Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
Or a feather in the wind. So laws of nature are regarded by some scientists as tools invented by human beings. And to say that there is a law of gravity is neither more nor less true than saying there are three feet in a yard.
Because we arranged it that way. Or there are 24 hours in a day. Laws are simply observed regularities, and we make these regularities by the way we look at things.
We might not even notice that stones fell to the ground unless it was significant to us. But the difficulty of pushing that theory too far is that it makes the human mind ridiculously independent of the physical world. Saying that everything is a projection out of the human mind would be to say that the human mind isn’t really part of the world.
But it is. Our being is continuous with the being of the whole universe. As I explained: each one of us is something the whole universe is doing, just as every wave is something that the sea is doing.
Well, we are waves of the universe, and it’s waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo, I’m here! And I’m called Alan Watts right now.” But it’s called so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so all around the room, but it’s all the same thing doing this jazz. And I explained how we have been taught to ignore that and to be under the illusion that we’re all doing it separately.
Now, that was what we were talking about this morning. Now I want to press one aspect of this theme particularly this afternoon, which is the aspect of play. The distinction… you see, the whole point is that a man who knows a woman—is it objectionable to you that we have to use “man” as the general word for human beings?
Anyway, there’s a person who knows that this is māyā is, as I said, somewhat disconcerting because we know that he doesn’t take life seriously. That is to say, he doesn’t take it absolutely seriously. He takes it seriously up to a point.
But as we might say, when it really comes down to it, he doesn’t. Now, you might think that such a person would be extremely undependable, and therefore he’s ethically suspect. If he knows that all the distinctions between good and evil, and between life and death, between the valuable and the non-valuable—if he knows that all those distinctions are illusory, would he not be, we’re afraid, a very dangerous person?
Would he fail to keep his contracts? Would he steal when he felt like it? Would he bump somebody off when it suited his convenience, you see?
Isn’t it more trustworthy for human beings to believe that there are absolute laws, that it matters absolutely that you never kill anybody, et cetera? Now, this is a very fascinating question. And I want to suggest to you, first of all, that a person who believes in absolute laws is liable to be quite dangerous.
Because he puts rigid structures in a place of higher honor than—oh, such a good old word, but no longer used—inwit. What is inwit? Ahhh!
The Chinese have a word which has to be the gift and the essential virtue of a good judge; a good judge in the law courts. This word—like this, you know 禮—is pronounced lǐ. There are several kinds of lǐ in Chinese, but this one means an innate sense of fair play, of equity, which can’t be written down in laws.
It can’t be formulated. They also have a word for laws that can be formulated, which is ze. Looks like that 則.
Because that character was originally this, when they had picture writing. Two bars across, that’s right. And that’s a picture of a bronze cauldron with a knife beside it.
Because in very ancient times, when people brought sacrifices to the sacrificial cauldron, the rulers caused the laws to be engraved on the cauldron so that they would read them. And the sages said that was a bad idea, because the moment the people know what the laws are in literal terms, they will develop a litigious spirit and they will start haggling over words. Although there has to be the ze, the formulated law, a good judge must know a lot more than the written law.
He must have a sense of equity. Because every case that comes to his attention is really different. There is no way of describing exhaustively all the possible relationships between man and man, and so a judge has to have this sort of rule of thumb—like a good gardener must have a green thumb, which is something beyond anything you can read in a book.
So lǐ is the sense of justice. Ze would be belief in absolutes, in that you must never do so and so or you must always do so and so. Thou shalt, thou shalt not.
So a person who holds to absolute rules will be an inflexible fool when it comes to the test. He is reliable up to a point. But this is what you get in bureaucracy.
I’m sorry to say it, but there is a specially offensive kind of usually female secretary of some government department who is utterly unreasonable, totally goes by the book, and will not under any circumstances do anything one way or the other beyond the letter. Well, people like that have a certain use, but they have the same sort of use as machinery: machinery which is foolproof that does the same thing every time and it can’t be changed. But there must always be some boss over this kind of person who can consider the case from a different point of view and say, “Well, obviously, in this case the rules are unreasonable and they have to be altered.” So, you see, a person who takes the laws absolutely seriously becomes inflexible, and therefore mechanical, and therefore inhuman.
You know, it’s like the Roman Catholics when they get on this bit about birth control or divorce or something like that. They get utterly inflexible, and they seem to enjoy being inflexible because they think it’s a mark of tough-mindedness. You know, I’ve been most amused.
There’s a tremendous theological controversy going on these days. I don’t know if you know it. Perhaps some of you don’t read these things.
But I have a certain interest in Christianity and I love reading the theological controversies. Well, there’s a character called the Bishop of Woolwich in England, who’s written a book that stirred everybody up. There’s not really anything new in it, but he’s just suggesting that God isn’t an old gentleman with a beard.
