Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
When we’re terribly tired we feel the drag of our physical weight overwhelming us. And therefore, what we want to feel is lack of obstruction in any direction that we move. So ideally, we would like to feel a world which didn’t resist our will at all, where the wish, the flight of imagination, was instantly fulfilled.
Well, when you think about that for a while you realize that’s not exactly what you would want. Because after a while, being able to accomplish everything wouldn’t challenge you, would offer no adventure. And therefore, to make the creation of a fantasy worth doing, you would like something that you would have to overcome in the course of doing it.
You would like some intractable material, something that presented a little difficulty in shaping. And so I think we would all ask, and we would go out of our way, to produce situations where we were confronted with difficulty. Supposing, for example, you find yourself (or you imagine yourself) in a situation where you can control everything, and you know always, therefore, exactly what is going to happen next.
This would not—would it?—be a pleasurable situation for very long. It would be boring. And after a while you would want to get into a situation also where you were not in control, where things would occur to surprise you.
But you might want to raise this qualification that I will let things surprise me as long as I can stand it. When I can’t stand it, I’d like to be in control again. Now, here is the nub of the whole problem of creating a universe as you would wish it to be.
You would say: I would like to be surprised, I would like to be out of control—up to a point. But I would always like to be able to call a halt and say: now I take over again, I’m in charge. But, you see, the moment you think this, you would like to add to this problem of being out of control—you see, it’d be all too easy if you could suffer and know: any minute you press the button, you’d recover.
Think of this! Supposing you had a “Paradise” button. Any time you press this you could be in bliss.
And so you’d start daring yourself: how far could you go out into all kinds of adventures and situations beyond your control and not press the “Paradise” button? You remember, as kids, on a hot summer day when you were terribly thirsty, how good an ice cream soda would be? And you had just ten cents that would buy it, but you’d put it off and put it off, and you got thirstier and thirstier and thirstier.
Because how grand it would be to be maximum thirsty and then have the ice cream soda! You see? And it’s just like that.
So we have the “Paradise” button that we could push in my—I’m still talking in terms of my purely invented, fantastic cosmology, or universal order; scheme of things—and we could press it any time. Now, wouldn’t it be fun to add to this a new dimension: that we had forgotten where the button is? We’ve lost it.
We don’t know, and we’re, you see, scaring ourselves in a new way. First of all, we voluntarily let ourselves get out of control of the situation. Then, to add to this, we forget that we’re really in control and that we can press the “Paradise” button.
This is a new way of scaring yourself; a new thrill. So we seem, in this predicament, to have lost contact altogether with a place from which we started. But this will only make sense, this will only answer the problem that I posed in the beginning—that is to say, the problem of what kind of cosmology could I imagine that would justify all possible sufferings—if we can wake up, we may have made it as difficult as possible to wake up.
But nevertheless, there always remains a point at which we can wake up and recover from the nightmare. Now, many of you will already see quite easily that the kind of cosmology which I’ve been describing is nothing very new. This is, after all, Hindu philosophy.
The idea that every thing, every being, every person in the world is Brahmā, the creator, playing the part. Playing, acting, that he is all these things. The godhead is masked, acting a drama in every single one of us, but forgets for the time being that he is the godhead.
This is Vedānta. And also, you know well that not only in India, but all over the world, there occurs to people from time to time a kind of experience that we call cosmic consciousness, or whatever it may be, in which they suddenly see that this is so. They suddenly see that this entire problematic world with its horrors and evils and tortures is a play.
That it is simply, as it were, life playing hide and seek with itself, frightening itself, scaring itself, screaming at itself, accusing itself, making itself feel guilty for a great cosmic joke. Let me read a description of this sort of experience. There are dozens of these things throughout ancient and modern times; people who’ve suddenly had this happen to them.
This is the description given by a very famous man, Richard Bucke, who wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness. Now, listen: So you see that the version of the world which I could construct or imagine out of fantasy is also very akin to things which people have experienced. And you could call these experiences hallucinations, wishful thinking, anything you like.
At the moment it doesn’t matter. Let’s suppose that that’s the way things are. In other words: that we are in charge.
