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And if you don’t understand, look at it again. And people are peopleing. We notice that all these ‘suchnesses’ appear and disappear.
They keep changing, they come and they go. But if you get hung up on your particular form—I’ll have to alter the language a little bit because, you see, “your form” makes a duality. Whereas you are your form.
You’re what you’re doing. Now, you think, “Hmm. For some strange reason I must make that go on as long as possible.” And therefore you think you have an instinct to survive.
And so the only thing anybody can agree about today, so far as the discussion of ethical and moral problems are concerned, is that we ought to survive. And therefore, certain forms of conduct have survival value and certain forms don’t. But when you say to yourself you must go on living, you put yourself in a double-bind.
Because you’ve said to a process—which is essentially spontaneous—that it must happen. And the basic form of the double-bind which is imposed upon all children is: you are required to do that which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. So when we say to ourselves “you must go on,” the reason is, you see, that we are not living in the eternal now, where reality is.
We are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later. “There’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away.” That one far-off, divine event to which all creation moves. Don’t kid yourself.
As the Hindus have taught us: in the course of time everything gets worse. It eventually falls apart. Comes kali yuga, and Shiva at the end, and POOM!
Which is to say, only suckers put hope in the future. You see—I tell you, there are three classes of people in the Western world: the aristocrats, the proletariat, and the bourgeoisie. The aristocrats live in the past, because they come of noble family, and they’re like potatoes because the best part of them is underground.
The proletariat live in the present, because they have nothing else. And the poor bourgeoisie live for the future; they are the eternal suckers. They can always open to a con game.
So when they find out that, really, there isn’t much of a future, you’re going to die, they transpose the future into a spiritual dimension. And they figure this material world is not the real world, but the spiritual world is the real world. And there will be, somewhere, somehow, an eternal life for me.
Well, then you say to them, “What are you going to do there?” Well, they haven’t the faintest idea. You know that? If you ask theologians about what they think is going to happen in heaven, they just dry up.
Oh, you’re going to play harps—I mean, there’s a symbolic meaning to that which I could go into, but the average person’s idea of heaven is an absolute bore! I mean, it’s like being in church for ever. Children see this immediately.
Children, when they hear a hymn like, “Weary of earth, and laden with my sin, I look’d at Heav’n and long to enter in,” and they go, “Oh god! Heaven is to be in church for always!” And they think hell is preferable; there’s at least some excitement going on. And you see it in Medieval art.
You go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and you see Jan van Eyck’s painting of The Last Judgement: heaven on top, hell below. In heaven everybody’s looking like the cat that’s swallowed the canary, sitting in rows and very smug. God the father is President and… oh dear.
Beneath this there’s a winged skull, like a bat, and squirming bodies, all nude, all being eaten by snakes and I don’t know—it’s a fantastic thing going on. But in that—you see, van Eyck had a ball painting that! Because in Medieval way it was the only way you could get away with painting nudes and sexy scenes; sadomasochistic, see?
So that’s naturally why hell became much more interesting than heaven. So therefore, this hope for the future is a hoax; it’s a perfect hoax. Maybe we will make spiritual progress.
Everybody puts it off. Maybe if I work at yoga for ten years, twenty years, and do this thing, I will eventually make it. To mokṣa, to nirvāṇa, whatever.
That’s nothing more than a postponement. It’s this business of… because you’re not fully alive now, you think maybe someday you will be. Look, supposing I ask you, “What did you do yesterday?” “Now, what did I do yesterday?
In fact, I’ve forgotten.” But most people say, “Well, let me see, now. Let me get out my notebook. I got up at 7:30 and I brushed my teeth, and I read the newspaper over a cup of coffee, and then I looked at the clock, and dressed, and got in the car and drove downtown, and did this and that in the office,” and so on, and you go on, and on, and on, and you suddenly discover that what you’ve described has absolutely nothing to do with what happened.
You’ve described a scraggly, skeletal, fleshless list of abstractions. Whereas if you were actually aware of what went on, you could never describe it. Because nature is multi-dimensional, language is linear.
Language is scrawny, and therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the world as described, it’s as if you were trying eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. Or eat numbers; a lot of people eat numbers. People play the stock market; they’re doing nothing but eating numbers.