And it seems to have created a terrific turmoil. And people, though, who stand in the opposition to all this want to say all this liberal thinking is vague, and therefore wishy-washy and gutless. To prove that you have guts you’ve got to believe something absurd and stick to it!
See? Come hell or high water, you believe that the Virgin Mary was sucked up bodily into heaven. You know?
Really went up! See? And brrrr, all these other people are weak-minded because they’ve reduced these eternal dogmatic truths to mere myths and symbols, see?
And they get a sense of masculinity out of this just in the same way as some people get a sense of masculinity out of being classists. You know, they believe we’ve got a real tough political theory; Colonel Damnit-Shoot-Em-All we used to call them in England. And they stick to this and say, “Ah!
I feel like a man.” You see? Or, “I feel like a real businesswoman,” like Ayn Rand, or whatever. They like to be ugh!
I’m an individual! You see? Krrrk!
Like that. But these people are inflexible fools because they have no give. They don’t know when to give.
And the whole art is to have a certain rigidity in life, but always to know when to give. That’s judo. So, in the same way, a person who takes life absolutely seriously doesn’t know when to give.
And he has this idea, you see, that life is a contest, and that we’ve got to win. And we’ve got to win! Now, if you go into battle with the idea that you’ve got to win, you get nervous.
It’s like walking across a wall with a big drop on one side, feeling that you’ve got to stay steady. You start worrying. And like someone once told me when I was a boy: there was a certain examination, and I simply must not fail it.
I just had to get it, you know? I was just absolutely nonplussed by the whole situation. Because, you see, you’ve got to have a certain flexibility so that, when you know it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, then you can really play.
This is the secret of all gamesmanship. To play golf, you know—shwww. Stop caring.
You’ve got to learn some technique first, whatever it is. But then stop worrying. How do you think you drive a car?
You learn the basic things to do, and then you go zooming along. It’s terribly dangerous to drive a car. Much more unsafe than taking a ride in a plane.
But yet, we all do it. Nobody seems to worry much about it. Well, that’s how to drive.
But if you get nervous on the road you react too fast, and you’re all over the place, and you’re a mess and a nuisance. So you mustn’t take it quite seriously. So then, the fellow who regards life as fundamentally an illusion would, on the whole, then, be more reliable than the person who is in dead earnest.
Because he has basically, at his heart, the most valuable human trait, which is the ability to come off it. You know, you say to someone, “Oh, drop it!” You know? And in the end, you see, a man who can come off it—who may make a terrific case for some point of view, but has a certain twinkle in his eye—you see, this is a true human being and has what Confucius would call ren (spelled “jen” for some reason): this is human-heartedness.
And it is human-heartedness because it is at the heart of the nature of things, and the nature of things is play. Now, we contrast here, you see, the two fundamental views of life as set forward in the drama—you remember: the comic and the tragic masks. The tragic view of the world is that the world is—you can take it from two points of view; they really come to the same thing—but one of the points of view in the tragic idea: the world contains the possibility of an irremediable disaster.
Things can go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the most vivid representation of the tragic view in all history is, of course, Christianity. Orthodox, old-fashioned Christianity, in which there is the possibility of eternal damnation. See, that is things going wrong always.
It isn’t just that it’s a failure that you die and cease, but that you are tortured forever without hope of respite. Forever and ever and ever. That’s the maximum tragic view of the world.
So in that view of the cosmos, things are very serious indeed. Because that might happen to you. And you must not let it happen.
That’s absolutely necessary to be avoided. Now, on the other hand, you see, although the Hindu and Buddhist mythologies have their various purgatories rather than hells—there’s one called avīci, which is the deepest of all these purgatories, and souls that get lost in avīci are there for an unendurable long time; many kalpas. And a kalpa is 4,320,000 years.
But in the end they get out. In other words, when they’ve paid for their bad karma that gets them there, they get out and begin again. So it isn’t quite serious.
It’s very serious, but not absolutely serious, you see? That’s the difference. So in this Hindu view, the Lord, in his māyā creation of the world, creates terribly serious situations.
He scares himself out of his own wits by playing that he’s all of us, and forgetting who he is, you see, or what he is, and imagining that he’s us. And he is terrified—or thinks he is—by all the situations of life, and nevertheless, in the end, it turns out it was all a game. It was all hide and seek.
Now what about that, you see? When we think of that as a point of view, let’s not ask whether or not it’s true. No serious philosopher asks anymore whether things are true or not, he only asks whether they’re plausible.
We can say no more. It would be arrogance to say more. Truth is a dimension where we stop talking, you know?