That there is, as it were, an inner self, an inner experiencer within us all, which is really in charge of things—which is the basic reality which nothing can overwhelm or destroy, but which is, as it were, amusing itself by forgetting that it’s in charge, by embarking on adventures and becoming subject to the feeling of not being in control. And however far it ventures into being out of control, the basic fact remains in the back of the whole thing that it is in control, and that nothing can possibly happen to you which is not your own will. And we must add to this, to make our fantasy complete, that one day you will wake up.
Now, don’t you think that on those terms, if that were the truth, you could face life with equanimity and say, “Well, there aren’t really any problems. One of these day’s I’m going to wake up from the nightmare. It’s alright!” No matter how deep we go, it’s all an adventure.
It’s all scaring ourselves. It’s like children: you know, children just love to scare themselves. Hide themselves in a dark room with the door shut and experience the fright.
Or, I remember—you know the nasty sensation you get with a plaster wall on a cold day, running your fingernails up it? I know, as children, we used to do this. Krrewwwk!
Just to throw ourselves with how horrible it was. I remember, too, in school when I was a kid, we used to have wooden pens that we wrote with, and we always used to chew them. Some people chewed the ends of their pens until they were like wooden brushes.
So one day, they ordered a jar of bitter aloes. It would be deposited on every teacher’s desk. And anybody seen chewing their pen would have it dipped in the bitter aloes.
Everybody instantly chewed their pens to get it dipped in the bitter aloes, which tasted absolutely horrible but was wonderful. We all sucked on the bitter aloes and acquired a taste for it in about three minutes. This is like children.
Children do this kind of thing. Perhaps because they are nearer to the source of what I’m talking about. But now, let’s go on to the next important step.
All I’m suggesting is that, thus far, I’ve created a fantasy. That this is not the way the world is, but is a purely artistic idea of what it might be like. Now, when we’ve created such an idea, there are certain ways in which we can criticize it.
We can criticize a work of art not on the grounds of is this conception true or not true, but is it a good work of art or not? And therefore, the criticism I want to apply to this is based on aesthetic grounds purely. And I think the aesthetic criterium I’m going to apply first is that of simplicity.
This is purely an aesthetic criterion, because there’s something that appeals to us—I don’t know why, but it does—about achieving some sort of result by the simplest possible way without, as it were, making any unnecessary detour. This is one of the great criteria of a work of art. I don’t know quite why.
But let’s take a comparison between the conception of the solar system of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus. The Ptolemaic solar system is where everything revolves around the Earth. And in this system, some of the planets have to do something rather complicated.
In order to describe the movement of the planets as all going around the Earth, some of the planets have to do things like this: they have to weave back on their own paths. But if you take the sun as the center, nothing has to weave back on its own path. It keeps moving elliptically around the sun in the same direction.
In other words, Copernicus’ solar system is simpler than Ptolemy’s. Today we say Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong. It isn’t quite correct to say that.
Copernicus was simpler. And science has in it an aesthetic criterion that those explanations which are simpler are accepted rather than those which are more complicated. Imagine for a moment you’ve got a box with two holes in it, and out of these two holes come each a piece of string.
You can never get inside this box. But when you pull the piece of string on the right, the piece of string on the left goes into the box. And when you pull the piece of string on the left, the piece of string on the right goes into the box.
Now what, inside the box, would account for this phenomenon? You see? You can imagine all kinds of pulley wheels and gadgets inside the box that would give this result, but the simplest thing you can imagine is that the piece of string simply goes in at one hole and out the other.
That would explain it. So the scientist always chooses the simplest. The simplest solution that will answer whatever he has.
So if we apply this criterion to what I’m talking about—that supposing we are all a drama, that there is within us a sort of second self that is pretending to be our ordinary everyday self, and is scaring itself, and enjoying itself with this pretense—on these aesthetic grounds, could some criticism be applied to what I’m saying? Well, I think it could. I’ve taken a step in inventing this idea which is perhaps unnecessary.
And that is the step of making a difference between an experiencer and an experience. Also, my fantasy has a complication of assuming something rather supernatural. In other words, it’s a little bit of a strain upon one’s credulity to believe that each one of us is really, as it were, God in disguise.
How can this be demonstrated, how can it be shown? That’s a little awkward. Could the theory be simplified?
Could it be made easier than that? After all, what am I trying to prove? What I’m trying to prove, or the problem my fantasy was intended to deal with, is the conflict which we ordinarily feel between ourselves and what we experience.
Yeah, this is the problem: the problem of pain. Life hurts. It hurts me.