And yet they’re always unhappy, absolutely miserable—because they never get anything. So therefore, they always hope more is coming, because they believe that if they eat enough dollar bills, eventually, something satisfactory will happen. So eating the abstractions all the time, we want more, more, more time.
Confucius very wisely said “A man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.” Because when you understand, you don’t put your hope in time. Time won’t solve a thing. So when we enter into the practice of meditation, of yoga, we are doing something radically unlike other human activities.
Of course, the way yoga is sold in the United States—like everything else—is that it’s supposed to be good for you. It isn’t. It has nothing to do with anything that’s good for you.
It’s the one activity which you do for its own sake, and not because it’s good for you; not because it will lead anywhere. Because you cannot go to the place where you are now, obviously. Yoga is to be completely here and now.
That’s why the word yuj means ‘join.’ Get with it. Be completely here and now. This is the real meaning of concentration, to be in your center.
And the Christian word for sinning—in Greek—is amartánei (αμαρτάνει), which means ‘to miss the point.’ And the point is eternal life, which is here and now. Come to your senses. So yoga is defined—in Sanskrit, in the Yoga Sūtra—yogas chitta vritti nirodha.
Difficult to translate, but roughly ‘yoga is the stopping of…’—vritti is ‘turning,’ see, like a wheel. And chitta is ‘consciousness.’ ‘Turnings in consciousness.’ In other words, the attempt of the mind to catch hold of itself, which is what we call thinking, worrying. So you could say, loosely, “Yoga is the cessation of thinking.” It’s not the cessation of awareness, but of symbolizing, trying to catch—clutch—reality in terms of thoughts, symbols, descriptions, definitions.
Give it up. It’s not easy because we do it habitually. But until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand.
Eternal life, that is to say, eternal now. If you could come to the place where you suspend conceptions. Conceptions, in Sanskrit, are called vikalpa, and so this stage is called nirvikalpa: ‘not conceptual.’ And this will be basic to everything I’m going to talk to you about.
To understand nonverbal reality, non-conceived reality—what I call ‘suchness,’ tathātā—it’s really very easy; it’s too easy, that’s why it’s difficult. But when you are fully aware and not thinking you will notice some amazing absences. There is no past—can you hear anything past, coincidentally?
Can you hear anything future? They’re just not there, to the plain sense of one’s ears. Ears are easiest to begin with.
Can you hear anyone listening to something else—other than sound, you know? Can you hear the listener? No?
Well, then presumably, it’s not there! Then you become again as a child, and simply forget all that you ever were told, and contemplate what is, all these ghosts go away. Huh, weird!
But they just go. And then you enter into the eternal state where there’s no problem! Well, then you go back, and you collect your opinions again, and you think, “Well, that won’t do.” How—how can I be practical, and be in that sort of state?
Well, I remember—in the Sermon On The Mount—that Jesus said a lot of things about this. “Consider the lilies of the field: how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet, Suleiman in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” “And if God so clothed the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you faithless ones?” Wow! So do not worry about tomorrow, saying, “What shall we eat?
what shall we drink?” Or, “How should we clothe ourselves?” All the rabble seeks after these things! Sufficient to the day is the worry of it. Nobody ever preaches a sermon on that text!
Never—I’ve heard lots of sermons!—and never one on that one, because people say, “Look, that’s all very well because Jesus was the boss’s son. And he knew,” you see, “that he was really in charge of the universe, and he has nothing to worry about. But we have to be practical.” Oh?
What do you suppose the Gospel was; the “good news?” Do you know it never got out? “You, too, are the boss’s son.” That was the gospel. If Jesus had lived in India they wouldn’t have put him to death, because everybody in India knows that we’re all God in disguise.
So if he had said, “I am the Father, our One”—in India they would have said, “Hooray!” You know? Lots of people in India know that perfectly well. But here?
Nuh-uh-uh-uh-uh, that’s a no-no! Who the hell do you think you are? You own the place?
You keep your position. You’re just a creature; a critter. It’s in the family system, it’s in everything.
Of course, they have their own way of doing it in India, because they have a delayed action on it. When you get to be a certain age, and after you’ve studied long enough with a certain guru, then—and then only—may you realize this. But until then, nuh-uh-uh; it’s still a no-no.