We know things in another way than words. But it’s plausible because we could say: well, does a thing have to be absolute to be important? It’s important that we make a distinction between good and bad.
It’s not good to murder people, generally speaking. You see, that’s important. But to make it important, do we really have to make it absolutely important?
See, I tell you, the religious mentality—or not only the religious mentality, but it’s the kind of mentality you find around—what the real secret of it is: it loves to have something to condemn. One of the biggest kicks a person can have is to feel righteous indignation. And also, people who go to church love to be lectured and scolded.
A real scoldy sermon from a Baptist preacher is a big, big bang! And they come out feeling so satisfactory. So supposing, then, we say: well, in the end all the sinners and the dreadful people who lived in the world will realize that they were manifestations of God like everybody else.
Some people stop and think about that and say, “Oh dear! Very dangerous doctrine.” What they are really worrying about is that they are not going to have the satisfaction of seeing those people they don’t like writhing in torment forever and ever. Now who ought to be fried in hell?
You know? And so this is saying, you see, that if a thing is not important when it’s not eternal—say there was no point in singing a song because it came to an end. You know?
There was no point in marrying this girl because she eventually died. There was no point in anything that’s finite in time, you see? That’s the argument.
But it obviously is important that a song be sung even though it ends, that a person live even though they die, because that’s the rhythm of life. So people, you see, who take this point of view that what isn’t ultimately serious isn’t serious at all are simply crude in their thinking. They just plainly lack judgment.
They’re like children who have to believe that two and two are always and invariably four because they might say one day they were five. Many children are a little whimsical. So then, the idea of māyā suggests two things, really, which are very difficult things for most of us to accept because they’re so outrageous in comparison with our accustomed viewpoints.
The one side of what it suggests is that life is not ultimately serious. If you fall far enough, you will find there’s no concrete to hit because you are one with a free-floating universe that has nothing outside it. I sometimes say, you know, that when God created the world, what he really did—I gave you one other version of it this morning—but he said: “Have a ball!” See, what are you going to do with this ball?
There’s nowhere to put it, nothing to bounce it on, it can’t get lost. There it is! It’s a ball of being, you see?
Have a ball! See? So the thought that all this life—which is so intensely involved and tragic and struggle—is really diaphanous: it’s like a dream.
Would you dare believe that? This is a test of nerve. The other side to the doctrine is that you, in your heart of hearts, are really the Lord being you.
Will you dare believe that? I mean, we often say that’s the touchstone of madness in our culture: a person who thinks he’s God is really out of his wits. Only, of course, it depends what kind of a God you’re thinking about.
If you’re thinking about Mr. Know-It-All who can explain how everything’s done, that would be one story. You’d be pretty much a megalomaniac. But God as the Hindus and Buddhists think of God—it’s really wrong to use the word “God,” perhaps, for this being, or both neither being nor non-being—but in their idea, you see, the Lord doesn’t have to know how things are done.
He just does them. Just the same way you grow your hair without knowing how to. And so a person who realizes he is the Lord in disguise does not therefore claim to know all the answers to all possible scientific questions.
But the conviction, you see, that you are somehow, in the inmost depths of your being, the works, the reality of everything that there is, you see? You are It. Tat tvam asi it said in Sanskrit: “that art thou.” Now, is that—see, these two things, “it isn’t serious” and “you are It,” we react in our cultural background against these things because they seem to be haughty, they seem to be fantasy, fantastic, claiming too much, getting too big for one’s boots.
Because we’re used to feeling that we are right if we cringe. The moment we start talking ourselves down and saying, “Well, I’m just a little fragment of dust, I’m nobody. I come into being.
I disappear. I’m a mess. I’m imperfect.
I don’t know anything.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We feel safe when we do that. It’s like feeling that you’re right when you hurt: How very good it is for me to hurt so much!
See? We’ve been brought up to feel that way. And also to be very careful about letting anyone know we’re happy.
Because the gods might overhear. And it’s not good for you to be happy. You might get uppish.
You might have hubris, pride, and start boasting to the heavens. And then the old gentleman will get annoyed, because the old gentleman’s pretty insecure, and he doesn’t like the children rushing around and stabbing their feet. Something might happen.
They might go too far, you see? So uuugh! to you!
So then, if we think, “Oh, but I say excuse me. Excuuuuse me!” Pardon me for having the disgusting effrontery to exist. Well, you see, this is fake.
It’s as fake as it can be. It’s phony. It’s another kind of pride: how good I am at being humble.
And it’s terribly dishonest. But it is something that our cultural attitudes take very seriously. And the touble is that, having taken this seriously and having felt for so long—through literature, through schooling, through attitudes of teachers and preachers and parents—that it’s good for us to be humble, when we revolt against it, we go make the opposite mistake, you see, of being unnecessarily cocky.
