Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
And they say, “Well, that is important,” and they cannot understand that survival might not be that important. Survival only seems to you that important when you think that your particular death is curtains. But if you see that the world goes on anyhow, and that, even, supposing we were to blow up this planet tomorrow completely, it’d be a matter of time, but the whole thing would soon get going again.
Might not be in this solar system or even in this galaxy. Because simply: what happened once can happen again. And it may take billions of years, but what’s that in cosmic time?
It’ll go on. And if people see this, they won’t blow it up. What will make us blow the planet up that the competition for survival; is our anxiety about the whole thing.
“Oh, let’s blow it up, because we can’t bear sitting around wondering when it’s going to happen. Get it over with!” You see? And this is our difficulty.
So if you understand (let’s carry this further now) that you are really the cosmos, and that you can’t die—in that sense of “you;” you can disappear as an individual organism, yes, but that’s only your surface. The real you can’t die, so stop fooling around as if you could. And you’ll be relaxed and you’ll be happy, and you won’t start these tremendous project to assert your individuality over everybody else just to tell you that you’re really there—that’s all they do.
I mean, a person who goes out for power, who wants to feel that he’s in control of all the things that are happening around him, is simply somebody who is in a state of terror. I was in a club in Dallas a few days ago, and I met a man who’s alleged to be the richest man in the United States, and he looked miserable! But boy, does he have power.
And, of course, he’s spending his life trying to prevent other people having any, especially his competitors. But he’s miserable. He looks as if he had ulcers, and just terrible.
So this is a question of learning new values and learning them by letting up on this tremendously frantic kind of consciousness, which simply jumps from one thing to another and says, “What’s next?” Now, Western philosophy, for centuries, was dominated by a big fight between the people who call themselves who call themselves realists and the people who call themselves nominalists. Realists were not what we call realist today at all; quite different. The realists were those in the tradition of Plato, who felt that every individual example of a species, say—every man, every bird, every flower—was a special case of something called a universal, namely: mankind, flowerness, treeness, fishness, and so on.
Finally, every existing thing was an example of existence. And therefore, that these universals were real; in fact, more real than the particular individuals that exemplified them. The nominalists, on the other hand, said that’s a lot of nonsense.
There is not such a thing as mankind. There are only individual people. That’s all there is.
And the nominalists, as you know, won the day. Nominalism remained dominant in Western philosophy until the most modern times. But the problem with a nominalist is this: how far are you going to go with this point of view?
Are you, after all, going to say of a given individual human being that he is a universal, a generalization, and an abstraction because, in fact, he is nothing but his component molecules? And they are the real individuals, and that the assemblage of them is an abstraction? Or go further: that submolecular vibrations or particles or whatever they may be are the only real things?
That the world finally is only the dust of which it’s made and the individual grains thereof? That’s a way of looking at things. But, you see, this has been the tendency of science to try and understand the world by analysis: to try to break it down into its smallest component parts.
And you can find out some very interesting things by doing that. When you get down through that electron microscope and see the wiggles on the tiniest level, they are fascinating. And beautiful.
But that’s only half the explanation. In order to understand what the wiggles are doing, the tiniest little itty-bitty thing—I’ve coined a language for this. That the tiniest thing is the eenie-weenie.
See? That’s a kind of a fundamental unit of life which I will just abstract. We won’t call it a scientific term, like an electron or a proton or a meson, because they’ll eventually find one smaller.
I mean the smallest thing that will at any time ever be found is called the eenie-weenie. Mathematicians play this game. They talk about the largest number short of infinity and call it aleph.
Who can say what the largest number anybody will ever think of will be. They call it aleph, you see? They do tricks like that.
And if they can do tricks like that and call themselves scientists, I don’t see why I shouldn’t talk about the smallest thing that will ever be discovered at any time, anywhere, and call that the eenie-weenie. Anyway, but the eenie-weenie doesn’t by itself explain everything that happens. The vision of the painters like Seurat, who were pointillist, they saw the eenie-weenie, and they made paintings of tiny dots.