But if you’ve put in the time, they finally let you in. Here, you have to wait until you’re dead. [Laughs] Well, all that’s bullshit.
The only place to begin is now, because here is where we are. So why put it off? A lot of people say, “Well, I’m not ready.” What do you mean, you’re not ready?
What’re you—why, where… what do you have to be to be ready? “Well, I—I’m—I’m not good enough because I’m neurotic, I’m (perhaps) not old enough, not mature enough for such knowledge. I still am frightened of pain, and of course I’d have to overcome that.
I’m still dependent on material things. I have to, you know, eat a lot, and drink a lot, and sex around, and all that kind of thing. And I think that I’d better get all of that under control first.” Oh?
You mean you’ve got a case of spiritual pride? You want to be able to congratulate yourself for having gone through “The Discipline,” which is rewarded with realization? Nu-uh.
That is trying to quench fire with fire. In other words, the reason you’re—wouldn’t it be great to be a mystic? Look at it this way.
I mean, ca-razy! To have no fear, no attachments, no hang-ups! To be as free as the air!
So that, you know, you could just wander out on the streets, and give away all your clothes to the beggars, and let go of the whole thing; let it all hang out. Wouldn’t it be crazy to have that courage? And you look into yourself honestly and you find that, inside, you’re actually a quaking mess of sensitivity.
“Ughh!” You know? So that this desire to be the great mystic is nothing more than a symptom of your quaking mess. It’s self-defense.
So you think, “Wowee! We’ll do that yoga bit, and we’ll get real tough.” That only means you’re going to be increasingly insensitive. Running away from the quaking mess, escaping.
You never can. You’re stuck with it. There is nothing you can actually do to transform your own nature into unattached selflessness, because you have a selfish reason for wanting to do it.
Well, that’s pretty depressing, isn’t it? You mean to tell me that the only people who get really enlightened and liberated are those whom the grace of God somehow hits in an arbitrary way? And all you can do is sit around and wait?
Well, let’s begin with that supposition. Let’s suppose there’s nothing we can do to change ourselves. You know?
Psychotherapy, religion, all this is just absolutely in vain. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing you can do about it. It’s like trying—as I said—to bite your own teeth, or lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.
(Incidentally, it struck me as funny: a lot of people using that phrase in the wrong way. They say when something very difficult has to be done, we have to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps—you can’t! It’s impossible.)
They say, “That’s terribly depressing! What do you mean, Alan Watts? You’ve come here simply to tell us that there’s nothing we can do?” I mean, here we are all presumably assembled in a cultural milieu, spiritual milieu, psychotherapeutic milieu, where we are supposed to get better.
And I tell you there’s nothing you can do about it. “Well, give us our money back. [We’ll] go to somebody else who’ll be more encouraging.” But!
But… what does it mean, that you can’t do anything about it? It’s singing loud in fear. The reason you can’t do anything about it is that you don’t exist.
That is, as an ego, as a soul, as separate will—it just isn’t there! Well, when you understand that, you’re liberated. They say, in Zen, Now, don’t misunderstand me.
This is not any kind of fatalism when I say “you”—as you conceive yourself to be, that is your ego, your image of yourself—isn’t there! That it doesn’t exist. It’s an abstraction.
It’s like ‘three.’ Did you ever see three? Plain, ordinary three? No, nobody ever saw it.
It’s a concept, it’s a vikalpa. So, in the same way, is one’s self. There is the happening, the suchness—yes, sure, you bet—but it’s not pushing you around, because there’s no you to be pushed around.
In other words, there’s no billiard ball on the end of the cue. There’s the cue, you know? Like this.
It goes this way and goes that way. You know, they call a Buddha a Tathāgata: ‘one who comes or goes thus.’ This way and that way, see? He went that-a-way!
So this illusion of the persecuted ego who is pushed around by fate—it has altogether disappeared. And so in, likewise, the illusion of the ego who pushes fate around has also disappeared. There’s a happening.
So—in this, do you see what has happened? By dying to yourself, by having become completely incompetent and found that you don’t exist, you’re reborn. You become everything.
