Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
This is a man just setting difficulties for you. And you love to get over them—or else it doesn’t interest you, because are playing the game “my game’s more interesting than yours.” But nevertheless, for some reason or other, the idea of a spectrum, of a somewhat more or somewhat less of the same thing, seems to make a great deal of sense. It seems more plausible than the idea of having to have two completely different substances, a stuff called “matter” and a stuff called “spirit” or “mind” or something like that, and try and see how they work upon another.
If you see, in other words—let’s take the beautiful image of the fern. First of all, a stalk. Just a thing like that.
And then more of them, but coming out of the sides. And then, out of the sides of those, more stalks. Out of the sides of those, you see?
And then, out of the sides of all those little ones come chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit little ones still, see? And you say, “Well, look at that! It’s getting very spiky, isn’t it?
Full of spines.” And then, gradually, right on the edge of the spine, more go chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee until they’re all going like this way, more and more and more, until it becomes soft and hairy, you see? And suddenly you’ve got what you’d call a vegetable. If you look at a watch, some people have extremely tick-tock watches—that is to say, they just have the hours marked with spots.
There are even more simple watches than that. I’ve seen watches that simply have four spots on them, twelve and six, nine and three. But on the other extreme, you can buy very expensive watches that have stopwatches on them, and things that tell you the date, and tachometers, and all kinds of involved things, and these watch calibrations are getting more and more and more complicated all the way around.
It begins to look like a flower, you see? It begins to look—what started out looking like a kind of metallic object ends up looking like a vegetable, or some kind of wonderful, growing, alive thing. Beyond some mysterious point of complexity, it seems to become alive.
So this is what I mean by the spectrum of the various, let’s say, games that are going on. The very, very pfuumm, pfuumm, pfumm, pfumm at one end, and at the other end all kinds of complicated metric motions, rhythmic motions, that are so difficult to reduce to anything so simple as tchumm, thchumm that we say they’re alive. Whereas the things at the other end that are very, very simple like that, you see, we say they are relatively inert.
But whether you say that the inert is merely less alive, or whether you say that the alive is merely the maximum complexity of the inert all depends on whether you want to say yes to the world or whether you want to say no. So it is, as it were, a yes-saying that makes everything seem alive, and no-saying that makes everything seem dead. And when you say no and you make it all seem dead, what happens?
You experience a very extreme form of differentiation between yourself on the one hand, and everything that you experience on the other. Because if you want to put this world down and say it’s all just a bunch of junk, you can’t do that without isolating yourself from it. You’ve got to stand aside and be a completely independent observer.
Because if you say, “Therefore I, too, am just a lot of junk, and therefore this statement that I’m making is just a lot of junk,” then, obviously, you can’t expect anybody to lay very much credence upon it. But, on the other hand, when you say, “Well, good gracious, this whole thing is something, isn’t it?” Then you put yourself into it. You don’t stand aside from it any longer.
You admit that you, too, are part of the whole thing; that your ego, your self, is so inextricably involved with everything that you experience, that there really ultimately isn’t any difference between the kind of thing that’s going on and you. Then—then, you see—you’ve got the total system. You’re one with it, you’re not standing aside from it.
But to make that clear, I just have to go into something that is puzzling for us, whose thinking is based on sentence structure and a kind of grammar that has subject, verb, and predicate, and a kind of mythology wherein we think of consciousness and being aware by analogy with photography and with mirrors reflecting images. If you can understand that what you are is everything that you know—there are infinitely many ways of… old language has… I was going to say being conscious of what’s going on. Each one of us looks at the present scene from a different point of view.
But let me say: look at it like this. Supposing I say instead: each one of us is a different point of view with respect to this situation. You see, we can say: here’s the situation, and each one of us is an “I,” you see, that looks at it from a different point of view.
And so we go into it like this. Now, that’s a very disintegrated picture. What is the connection between this and this?
What’s behind this? And where does all that come from? What’s its relation to this, the situation?
No, we are part of the situation. You can’t deny that. So, you see, the thing behind this is this, you see?