And that vision of things. When you, for example, look at a newspaper photograph and you find it’s all on a screen, it’s all little black and white dots, those are eenie-weenies. And it doesn’t matter how actually small or how actually large they are, the whole idea is of a component part, the unit.
In a way, the “atom” means that, because that’s the Greek ἄτομος, which means that which is non-cuttable into any smaller portions. I don’t say you can’t cut the eenie-weenie, but that if and when anybody does, what the new situation will be will be the eenie-weenie. But this thing doesn’t make sense by itself.
The thing that every analyst always forgets is that the little bits are what they are in relation to a context, and the context is not just what kind of bits exist also around any given bit, but what pattern they’re arranged in, what they’re doing. So that’s why science has to include a description not merely of the smallest components of any given element or so-called substance, but it also has to include a description of the environment in which this thing is found. Just as the meaning of the word changes in the context of the sentence, and the sentence changes in the context of the paragraph, and the paragraph in the context of the book, and the book in the context of all literary productions going on at the time of its publication, and that in the context of the social order and its institutions.
They all are determinative factors in the meaning of any given expression in speech. That’s why a literary historian can look at almost any piece of writing and date it. Because he knows the historical context in which it was written.
If, for example, forty years ago somebody said, “Do you dig this situation?” he couldn’t possibly have said it. At least not in the way we mean it now. And this new word for “appreciate” has something, however, a little bit more in it than “appreciate.” If you use the word it means you are au fait with a kind of hip culture and you know something about it.
You’re not necessarily a beatnik, but you know this kind of new language. And that tells a great deal about you, and where you live, what sort of people you’re exposed to. And so, in one of my books I use the word “dig,” then the literary historian can look at that and say, “Well, that passage couldn’t’ve been written before 1955, and probably not later than 1973.” Or however long this goes on.
So the component element of anything, you see, depends on its context. And so in order to give a description of what’s happening—and that’s all science is: science is attempting to describe what goes on as accurately as possible. And so to do that it has to describe not only the eenie-weenies of which things are composed, but also the biggie-wiggies in which they’re found.
And so, in the same way, now, when you then change your level of magnification so that you go down to the small components, you suddenly find that what you thought was a thing (that is to say, a unity) disappears into a multiplicity. And the funny thing is, the really weird thing, is that in, say, the human body there is more space than anything else. When we get down to these minute components of cells and molecules and atoms, we find that they are separated by vast spaces.
Well, if anything separates things from things, surely it’s space. There are no strings joining these things together. They’re all free-falling entities, except that when things start being free-falling in the middle of space, they start influencing one another.
There is also the influence and the properties of space itself. And so, somehow or other, they manage to hang together. But then you look at that individual molecule and say, “Well, that’s what I’m made of.
That’s all there is. Just those.” But, you see, then, when you withdraw, and you see it at a higher and higher and higher level of magnification, the distinction between those molecules is lost and you get what you call another thing at a higher level, a unified thing. So, in exactly the same way, when you examine your situation in the midst of humanity and realize that you are looking at it microscopically, and that if you can alter your point of view and (as it were) draw away from it, you suddenly see everything that you thought was a separately functioning molecule of experience merge into a larger whole.
Now, for some reason or other, human beings are made happy by seeing that. That’s a very strange thing, but it’s so. Because if you look at things on any given level, and you see uppermost their conflicts, well, you don’t feel so hot about that level of things.
But when, on the other hand, you see that a certain conflict, a certain nasty situation, at some higher level becomes essential and important—a necessary ingredient in that higher situation—you feel happy about it. You say, “Well, that had to be, after all. It makes sense.
Now I realize.” You know, you went through a personal tragedy of some kind in your life, and if that hadn’t happened you wouldn’t have met your present wife, or something like that. And you feel, if you love her, that that was great, you see? Now the tragedy has been resolved.
Because you fitted it into a pattern which you feel to be a larger pattern than the pattern of things at the level of the tragedy itself. So then, in exactly the same way, when you look at your ordinary situation, you look at your individuality, you feel you’re operating at a separately moving automotive body. And, as such, we’re always getting into trouble because we are unaware (or very largely unaware) of the structure of interpersonal behavior.