In the words of Sir Edwin Arnold, “Foregoing self, the universe grows I.” The subject of this seminar is The Veil of Thoughts, and following out the theme that somebody once suggested by saying that thought is a means of concealing truth, despite the fact that it’s an extraordinarily useful faculty. But in quite recent weeks we’ve had an astounding example of the way mankind can be bamboozled by thoughts. There was a crisis about gold.
And the confusion of money—in any form whatsoever—with wealth is one of the major problems from which civilization is suffering. Because, way back in our development, when we first began to use symbols to represent the events of the physical world, we found this such an ingenious device that we became completely fascinated with it. And in ever so many different dimensions of life we are living in a state of total confusion between symbol and reality.
And the real reason why, in our world today—where there is no technical reason whatsoever why there should be any poverty at all—the reason it still exists is people keep asking the question: “Where’s the money going to come from?” Not realizing that money doesn’t come from anywhere and never did, except if you thought it was gold. And then, of course, if to increase the supply of gold and use that to finance all the world’s commerce, prosperity would depend not upon finding new processes for growing food in vast quantities, or getting nutrition out of the ocean, or getting water from atomic energy—no, it depends on discovering a new gold mine. And you can see what a nonsensical state of affairs that is, because when gold is used for money it becomes, in fact, useless.
Gold is a very useful metal for filling teeth, making jewelry, and maybe covering the dome of the Capitol in Washington. But the moment it is locked up in vaults in the form of ingots it becomes completely useless. It becomes a false security, something that people cling to, like an idol, like a belief in some kind of Big Daddy Oh God with whiskers who lives above the clouds.
And all that kind of thing diverts our attention from reality, and we go through all sorts of weird rituals. The symbol, in other words, gets in the way of practical life. So it was—you remember the Great Depression?
I expect a number of you here, looking around, are old enough to remember the Great Depression—when, one day, everybody was doing business and things were going along pretty well, and the next day there were bread lines. It was like someone came to work and they said to him, “Sorry, chum, but you can’t build today. No building can go on.
We don’t have enough inches.” He’d say, “What do you mean, we don’t have enough inches? We’ve got wood, haven’t we? We got metal, we even got tape measures!” They say, “Yeah, but you don’t understand the business world.
We just haven’t got enough inches! Just plain inches. We’ve used too much of them.” And that’s exactly what happened when we had the Depression.
Because money is something of the same order of reality as inches, grams, meters, pounds, or lines of latitude and longitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of bookkeeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter.
But our culture, our civilization, is entirely hung up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own. And this is a very striking, concrete example of what I’m going to talk about: of the way we are bamboozled by our thoughts which are symbols. And what we can do to become un-bamboozled, because it’s a very serious state of affairs.
Most of our political squabbles are entirely the result of being bamboozled by thinking. And it is to be noted that, as time goes on, the matters about which we fight with each other are increasingly abstract, and the wars fought about abstract problems get worse and worse. We are thinking about vast abstractions, ideologies called communism, capitalism—all these systems—and paying less and less attention to the world of physical reality, to the world of earth, and trees, and waters, people, and so are in the name of all sorts of abstractions busy destroying our natural environment.
Wildlife, for example, is having a terrible problem continuing to exist alongside human beings. Another example of this fantastic confusion is that, not so long ago, the Congress voted a law imposing stern penalties upon anyone who should presume to burn the American flag. And they put this law through with a great deal of patriotic oratory, and the quoting of poems and so on about Old Glory, ignoring the fact entirely that these same congressmen—by acts of commission or omission—are burning up that for which the flag stands.
They’re allowing the utter pollution of our waters, of our atmosphere, the devastation of our forests, and the increasing power of the bulldozer to bring about a ghastly fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that “every valley shall be exalted, every mountain laid low, and the rough places plain.” But—you see—they don’t see, they don’t notice the difference between the flag and the country. Or, as Korzybski pointed out, the difference between the map and the territory. Now, however, I think we should begin by talking a little bit about when we use the word “physical reality”—as distinct from “abstraction”—what are we talking about?
Because, you see, there’s going to be a fight about this, philosophically. If I say that the final reality that we’re living in is the physical world, a lot of people will say that I’m a materialist, that I’m un-spiritual, and that I think too much of an identification of the man with the body. Any book that you’ll open on yoga or Hindu philosophy will have in it a declaration that you start a meditation practice by saying to yourself, “I am not the body.