Because that’s compensation. There is no need, you see, to take on the universe and say, “I’m man. I’m the works.
I’m the Lord in disguise,” and all this. Get lost. You don’t need to do that if you really know—you see, as I said at the end of this morning’s talk: to believe that you are the disguised Lord is unnecessary.
It’s a form of doubt. So, in the same way, to assert it in a kind of defiant way is also a form of doubt. Although, please, remember you’re perfectly free to do that.
Don’t get caught in it by feeling that you oughtn’t to. You know, I remember when I was a child we used to read that the sin against the Holy Ghost was unforgivable. I always wondered what the sin against the Holy Ghost was.
And there’d be a little thing at the back of your mind whispering: “Damn the Holy Ghost! To hell with the Holy Ghost!” You know? Just, you know, you’re absolutely sucked into it by the very prohibition; a kind of vertigo where a person looks over a precipice and he’s got to throw himself down.
That’s a funny thing in human psychology. So in many forms of symbolism that you find in the Orient there is the idea of the liberated man (who knows who he is) as the man who can’t be phased. You know, for example, that Bodhidarma, who’s supposed to have brought Zen to China, is made into a toy in Japan, which is like a Shmoo, only it’s this shape, and it’s weighted so that you can’t knock it over.
Push it down, but it always springs up. And this is the sort of figure of this. It says a poem: Or it may be the image in Hindu literature of the tightrope walker: the man walking the path of the razor’s edge.
It’s balance again, you see? But the Bodhidharma is, in a way, more flexible. He can be pushed right to the floor, but the minute you let go he’s back up.
Or the Taoist image of water: you can squeeze it, you can jump on it, you can cut it, but you can’t hurt it. It always comes together again. Look, for example, I gave the illustration this morning of a human being as something like a whirlpool in water.
Constantly changing, but always the same. Now, what happens if you chop up a whirlpool? You know, you can smash it, you can put your fist through it, and you can make it disappear for a while.
But after a while, there’s the pattern again. See? So, in the same way, we think we can solve problems with violence.
We think that killing people is an answer to a problem. It’s only temporary. Because if you knock out, say, a Hitler, another one comes up.
Because you haven’t understood the problem of this sort of manifestation. Anything that’s destroyed with violence eventually recurs again. Because the persistence of life and its continuity is a persistence of patterns.
So long as, for example, the principles of surface tension hold true, or the principles of crystallization, you’re going to get crystals everywhere. Anywhere in the universe you’re liable to get a crystal of something or other. Well, life is the same kind of thing.
It’s a pattern which is going to keep cropping up. It doesn’t matter how long it has to wait. A million years is nothing.
You blot it out here, it’ll turn up somewhere else. It’s only a matter of time. Because it’s in the nature of the patterns.
So in this sense, then, let’s review these two ideas. It’s, first of all, seriously speaking—sincerely speaking, I should say—is it demoralizing to believe that it’s all play? That at the last minute, you know, when the screaming meemies are right on and everything’s awful, at the last minute, will you wake up and find it’s a dream?
You could say, “I hope so. I hope so.” But life sometimes gets so black that it’s impossible to hope so. You know it’s the end.
Now, I remember once a marvelous conversation with Count von Dürckheim, who is a kind of German Zen master. And he said, “You know, during the war people have the most utterly soul-searing experiences.” He said, “There are three general kinds of experience. Of course there are the air raids, when you heard the whistling bomb right above you and you knew that was the end.
But sometimes it was a dud and it didn’t go off. But you resigned yourself, because you heard that scream and completely accepted the fact that you were about to cease to exist. Or else you were in a concentration camp and you saw absolutely no hope of ever getting out alive.
Absolutely none whatever. And you gave up. Or,” he said, “you were displaced.
The town where you worked and you had your occupation was erased, and you were a person with absolutely no background, no career, no future, nothing. And you accepted it.” Now he said, “So often, all these cases, the individual concerned had the most extraordinary experience.” They had, in other words, the cosmic consciousness; satori. They woke up.
They realized suddenly that there was really nothing to worry about at all. That I—the real I, not the superficial ego; the real I—is the whole cosmos. Then he said, “They tried to explain this to their friends afterwards, and their friends said, ‘Oh, you’re crazy.
You were under such strain that you got a little tetched.’” And so they would try to forget it and put down this experience. He said, “Most of my work is in reviving this and telling people that this is an authentic experience.” So that’s what I mean: the gamble that it isn’t really serious if you don’t, at the last moment, you see, as it were, call in the police; if you don’t scream for help—I’m using that as a metaphor—to accept: “Well, I’m going to die.” See? That’s it.