And I feel different from it. How am I going to justify it? So the way in which I tried to solve this problem was by saying: I have another, deeper self than the one I’m ordinarily aware of, and that deeper self wants everything that happens and is really in control of it.
That was the solution. Now, then, I criticize this solution and say: it may have in it an unnecessary step: the unnecessary step of a self different from, standing away from and observing, what actually happens and goes on. Now, look: in our ordinary everyday awareness, yes, we all are a self which observes what goes on and feels different from it and criticizes it.
We like it or we don’t like it. Now, what my theory first assumed was a deeper self than our ordinary one which actually digs everything that happens. It is no longer in a position of either liking it or not liking it, but accepts all of it.
But now we can see that there’s another possible solution which achieves the same result: that there isn’t any self that observes what happens, different from it. That would achieve the same result as the self which accepts everything. You see what I mean?
Let me go over this again, because this is an absolutely crucial point. You can imagine yourself as a subject, as an ego, to which everything happens. And you can accept it or reject it.
You like it or you don’t like it. And so you feel it’s a problem. First idea.
Second idea: you can imagine that you’re a self deeper than the ego. A kind of Ātman—Brahmā in Hindu philosophy—which actually is willing the whole thing. This is a little bit of a stress on our credulity.
Third possibility, though, which comes out: let’s not posit at all a self on the one hand and experiences on the other, so that there’s a problem; do I like it or don’t I like it, do I accept it or don’t I accept it? But let’s suppose that we’ve introduced a problem where no problem exists. It isn’t a question of whether life experiences something that we’re going to accept or reject.
Supposing it’s what we are, and no question arises of accepting or rejecting it? Isn’t this, then, a simpler description than the one I have tried to describe? What we would have, then, to recover from: we ordinarily experience ourselves as an ego, a mind, a center of consciousness confronted with the problems of life, and absolutely, really basically, unable to deal with them.
We can find an out from that by the fantasy that we’re really capable of dealing with them, that we’re omnipotent, but that we’ve put ourselves in this position for fun. But if that solution is (aesthetically speaking) too complicated, there is a simpler solution—aesthetically. And that is that the initial division of ourselves from what we’re experiencing is an unnecessary step.
Now, we know physically that everything that we experience is a state of our own nervous system. That the division between the subject and the object, the self and the world, is quite conventional. At this moment, you can see me standing against the black curtain here, with these flowers behind me, and you can see the backs of the heads of the people sitting immediately in front of you.
And you normally assume all that is not you. Somebody, something else. But, as a matter of fact, the whole thing that you’re looking at is deep inside you.
It’s a state of your nervous system. Now, is there somebody observing what’s happening in your nervous system? Is there somebody watching what you see with your eyes?
No. What you’re looking at is you. As your eyes are open now, resting upon this scene, you are observing the flesh and blood of yourself.
That’s it. And there’s no “you” observing it. This pattern of lights and colors and shapes is the middle of your brain.
That’s how the middle of your brain feels; how you feel—and not only through the sense of sight, but through all your fingertips, the drums of your ears, the taste buds in your mouth and your nose. All they’re conveying to you of the external world is you. Now, if we appreciate what this involves, this is quite a shock.
Let’s go back. What did we start—what was the problem we started with? The problem we started with was this: how can I reconcile myself to life as it actually is?
How can I make up a theory to try and show that, in some way, what happens is what I want? To try and solve this problem we invented a second self underneath our ordinary self who wants all this, who is one with it. Now I’ve simplified it.
I think I’ve shown: we don’t need that hypothesis of a second self underneath our first self. That’s unnecessary. What we discover is that the world we know and the world we say we suffer is ourselves anyway.
There actually isn’t a situation in which the hard facts of life impinge on and hit a person who is separate from them. We think of life as an encounter between a subject and an object, as if these two creatures—the subject and the object—came from opposite ends of God only knows where and met each other, and BANG! they have an encounter.
Whereas if we describe human life in the simplest possible way without calling in any souls and spooks and supernatural beliefs, what we find out is quite the contrary: that experience is not an encounter. It is not an “I” meeting with an “it” or a “thou.” Because when I look at you I’m also looking at myself. These are inseparable.
Yes, you exist in your own right. But when you look at me and I look at you, what we’re seeing is ourselves. We’re seeing our own nervous system.