I mean, look at all the work that a man like Sullivan did to try and straighten people out with respect to their interpersonal relationships. But he goes way beyond that. So as this, shall we say, interpersonal level comes into realization, we are doing the same thing as a biologist is doing when he says, “Don’t tell me simply about how the anopheles mosquito is made up, tell me how it functions in relation to its environment.” Because then I will tell you that the anopheles mosquito is not just something which makes use of an environment, it is a functioning of the environment.
An environment which produces these bugs is on the same level—no, on a different level—the same thing as a world which peoples. So malaria swamps mosquito—using it as a verb. And when you see that, when you see that you as a separate being are actually belonging in a greater harmony, you feel harmonious.
And most people want to feel harmonious for some reason or other. So you feel happy. And you say, “At last I found out that my life has a meaning.” I felt that, when you say life is meaningless, you feel disjointed, you feel cut off from things, you feel that if you die it wouldn’t make any difference.
Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the work on the other side of town that you’ve become so interested in would be carried on anyhow. Maybe.
But when you get the sense, now, of yourself as a unit, and the sense of magnification grows, and you see yourself now as a component in a larger pattern, you’re doing just the same thing as you did when you stepped back from the microscope and saw all the crystals or all the amoebas or all the cells fit into the pattern of living tissue. Now let me ask you the question: when you understand this and you suddenly see that you fit in, who’s understanding this? Where are “you” at that moment?
See, you thought you knew where you were. You thought you were looking down the microscope, and at those little things on the other end, and you suddenly found out that all those little molecules turn into your finger. Then you suddenly are looking through another kind of a telescope maybe, and you find out that you’re a molecule looking up at something to which you belong.
Now, who is “you” at that point? Well, you see, we’re accustomed to think of ourselves according to certain definitions. And if you believe the popular physical superstitions of our time, you believe that you are a sort of electrical buzz given off by the brain—that is to say, the sensation of “I,” the sensation of consciousness.
And here’s this brain inside your head, and that buzzes in a certain way and gives off an electrical charge, or a field, and that’s “you.” And when you blow the brains out, all that will stop and “you” will vanish forever. But that’s just because you’re being myopic. If you want to identify yourself that way, it’s your privilege to do so.
But you can (with just as much right) identify yourself as a far vaster system than that. As I said: the whole world is a single energy system, and you can cut it up in this way and that way and the other way, and say so much is me, and so much is somebody else, and so on. But I want to point out that that is just as arbitrary as the way in which we are accustomed to divide up our own bodies into superego, ego, id, personal unconscious, collective unconsciousness, persona, ego—all these divisions of human nature are really very arbitrary.
You might say they are drawn along boundaries which don’t necessarily exist in nature. They may be imaginary boundaries. So perhaps, in a way, you see, there is no final way that you are.
Maybe the whole definition of identity of personality is extremely flexible and you are what you want to be. And if you want to come on as an UUGH! individual, “me,” and to play this game about being here for four score years and ten, and then you give up and die—if you want to come on that way, I guess that’s perfectly alright.
Only, I think it’d be alrighter if you saw that that’s only one possibility. That you can define yourself in many other ways besides that, according to the way in which you are looking at yourself—that is to say, according to the level of magnification on which you’re working. So that if that’s a very large level, you see that you are just as much your next-door neighbor as you are just you.
Some people couldn’t possibly accept this theory. It would destroy their whole lives; unnerve them. But at the same time it is actually no different in principle—as a theory of human nature, as a theory of identity—it is no different in principle whatsoever from seeing and being able to understand that all the cells in your body function together as a single organism.
The question, of course, is: how are you going to see that? And, once again, you can say to me: “I understand this thing theoretically, as you put it. I can see why that would be true, but somehow I don’t have the power to step outside myself emotionally.
