by T-Mobil to get rid of my phone and upgrade to 5G or lose the service. Does anyone here even have a landline?

Anyway, Watts angle is meditation and its benefit. To whom? Unless one is retired or has opted out of conventional life, meditation is only a tool for stress management programs.     

 

[Reefs]

Jun 8, 2022 11:11:26 GMT -5 sree said:

Jun 6, 2022 23:27:35 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Still Mind (S01 E05)


4. Addiction to Thinking – Coding Our Experience


Remember this point, it's important. This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance, is a thing that human beings shouldn't do. On the contrary, it's a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking, unless we can have our minds silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.

And so this leads to a very common practice in Asia among Hindus, among Buddhists, among Taoists called meditation.

Bingo! Well said. The world of abstract thought, of objectified perception, is a lifeless world, a mere shadow (or representation) of the real (or actual) world of direct perception.

This argument against linguistic symbolism - comparing a real man to a stick figure - is crooked thinking.

Instead of applauding human ingenuity in the invention of language to facilitate speedy communication of ideas, we condemn it as a cause of the loss of our vitality as real living beings in a real world. Pointing to what I want on the menu saves the restauranteur from having to serve up a whole banquet just for me to show him what I want. And I guarantee you that the abstraction "roasted duck breast" would be devoured with all my senses acutely attentive without any interference of thought when the food arrives.

[Reefs]

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

9. The World as Representation – Living in a World of Abstraction

(23:30)

Now, I think it's not difficult to see some very obvious values from this because, if we live entirely in a world of thought, all the things that we pursue in life tend, in a way, to become arid and unsatisfactory because we are living in an abstract world. In other words, nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner. Nobody in his senses is going to try and get a satisfactory diet of dollar bills.

And yet, you see, dollar bills and menus stand in the same relation, on the one hand, to wealth; on the other hand, to dinner. The same relation in which thought stands to reality. They represent it. They symbolize reality, but they are in no sense substitutions for it.

Yes, you can do a great deal of things if you have a lot of dollar bills. But unless you exchange those dollar bills into real concrete worth, they are of no value to you. And so in the same way, if we try to live in the world of pure thought, we begin to feel a strange, unsatisfactory quality to the world.

And this living in pure thought is not something that is only done by professors and intellectuals and thinking people. Perfectly ordinary people often live in the world of pure thought. As for example, when we pursue certain goals in life, when we say "I want to be successful," "I want to be happy," these are only abstractions because supposing you become enormously wealthy and you're able to afford three cars and six houses, you can't drive in three cars at once. You can't live in six houses at once. You have a symbol which we call prestige of your status. But that is an abstract symbol. You can't eat prestige. You can't eat success.

And so to overcome that kind of beguilement by the fantasies of thought, not thinking is an important adjunct to thought. To be able every so often to cease the hubbub going on inside one's head and to let talking to oneself stop and come to stillness, you needn't, of course, sit in a meditation posture like this to do it.

This is simply the way it's done by Buddhists and Hindus. You can walk. You can sit in the ordinary way. You could lie in the bathtub and do it. You can lie in your back in bed before you get up in the morning to do it. Just let your mind alone and stop trying to make sense of the world, so that there is really something to think about other than thought itself. It's like if we wrote books about nothing but books.

This is, I'm afraid, what a great deal of scholarship is, books about books about books. So in this way, through meditation we come to that kind of profound peace which is exhibited in the faces of the Buddhas.


-- THE END --

[stardustpilgrim]

Jun 9, 2022 10:00:06 GMT -5 Reefs said:

The Still Mind (S01 E05)

9. The World as Representation – Living in a World of Abstraction

(23:30)

Now, I think it's not difficult to see some very obvious values from this because, if we live entirely in a world of thought, all the things that we pursue in life tend, in a way, to become arid and unsatisfactory because we are living in an abstract world. In other words, nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner. Nobody in his senses is going to try and get a satisfactory diet of dollar bills.

And yet, you see, dollar bills and menus stand in the same relation, on the one hand, to wealth; on the other hand, to dinner. The same relation in which thought stands to reality. They represent it. They symbolize reality, but they are in no sense substitutions for it.

Yes, you can do a great deal of things if you have a lot of dollar bills. But unless you exchange those dollar bills into real concrete worth, they are of no value to you. And so in the same way, if we try to live in the world of pure thought, we begin to feel a strange, unsatisfactory quality to the world.

And this living in pure thought is not something that is only done by professors and intellectuals and thinking people. Perfectly ordinary people often live in the world of pure thought. As for example, when we pursue certain goals in life, when we say "I want to be successful," "I want to be happy," these are only abstractions because supposing you become enormously wealthy and you're able to afford three cars and six houses, you can't drive in three cars at once. You can't live in six houses at once. You have a symbol which we call prestige of your status. But that is an abstract symbol. You can't eat prestige. You can't eat success.