The more we know of others, the more we know of ourselves. There isn’t any gap. So that you could say that, actually, you are willing—this is sort of putting it in picturesque language—you are willing everything that happens to you.
When you don’t like it, you’re willing “you don’t like,” and you do like it, you’re willing “you do like.” And the people who have the sort of experience that Rickard Bucke was describing here, the cosmic consciousness or whatever, are those who wake up to this fact that you never, at any time, experience anything which you don’t completely will, however horrible. Now that’s, as it were, a sort of report that comes out of a state of consciousness that is not familiar to us. But it happens to very many people.
Not necessarily people who are great saints and sages who’ve practiced yoga and meditation disciplines for many, many years. This is an experience which happens to very ordinary people, children, to people having their teeth extracted because they had anesthesia or something like that. There are all kinds of way in which this may be seen.
And we don’t know the laws, if any, which govern how it happens. The sudden recognition, in other words, that the world that is other than yourself, that is outside you, that is not under your ordinary control, that hurts you and fights you, is deep down a hidden aspect of yourself; the unknown other that is you. If we could believe that—if we could really believe it and know it—obviously, nothing would have any terrors for us.
We could know that however far we went—into pain, grief, anything—it would be simply discovering ourselves in a hidden form. Now, first of all, my point is not to say to you we can prove that this is so. My point, first of all, is: imagine this as an answer, and: can you think of a better one?
Supposing, on the other hand, you want to be completely hard-boiled, we could invent a cosmology other than joyous. We could think of the disastrous cosmology. What kind of a theory of the universe could we invent that would be as nasty as possible?
And we would very quickly find that, if we invented it, it wouldn’t work. In other words: that all would have ceased to exist long ago. Think of the maximum nasty cosmology, and it would’ve collapsed.
Think of the middling cosmology that is just so; you know… pfft. More or less works. It would’ve collapsed, too.
You have to think of something like this for one that still does actually go on. And this is not only a work of fantasy that invents this, but also, in addition to this, there are again and again the people who experience this as being the actual state of affairs in one way or another. And I often think of a poem of G. K. Chesterton’s that I read years and years ago called The Song of the Children.
It is a sort of fantasy about Jesus and his relation to the adults on the one hand, which was rather stuffy, and his relation to the children on the other. And he says: And I feel that this is the spirit which our present day world needs more than anything else: to see that what is truly important in life is what is frivolous. To see that it doesn’t matter two hoots that we achieve a certain success, that we win a certain game, that we live longer than we might live otherwise.
What matters more than anything else is that “the king be cutting capers and the priest be picking flowers.” In other words, that we become capable of touching each other, of loving each other, of recognizing in every other, in the strangeness and threat that we feel sometimes when we look into another person’s eyes, and feel—you know how we turn away? You look, in the subway, at the person sitting opposite you, and you meet their eyes for a moment and then turn off—why? What are we afraid of?
The thing that you’re afraid of in the other is you. Isn’t it possible? Isn’t it really possible that this stop?
That the fear of looking at the other, touching the other, of recognizing yourself in the other be overcome? And that we understand that what otherness means—on the surface, the other is always the one with whom we’re in contest. When we look in the other person’s eyes—you all played this game—can I look longer until he looks away?
Who’s going to win? What’s the relationship between husband and wife? Mostly competition.
Always, the relationship between self and other is a contest. But what I mean by the joyous cosmology is seeing that all contests are faked; that it’s a “let’s pretend” battle because there really is no self and no other. And so that when you feel the strangeness of another person, the weird unfamiliarity when you look into their eyes, and feel embarrassed and peculiar, and maybe threatened, what you’re feeling is your own life.
And you’re just thrilling yourself with the other person—like climbing up behind yourself and saying BOO! But we could wake up, and we could look and enjoy it. So shall we have about five or ten minutes intermission?
And then, if you want to stay to ask questions, I’ll be happy to try and discuss. Did you all hear the question? It’s a very good question.
It brings up a crucial difference between the two alternatives that I presented. One: that behind our ordinary everyday self there is a hidden self which is playing these limitations and problems of our everyday life as a hide-and-seek game. And this seems, to the questioner, to be a better explanation to the difficulty than the second position, which is not that there is a self behind the self that has the experiences of the world, but that there is no difference between the self and the experiences of the world.