I seem to be able to step outside intellectually and entertain and, I believe, understand a set of ideas in which this new theory of personality is truer than the old one. But how do I translate this intellectual comprehension into vivid experience so that I will behave as if it were true and not merely behave as if I understood it in theory?” You know the famous experiment of the trapezoidal window which was worked out by Adelbert Ames? This is, in case you don’t know it, a frame, and simply one side of it is longer than the other side, so that the connecting upper and lower parts of the frame go like this—to a short side, and this to a long side.
Now, you suspend that window through the center of the upper and lower frames. You then cause it to revolve. Now, because we have been trained in the convention of perspective, and because we have learned to regard an ordinary rectangular window as looking trapezoidal when we look at it from across the sides, we see, of course, the right side of the window, if that’s further away from us, we see it as smaller than the left side.
But in this damn trapezoidal window this doesn’t apply. And so, as it rotates, it seems as if the short side is always further away from us than the long side, although it’s often closer. So the apparent behavior of the trapezoidal window is to switch, to do this.
Then what you do is: you attach a little red cube to one corner of it, and to your amazement you see this cube going ’round and ’round and ’round while the window flips. So, you see, your sensory experience, which is something very immediate, has been altered by your concept. And I’m saying this to show how powerful concepts can be.
Now, this idea of our individuality as being something locked up in a bag of skin and existing only from the maternity ward to the crematorium is a concept. I perhaps use this word—it’s a little politer than “myth.” But it’s a concept. Now, then, in Sanskrit this concept is called vikalpa.
It means: a concept, a theory of the world. Now, you can have many theories of the world, many vikalpa. And the more you have, the more you will realize that they are all rather provisional.
Some work better than others, but it depends on the circumstances you’re in as to whether one works better than another. And so they describe the highest state of consciousness as nirvikalpa, which means: free from concepts. Now, even the idea that I have sort of put forward—that you basically are the whole cosmos—is a sort of vikalpa.
It’s still, in other words, we’re projecting on everything that exists the conception of unity; that it’s an organism, that it all works as one, so that you get what you might call an organic theory of the universe as distinct from a mechanistic one, or as distinct from a creationist one that the universe is an artifact manufactured by an extraterrestrial spirit. But these are all vikalpa. Now, the basic idea in Zen is to see life without vikalpa.
And so, in a way, it one-ups, or goes one step further, than Hinduism. Hinduism sees it all as the Self, you see? All as the basic whatever-there-is.
In Zen, we look through all the various vikalpa, all the various conceptions of the world, and abandon them all. I don’t mean get rid of them all as if you burn the library. But you realize that you can use all these different concepts, and you don’t have to be hooked on any one of them.
To have no fixed concept. The word to be underlined is “fixed.” I was saying that this, in a way, this is not quite technically correct, because a profound Hindu thinker goes beyond unity to nonduality. But in the mythology of Hinduism as popularly presented, we are all the one Self.
And this is sort of saying like I said: we’re all tits on the cosmic sow. That ultimately, behind all our multiplicities, there is one Self who’s playing this game of being different. Now, we’re going to take that a step further and say: that’s still an idea, a concept, a way of fixing the universe.
And the difficulty is that if you take any one of these concepts that you could call a fixed philosophical position, and you cling on to it, somebody’s going to upset you one of these days. It may be somebody who comes and argues philosophically with you, it may be some practical dumb bunny who phases you and puts you out of joint—it may be yourself; you just start feeling unhappy and that that doesn’t explain anything. You know, there are certain conditions under which you could have a mystical experience which explained it all to you, and you said, “So what?
I’d rather be in a state of ordinary consciousness.” That can happen. So let’s go a step further to the point where we don’t have a concept. This is called the state of spiritual poverty.
You don’t have no religion, you don’t have any virtues that you can brag about, you don’t have any ideas you cling to and believe in passionately and hope they’re true. I mean, so far as ultimate things are concerned, you are like this, you see? Here’s the thing: there’s no reason why you should not—all of you—be realized and liberated instantly, right now, this afternoon, in Millie’s apartment.