I am not my feelings. I am not my thoughts. I am the witness who watches all this and is not really any of it.” And so, if I were to say, then, that the physical world is the basic reality, I would seem to be contradicting what is said in these Hindu texts.
But it all depends on what you mean by the “physical world.” What is it? First of all, it must be pointed out that the idea of the “material world” is itself philosophical. It is in its own way a symbol.
And so, if I take up something that is generally agreed to be something in the material world, and I argue that this is material—of course, it isn’t. Because nobody has ever been able to put their finger on anything material—that is to say if, by the word “material,” you mean some sort of basic stuff out of which the world is made. By, say, analogy with the art of ceramics, pottery: we use clay and we form it into various shapes, and so a lot of people think that the physical world is various forms of matter.
And nobody has ever been able to discover any matter. They’ve been able to discover various forms, yes—there is patterns, but no matter. You can’t even think how you would describe matter in some terms other than form, because whenever a physicist talks about the nature of the world he describes a form, he describes a process which can be put into the shape of a mathematical equation.
And so, if you say, “A + B = B + A,” everybody knows exactly what you mean. It’s a perfectly clear statement, but nobody needs to ask, “What do you mean by ‘A’?” or “What do you mean by ‘B’?” Or, if you say, “1 + 2 = 3,” that’s perfectly clear, but you don’t need to know one what, two what, or three what. And all our descriptions of the physical world have the nature of these formulae: numbers.
They’re simply mathematical patterns. Because what we’re talking about is pattern. But it’s pattern of such a high degree of complexity that it’s very difficult to deal with it by thinking.
In science we really work in two different ends of the spectrum of reality. We can deal with problems in which there are a very few variables, or we can deal with problems in which there are almost infinitely many variables. But in between we’re pretty helpless.
In other words, the average person cannot think through a problem involving more than three variables without a pencil in his hand. That’s why, for example, it’s difficult to learn complex music. Think of an organist who has two keyboards—or three keyboards—for work with his hands, and each hand is doing a different rhythm.
And then his feet on the pedals: he can be doing a different rhythm with each foot. Now, that’s a difficult thing for people to learn to do, just like to rub your stomach in a circle and pat your head at the same time takes a little skill. Now, most problems with which we deal in everyday life involve far more than three variables.
And we’re really incapable of thinking about them. Actually, the way we think about most of our problems is simply going through the motions of thinking. We don’t really think about them, we do most of our decision-making by hunch.
You can collect data about a decision that you have to make, but the data that you collect has the same sort of relation to the actual processes involved in this decision as a skeleton to a living body. It’s just the bones. And there are all sorts of entirely unpredictable possibilities involved in every decision, and you don’t really think about it at all.
The truth of the matter is that we are as successful as we are—which is surprising, the degree to which we are successful in conducting our everyday practical lives—because our brains do the thinking for us in an entirely unconscious way. The brain is far more complex than any computer. The brain is, in fact, the most complex known object in the universe.
Because our neurologists don’t understand it. They have a very primitive conception of the brain and admit it. And therefore, if we do not understand our own brains, that simply shows that our brains are a great deal more intelligent than we are.
Meaning—by “we”—the thing that we have identified ourselves with. Instead of being sensible and identifying ourselves with our brains, we identify ourselves with a very small operation of the brain, which is the faculty of conscious attention, which is a sort of radar that we have that scans the environment for unusual features. And we think we are that, and we’re nothing of the kind.
That’s just a little trick we do. So, actually, our brain is analyzing all sensory input all the time: analyzing all the things you don’t notice, don’t think about, don’t have even names for. And so it is this marvelous complex goings on which is responsible for our being able to adapt ourselves intelligently to the rest of the physical world.
The brain is, furthermore, an operation of the physical world. But now, you see, though, we get back to this question: “physical world.” This is a concept. This is simply an idea.
And if you want to ask me to differentiate between the physical and the spiritual, I will not put the spiritual in the same class as the abstract. But most people do. They think that 1 + 2 = 3 is a proposition of a more spiritual nature than, say, for example, a tomato.