See what I mean? You’re not out of it. Alright.
Then, if that’s the way it is, we’ve got to draw a different diagram altogether. Here’s the situation again. Now, we talk about a point of view towards the situation.
But can’t you see that the situation grows out of itself points of view, like this? See? And then, here they are.
The little eyes at the end of it, you see, like a snail—but it is a big snail with many, many eyes. See? So it looks at itself like that.
Looks at itself through many eyes. But so, in other words, what each one calls “our self” is a point of view taken by what each one of us calls “our experience.” You get that? Experience, in other words, doesn’t need, really, an experience and an experiencer.
You don’t need a thought, and then to have a thought you have to have a thinker; or to have a thinker, then you’re going to have a thought. All I’m introducing you to, you see, is really a simplified language. Do you feel a feeling, or is feeling a feeling the same thing as feeling?
It’s easier, isn’t it, to say “feeling” instead of “feeling a feeling.” Or that other limerick that some of you know that I made up: This is what—so, when you see that things (the physical world) and consciousness are inseparable, it isn’t that the physical world is reflected in a mirror, but that it and consciousness are all one. But that consciousness seems to be something that is different from the world and looks at it, because it is done, focused, projected in so many different ways, and these are like the spikes coming out. See, you remember my fern thing?
Alright. We can play ferns with this, and we can start growing little ones out of here, you see? Or take any one of these and start doing this, see?
Take one of these and start doing this, see? All points of view growing out of the center. So then, remember that what you are experiencing—perhaps it’s easier for some of you in this way.
What you are seeing out there, in front of you, is actually a sensation inside your head. All that you see is a conversion of quanta in the external world into the form of your brain—your brain, in its turn, being something in the external world. Now then, when it’s in your brain, you say, “Now I see it in terms of my brain.” Well, is there somebody standing back inside your brain, you see, and looking at your brain, and saying, “Well, there it is.
What a nice picture!” See, if you can get this it’s wonderful. The centers of the optic nerve are right in the back of your head. They’re not just here.
If they were just here, you could imagine someone standing inside your head and looking at them. But actually, they’re right back there. So what you are seeing in front of your eyes is right back in here, where it’s actually happening.
So you can stroke the view here with your fingers, see? Now, there isn’t somebody in the middle who’s turned around, looking at the back of your head like the people in Plato’s cave, to see what’s out in front. The point is that the sensation of your self and the sensation of other people is the same thing.
And that’s mutual between all of us, you see? We all are our view of other people and other things. Views of views.
Views of viewings. And so you don’t have to introduce the problem of how the knower knows. How does the world make an impact on the knowing subject so that it can be aware of, be conscious of, everything else?
There isn’t that kind of mirror or camera process going on. That’s the important thing to understand. Because everybody’s thought is so powerfully influenced by the metaphors he uses.
And the metaphors for knowing and for consciousness mirrors cameras, et cetera, et cetera, can be extraordinarily introducing unnecessary complications. Simply see that what you are aware of in terms of external sensory experiences, in terms of so-called internal feelings, internal thoughts, that is what you are. Krishnamurti puts it so beautifully when he tries to show that behind the stream of thoughts there isn’t a thinker.
He says you create the thinker, you create the thought of a thinker behind the thoughts in a moment of insecurity, when you want to withdraw. But actually, there is simply this stream of what you could call luminous experience. And you can take away the word “luminous” and put the word “conscious” in its place.
So see it again—your heads, your nervous systems, your eyes, your senses, your bodies—not as something that encounters the external environment from outside. You all are the external environment. Rather, your heads and eyes and so on are points, you see, put out by the environment as a whole, as a totality, through which it feels all around: like many sensitive hairs, like a sea urchin with all those little spines coming out of it.
And each one of us is one. Well now, there is a final matter to be considered. I have given some seminars on Far Eastern aesthetics, and some of you may have attended some of them.
When we talk about Chinese art as compared, say, with Mexican art or Cambodian art, we say it’s naturalistic. On the other hand, these other artforms are highly stylized. What do we mean when we say an artform is more natural than another one.