Because we’re all disintegrating, just like disappearing smoke, you see? It takes a little longer. We are more cohesive than smoke, but we’re frisky and we’re doing everything that’s bad for us, and everything is just falling apart.
And eventually we’ll blow away as so much dust, although we will employ the morticians to embalm us and put us in concrete vaults so we won’t blow away quite as fast as all that. In California they’ve got things so sewed up that if you want to scatter a person’s ashes, you have to charter a plane and take it outside the three-mile limit and scatter them on the ocean, just to put you to lots of trouble and make it difficult to do that. To make it difficult to disintegrate.
Now, the great thing in this world is to disintegrate joyfully. In other words: get with it. Not in a spirit of hostility to the flesh, not in a spirit that the suffering is good for you.
But the point is: this is what is happening. Life is something which is absolutely incapable of being held onto. Because if you could hold onto it, it wouldn’t be life.
And all that everybody is doing who interests himself (as far as I can make out) in the spiritual life and religion and all that, is they are trying to put this off. In other words, they are trying to find a reason why they’re not really going to disintegrate, and that they’ll go to heaven or something or other and be there for always. Fine.
But the thing is that you never discover that you’re there for always except in the degree that you’re willing to disintegrate. This is one of these paradoxes where the thing flips. As I said with the Zen paradox: empty-handed I go, and yet a spade is in my hand.
In other words, you wouldn’t know what an empty hand was if it always was found with a spade in it, would you? If everybody had a spade in their hand you would think that was part of the hand, and so it would be. But because they sometimes don’t have one, it depends on your having a spade in the hand, sometimes, to know when your hand is empty.
So, also, the difference between walking and riding. So, in the same way, the complete abandonment of clinging to any system of concepts for your safety or of clinging to yourself in whatever form you experience yourself, you have got to let go. Life assists you.
Life itself compels you to let go. Because you are just so much dust—only: exciting dust, beautiful dust, dust dancing in the most weird patterns. And there it is.
It’s doing that. But it is all falling apart. Of course it reforms, but you have no conscious control over that.
There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t be sure that you will reform in the way you want to reform. So the only thing is to accept this.
And one of the funniest things about that is that you can’t do it, because you object. And you find out that you can’t accept it—and that, too, is part of the thing that’s falling apart. Do you get what I mean?
Just as you don’t have the power to hold the thing together, you don’t even have the power to go with it—not as an ego. And what that’s telling you is that you, as something separate from all this stuff that’s falling apart, don’t exist. If you did exist as something separate from all this stuff that’s falling apart, you’d be able to accept it or you’d be able to control it.
But you can’t do either. You’d like to control it; yes, sure. And we do to some extent.
But it all comes apart in the end. We can only do it for a certain time. Then you’d say, “Well, I’d like to be able to accept that and take an attitude of philosophical resignation.” And you find you can’t do that, either.
So the message of all that, the lesson that that’s telling you, is that—as something separate from this, which could either control it from outside or accept it from outside—you don’t exist. You’re just a figment of your own imagination, a concept. So what we get to in the end is not a kind of concept of ourselves as a god who is somehow ultimately in charge of all this.
If you hang on to that concept you’re going to get in a very weird state. It’s alright provisionally, provided somebody comes along and knocks it down in the end. It’s an excellent stepping stone concept to move you from one to another.
But that’s not the final thing, because when you really seriously go into the idea of god and ask yourself this, what would your state of mind be if you knew everything? If you were in control of everything, including your own will? Let’s suppose your entire being-structure is voluntary and it’s up to you now.
What are you going to do? If I say total responsibility, see? Let’s just suppose this were the case.
I’m making a supposition. Everybody else is that way because they’re all doing what you tell them to. I’m describing a certain state of consciousness in which you see quite clearly that everybody else is just as much you as your own fingers are on the end of your hand—but they all sit out there with a different kind of space than the fingers have, but nevertheless just as connected with you as that.
And you wiggle your fingers, you don’t know why you did; you made up some rationalization that you were going to illustrate something, but a lot of time you wiggle your fingers without even thinking. So you can feel I wiggle all these fingers sitting around this room without really knowing why I’m doing it. And each one of them, naturally, thinks they wiggle me and all the others.