Then she is asking: why don’t we know that this is so? You see, when we explain or answer the question “Why?” we always cheat. When, for example, you ask of a scientist: why do certain things happen, what he tells you is how they happen.
In other words, when he gives you the causes of certain events, all he does is to describe the same events in greater detail, and calls this “why” it happens. It’s only how it happens. So you’re a little bit cheated if you thought it was why.
So, in the same way, if, in other words, we are really what we experience but we think we’re different, and we say, “Why does this happen? Why don’t we know?” I can tell you how it happens, but I can’t tell you why. How it happens—yes, that’s simple.
Because when we are little children, our sisters, cousins, aunts, parents, teachers—everybody—tells us who we are. They give us a definition of what it is to be a human being. And this definition is that you are a knower who confronts the known.
You are a controller, you are an agent behind acts. That’s the definition of you. We’re all taught this.
And even if it ain’t necessarily so, that’s what we believe and that’s what we feel. So this is not so much why, but how we come to feel divided from our experience of the world. I could go on to say how this began to happen.
It was a sort of mistaken interpretation of human experience which occurred a long time ago and grew into a habit. It’s caused a lot of damage just in the same way as a single tiny pebble may be set rolling and start an avalanche. Nobody could’ve foreseen that.
I wonder if it’s ever struck you how curious a thing it is that most of the things that we experience we regard as things that happen to us, which we ourselves do not originate, which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves. And if you consider that, you realize that what you mean by “yourself’ is rather narrowly circumscribed. Even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of things that happen to us in the same way as things that go on in the world outside our skins.
If there’s a thunderstorm or an earthquake—well, it happens to you; you’re not responsible for it. But so, in the same way, when you have hiccups you didn’t plan on it. If you have belly rumbles, you had no intention of doing it.
And as for the catastrophic act of getting born… well, you had nothing to do with that. And you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in which you find yourself. And this way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood—as something that happens to you—goes right down to our general feeling about life.
It goes down to the way in which, as Westerners, we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in a cosmos that, on the whole, is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence. In other words, if you’re reared with a 20th century—or, shall we say, an early 20th century—common sense (which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century with its rejection of Christianity and Judaism), you regard yourself as an accident—a biological accident—in a stupid universe which is mechanical but has no feelings—no finer feelings. A vast, pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur.
Of course, if you don’t have that point of view and you are more traditional, you look upon yourself as a child of God and therefore under authority. In other words, there’s a big boss on top of all this who allowed you, at his pleasure, to deign to have the disgusting effrontery to exist, and you better watch your Ps and Qs because that Almighty is looking after you with the attitude of “this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.” And when you look at the world in that image—or in the other image that it’s a stupid mechanism—either point of view you take, you don’t really belong. You’re not really part of all this.
And I could use a stronger word than “part,” only we don’t have it in English. We have to say something like “connected with it,” “essential to it.” Or, to put it in the strongest possible way, it is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external world—which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself is something that you got caught up with—it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you, yourself. Because you see, we have such a myopic view of what one’s self is.
It’s as if, in other words, we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as “me,” as if you focused your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole panorama of things that you experience and say “I will take sides with that much of it.” Now, we come here—right at the start—to an extremely important principle, which is the different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification. That is to say, you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way, you can look at it with a naked eye and see it in a certain way, you look at it with a telescope and you see it in another way. Now, which level of magnification is the correct one?
Well, obviously, they’re all correct, but they’re just different points of view. You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass and where, with the naked eye, you will see a human face, with a magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots rather meaninglessly scattered. But as you stand away from that collection of dots, which all seem to be separate and apart from each other, they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern.
And you see that these individual dots add up to some kind of sense. Now you’ll see at once, from this illustration, that maybe you—when you take a myopic view of yourself, as most of us do—but you may add up to some kind of sense that is not apparent to you in your ordinary consciousness. When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope we see there’s one hell of a fight going on.
All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the microscope we should start taking sides, which would be fatal. Because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle.
What is, in other words, conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level. Now could it possibly be, therefore, that we—with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures and everything that goes on in human life—are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony? Well, it is claimed, you see, that some human beings have broken through to that vision.
That they slipped, somehow or other, into states of consciousness where they see the apparent disintegration and disorganization of everyday life as the functioning of a totality which, at its level, is completely harmonious. And you could say, “A-ha, at last, I see. I got the point.