It’s rather difficult to say, isn’t it? Because you’re trying to say that, somehow or other, things that look like this are not as natural as things that look like this. What do you mean by that?
What is natural somehow strikes us as being a little bit more asymmetrical, a little bit more wiggly, than what we call artificial. Well, ever looked at sugar crystals under the microscope? Beautiful cubes.
What about iron pyrites? All kinds of things in the crystal world, they look very formal, very stylized, very artificial. Go to the Charles Darwin Hall at the Museum of Natural History and take a look at the glass models of radiolaria.
You have never seen anything so artificial. But my goodness, what a wow of artificiality! It’s like looking at a master jeweler; Cellini beyond Cellini has made baubles to hang around your neck, tiaras to put here, all kinds of gorgeous things.
For this is the magic of nature. Really, go there—if it’s open now; they were renewing it. But it is the most beautiful exhibition in New York.
Makes all the painting look pretty silly. Living forms that are nevertheless absolute craftwork, master craftwork, of jewelry. So, you see, the point is: fundamentally, there is no such thing as an artificial work.
All that happens is nature, all that happens is—however apparently artificial—still within the one domain. Once again, you see, we get a continuum. Everything in this continuum is nature.
Just like everything in a continuum is consciousness. But at one end it’s apparently less natural than at the other. It all is natural.
But what is less natural isn’t necessarily for that reason boring, lacking in form, lacking in excitement. Because beyond the radiolaria, the diatom is the works of art of mankind, and beyond them the work of the computer. All in the direction, the dimension of, the artificial.
But you never reach the purely artificial. You never, never get outside the domain of nature. So from one point of view, then, everything that exists in the whole world is in the course of nature.
It is the Tao, it is the flow, of being. And you can manifest the Tao, and be in accord with it, and be harmonious with the whole universe by doing any single thing you like. If you’re a painter, you can go back home, and you can pick a bottle of ink and throw it at the wall, and smash!
And there it is. You can’t stop it. If you’re a writer, you can take somebody else’s essay, cut it up the center, cut it across, and paste it in different ways and then read it straight over.
They are doing this now. And that’s alright, too, you see? That’s it.
You can roll down the street, you can tatter about and rest upside down, put your pants on your top and your coat on the bottom. Anything goes, you see, in that domain. It’s alright.
Don’t worry. You see? But nobody will understand you.
You won’t make a communication if you do that. You see? That’s what some of our artists are doing today.
They’ve discovered that they can be completely liberated. So they just do anything at all and have the nerve to sell it. But now, look here.
Supposing that we’re going to make a communication. I want to find a way in which I can make some things look more natural than others. How am I going to do that?
I’m going to want to show you by some stratagem—whether it’s by talk or by art—how you can have more suchness somewhere than elsewhere. That doesn’t seem possible, does it? There is a saying in Zen, which you can write in a funny way: 見山是山、見水是水.
You can say—this character (山), you know, means “mountain.” And this character (見) means “gets,” “pertains to,” “grasps.” “The mountain gets the mountain, and the water gets the water.” Now, mountain-water, the two characters together, mean “landscape.” So this refers to the Earth as a whole. Now, when does a mountain get the mountain and the water gets the water? The answer is that the mountain gets the mountain when a particular mountain looks just like a mountain, and the water looks just like water.
And we can say of, say, a person: “This man is so much of a man.” “This woman is so much of a woman.” So the man gets the man, the woman gets the woman. And well, you know, you can do that, too, you see? The man gets the man, and the woman gets the woman.
So how are we going to do that, though. Every man is a man, every woman is a woman. Every mountain, after all, is a mountain.
But some mountains are more like mountains than others. As G. K. Chesterton once put it in a kind of satirical way: all religions are really the same religion, especially Buddhism. He was trying to poke fun at people who say all religions are really the same.
But what a wise word, you see, he had there. So now it comes to this question of: how do we show something as being more of the nature of thusness, or especially of the nature of thusness? The same question as: how do we show something as being more natural than something else?