And you feel perhaps you’re somehow in control of it. You’re doing it. It’s a beautiful experience that you are somehow the ultimate center.
Now, if you get into that state of consciousness, don’t get stuck there. There’s a saying in Zen that nothing is good which cannot be destroyed. That when Zhaozhou, the old Chinese master of the Tang Dynasty, was asked, “What would you say to a man who comes to you with nothing?” (which is the ultimate attainment in Zen), he said, “Throw it away.” Another saying they have: “The monk who has satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow.” You see?
The whole point in this is: wherever you think you’ve got it—that you understand, that you claim something at a certain kind of spiritual possession—get rid of it and see that there isn’t any security at all. Now, naturally, for people who’ve worked all their lives and saved up money and are looking forward to retirement and security of one kind or another, that sounds depressing. But actually, it isn’t depressing at all.
That’s behind the symbolism of the bum who doesn’t own anything, and whose clothes are the skies, whose candle is the sun, whose bath is the sea, and whose musicians are the birds. As St. Paul’s language: as having nothing but possessing all things. That image, you see, is of the person who just doesn’t own a thing.
Spiritual poverty. No claims, no concepts. And he feels as happy as a lark because he’s free.
He is really, really and truly with it. As the Hindus say in the Upanishads: “If you think that you understand Brahman”—this is in the Kena Upanishad—“you have yet to be instructed further.” He who knows Brahman does not know him, but he who does not know Brahman truly knows. Why?
Because, of course, the ultimate reality doesn’t make itself an object of its own knowledge. I mean, that would be the ultimate stupidity of the ouroboros. Really, the ouroboros is a fascinating symbol.
But a snake that feeds on its own tail is just going nowhere faster and faster. Of course, the snake will only feed on its own tail because there’s a blind spot somewhere in the snake. So that, you see, the snake has eyes in front of its head and doesn’t see what’s behind it.
So when it sees its tail coming at it, it thinks this is someone else. And so it eats it and says, “Why the devil does this hurt? But it is good food!” So, now, that snake is the Brahman, actually, in the state of illusion—that is to say, in the state of having not discovered that the tail was itself.
Now, of course, as you start getting nearer and nearer to your own head in swallowing your own tail, and it begins to give you indigestion, you’re more and more liable to wake up. And then, when you spit your own tail out and stop pursuing your own end, you see, you become endless. You’re free.
Only: you can’t pin yourself down. It isn’t just that your identity is no longer an ego inside a skin, it is that you don’t know who you are. Only: instead of feeling lost and miserable that you don’t know who you are, this is a kind of upper kind of not knowing.
That’s why there’s always a kind of parallel between the sage and the fool, between the saint and the idiot. So when Bodhidharma is asked by the emperor: “Who is it that stands before me?” he says, “I don’t know. You may wish to ask where the flowers come from, but even the god of spring doesn’t know.” Of course he doesn’t, because he’s a god.
Again, like you don’t know how you grow your hair. So there’s a great thing about this kind of superior and glorious not-knowing where, suddenly, you absolutely give yourself up. Now, it isn’t that you throw yourself away, like a person who hates himself throws himself into the garbage can or jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge.
He knows himself all too well, or thinks he does, and wants to get rid of it. But when you find out that you’ve been gotten rid of long ago, there’s no need to jump off the bridge. You don’t know who you are.
And you can go ’round in circles for ever and ever trying to find out, but that’s just going ’round in circles. You don’t know. And because you don’t know who you are, you are never, never, never going to be bored.
It’s very commonly said that the root of most human unhappiness is the sense that one’s life has no meaning. This is, I suppose, most frequently said in circles interested in psychotherapy, because the feeling of meaninglessness is often equated with the existence of neurosis. And so many activities into which one is encouraged to enter, philosophies one is encouraged to believe, and religions one is encouraged to join, are commended on the basis of the fact that they give life a meaning.