And so to overcome that kind of beguilement by the fantasies of thought, not thinking is an important adjunct to thought. To be able every so often to cease the hubbub going on inside one's head and to let talking to oneself stop and come to stillness, you needn't, of course, sit in a meditation posture like this to do it.

This is simply the way it's done by Buddhists and Hindus. You can walk. You can sit in the ordinary way. You could lie in the bathtub and do it. You can lie in your back in bed before you get up in the morning to do it. Just let your mind alone and stop trying to make sense of the world, so that there is really something to think about other than thought itself. It's like if we wrote books about nothing but books.

This is, I'm afraid, what a great deal of scholarship is, books about books about books. So in this way, through meditation we come to that kind of profound peace which is exhibited in the faces of the Buddhas.


-- THE END --

Most excellent.

[Reefs]

Omnipotence (S01 E13)

Omnipotence (S01 E13)

1. Constructed World vs. Grown World

(00:10)

Throughout this series, I have been trying to explain two fundamentally different ways of looking at our world—one characteristic, predominantly of the West, and the other of the East. And these might be called, respectively, the way of description as opposed to the way of seeing. The way of understanding things in words or in terms. Contrasted with the way of understanding through looking and seeing a field or a subject totally all at once. Or you might call these the linear view, strung out in a line, or the total view, seeing all at once. Or the serial view on the one hand, as contrasted with the simultaneous view on the other.

In classical Western science, we have depended largely on this serial, or analytic, view, which understands the world by translating it into ideas, into words, or into, say, even series of numbers. The basic feature of it being that things are understood in a step by step way, in sequence. And insofar as we constantly look at nature in that way, we tend to think of nature as something constructed. Something made or put together as we ourselves make and put things together through a series of steps. And perhaps this gives us the feeling that if we understood nature sufficiently, if we understood in full detail all the steps which go to the making of our universe, we could ourselves make it.

Now, it's here, you see, that we get a very fundamental contrast between East and West, and especially through Chinese and Japanese ideas of the formation of nature. Because for them, it seems extremely odd to think of nature as being constructed or made by a sort of step by step procedure. Their feeling is rather that the world and its forms are not so much constructed as grown. And one of the most important keys to an understanding of Far Eastern thought is to see the difference between a view of a constructed world and a grown world.


2. Creating from the Outside vs. Creating from the Inside out

(03:00)

To give a sort of crazy illustration of this, supposing I construct something. For example, an artificial flower.

And notice that as I put [the petal and leaves] on, I take them from outside and around me things that are bits, and I bring these bits together to make the flower, the construction, or whatever form it is that I'm intending to create. And so from going around to the center, from getting something that was previously pieces and bringing it all together, I get my flower.

But now, watch how an actual flower grows. How it starts, as it were, from the center. And it unfolds itself, not bit by bit, but all the parts of the flower exfoliating together, from the center outwards. In contrast to the making process, which goes from the outside inwards, from a situation where the parts are originally all apart, all in bits, and then assembled. Contrasting with a situation where you have some simple beginning, like a seed or a bud. And as it expands, it constellates, or forms, its own parts from within itself.

And this is the fundamental process of natural growth. It's in the same way that the human baby is formed within the womb. It's in the same way that if you watch crystals under a microscope forming in a solution, you will notice the whole area of the crystal, the whole structure of the crystal coming into being all together at once. And you will not see a kind of bit by bit assemblage, which we use when we make machines, or make houses, or make tools. Even when we carve a block of wood, although the block of wood is not originally a lot of distinct parts. Nevertheless, we work upon it from the outside towards the inside. Whereas all processes of growth go from the inside to the outside.

This term 'creating from the inside out' is actually one of those buzz words A-H use a lot. And in the deliberate creation context, it essentially means the same as Alan describes it. It's the difference between making things happen (forced, efforting) and letting, allowing things happen (naturally, effortlessly). People often misunderstand this LOA/deliberate creation business in a very fundamental way. The fundamental principle is "ask and it is given". So the point is not to put in effort via positive thinking, visualizations, affirmations or skillful action in order to will or force what we want into place - relationships, things and events. That's like making artificial flowers. The point is to be in a state of being that we prefer and then everything around us will naturally and automagically adjust to and reflect that state of being - relationships, things and events. And that's more like a flower growing, naturally and effortlessly. So this disconnected action orientation in the Western world shows a fundamental misconception of how nature or creation in general works. Sure, effort and action and nose to the grindstone gets things done, but compared to the natural and effortless unfolding we see in nature, the results are not really that impressive and also not that long-lasting and usually create additional problems that then have to get fixed with even more disconnected action. So I think this is a very important distinction Alan is illustrating here, the focus on being vs. doing. After all, we are human beings, not human doings, hehe.