Now this lies, you see—this is the basic problem of aesthetics in the Far East. How a house can be constructed to look more like a work of nature than other houses. Of course, this is part of the real fun of going to a place like Kyoto, where for centuries they’ve been tremendously aware of this problem.
And you can go, on the one hand, to the Heian Shrine. The Heian Shrine is a huge Shinto shrine on the east side of Kyoto which is built in Chinese baroque style. And it is all orange-red paint and gold, with blue tiled roofs, with every kind of curlicue and luxury, and it’s a real dolled-up scene with a magnificent garden.
And in this garden, you know, there are lakes with carp in, and wonderful piers going out to summer houses at the end of the piers—with, again, magnificently curved roofs, and everything is ornate as possible. And you feel you walk into that place and you think, “Good lord, I’ve got into a Willow pattern plate!” Or this is [???] or something, you know?
I mean, it’s like you remember China from your grandmother’s china cabinet. It’s just that. And you think, “Well, well!” You know?
How unnatural can you get? How contorted, how twisted, how artificial? And then you go across to a place called Shisen-dō up in the hills.
And here is a little rustic house built by some great samurai who wanted to retire from all that political war scene, and built himself a place that would look as much as possible as if it hadn’t actually happened on purpose. But now, how could he do that? He could’ve found a place which hadn’t happened on purpose at all.
He could’ve taken simply the hillside and sat down there and not done a thing, but somehow adapt himself to the changing temperature and become nature. But it’s not the nature of a man to do that. He needs clothes because he didn’t grow fur, and he needs a house, and he needs to eat, and so on.
And so a man does it in a different way. But he did make a place to look as much as possible as if no one had really interfered with things. All of it is, from a certain point of view, artificial.
Every bush, every rock has been carefully considered, its position minutely planned. Because the man enjoyed the problem of: how natural can I make it? He really knocked himself out.
Now, you see, look here. Here’s the problem of “how natural can I make it?” I want to arrange in this area some rocks. You see, this is a big expanse of sand.
And I want to put them so that they don’t look as if they had arrived there artificially. Now, what am I going to do. Obviously, if I do this—I’ve got a rock here and a rock here and a rock there—somebody will say, “One, two, three.” You know, it looks as if somebody laid them there.
And what you wanted was a situation where it didn’t look as if it had been laid out like that. So we begin again. So we put rock one, rock two, and rock three.
Now, are we going to accuse anybody of anything? Yes, maybe we are. We’re going to say, “Now, wait a minute.
You couldn’t get away from it so far. You put these two together in alignment, close, and then you thought: well, then the other one should be further away from it. It should be some way like that.” See?
But then you would say, “No, they’re all pointing the same direction. Reverse this one and put it that way.” See, it still looks a little artificial. It always looks artificial so long as we can trace the thinking of the artist.
But when we can’t trace the thinking of the artist—look: we’ll divide the thing in two. We’re still using the same pieces. Well, they might’ve been thrown there, but that’s not good enough.
What we want is the point where we can trace his thinking to the point where it has only just vanished. We are just going to keep pace with it and say, “This is not quite as if it had been thrown down there. Something a little better than if it had been thrown down there.” And that is the most difficult thing in the world for an artist to achieve.
I mean, there’s a trick to that. In other words, they’ve slowly rotated, but at distances which don’t suggest orderly, numbered arrangement. Some of you may immediately see that trick that I used, some of you may not see it.
But the point is that the artist gets to this situation with relation to his beholders, where he has a trick just beyond what they see, and almost just beyond what he knows. Do you see? It just reaches a critical point.
And so it is so close to chaos, and yet so close to being order, that it’s the point where the one turns into the other. Because here again you’ve got a continuum. You’ve got chaos way out here and you’ve got order way over here, and you can approach this one or approach this one.
But at a certain moment, when you approach chaos but it’s still really order, then you get a garden like Ryōan-ji. And you go there and see the most fabulous arrangement of things so as to look natural, done with infinite care and patience. So what happens here?
In a garden like Ryōan-ji, which is just rocks on sand—there are more; there are five rocks, not three—what you have is somebody revealing that everything is natural, basically, by doing something more natural than anything else. So you can imagine in terms of human character what this experiment would involve. We want a person who indicates to everybody else that, really and truly, everything goes, anything goes.
But so that this person shall not be confused with being a complete mess, see, he has to have a very, very carefully natural character. Yet, at the same time, the mystery of this character and how it works must escape everybody who knows him, and it must even escape himself. Because he must be able to do it without really trying.
So do you see from this that there are many, many things involved in a truly naturalistic artform, or in something which reveals the nature of suchness more than something else; when, indeed, everything reveals it. Everything is natural, everything is divine, but then there might be someone or something that approximates so well to the divine that you actually see it. The secret in all this is, first of all, that there isn’t a method.
Or, to put it in another way: that you have to come to the point of losing everything, of letting go completely. As an Arab in the sandstorm, when the storm is absolutely impossible and overwhelming, he kneels down on the sand, he puts his banús completely over his head, and he curls up like a fetus and waits. And because light sand blown by the wind can be quite porous, even if he gets covered, he can breathe.
But he doesn’t try, he doesn’t use any energy to fight the storm. So in a raging sea you have to turn off the engines, otherwise every time the propellers are thrown out of the water it’ll shake the ship to bits and drift. The person who wants to master this must first get the feeling of being able to drift—of seeing that suchness (in other words, that nature) is in all directions, and that you have really no alternative.
Nothing you can do can hold it up, stop death, change anything else. You have, for a time, go with it completely. Let go everything.
And then, as you do that, you see, just in the same way as the sailor finds that the wind blows him—if there is wind blowing and he’s got any kind of a thing to be blown, he’ll be blown by the wind. And after experimenting how it is for a while just to be blown along by the wind, he discovers: good heavens, you can do little things that will change the course! So, in exactly the same way, when you let yourselves go completely: let’s say you imagine that you are completely determined—there is nothing you can do, you’re just puppets on strings and you accept this situation—you will then suddenly discover that you’ve got new life, and that you can start controlling it, and you can start playing with it in the masterly way that these men made gardens and did magnificent calligraphy.
Now, I want to go, today, into the subject of the male-female symbolism in tantric yoga. You will find that, in the tantric art forms, every Buddha or aspect of the Buddha has a feminine counterpart. And that not only do they have feminine counterparts, but they also have various levels on which they’re represented.
In other words, we started out—you remember—I described in the last seminar there were the idea of five so-called dhyani buddhas. And these five—who represent, as it were, the center of a rose: one’s in the middle and four surround—then each one has a corresponding bodhisattva form. And then each bodhisattva has, in turn, a corresponding heruka form, but they’re all forms of the original five.
Then, whether they’re in the form of a dhyani buddha, or in the form of a bodhisattva, or in the form of a heruka—which is a kind of wrathful and weird, far out kind of a character; often with bulls’ heads. This one, here—which we can look at—is a little statue that Kim has brought over. They’re all reducible to the original group.
And all have these female counterparts, and they are represented—as in sexual intercourse—touching at all points in a complete embrace. And the idea is that this embrace lasts for ever and ever and ever and ever, and never ends. Because this is a way of representing the nature of life.
What is fundamentally involved in this system is self-knowledge. You see, without resonance, nothing happens. If there are no echoes, you can’t hear anything.
Supposing we get a room in which we blanket all the walls—and blanket the floor, sound-proof it in every possible direction—you can hardly hear anyone talk. Because voice requires resonance. That’s why people enjoy singing in the bathtub: they suddenly discover they’ve got a good voice.
Because, suddenly, the bath and the structure of the room which is all non-soundproofed, resonates their voice. That’s why you use a violin—or a cello, or a base fiddle—[that] has a big wooden structure to make the sound resonant; to play back to itself. And that’s why we are all so fascinated with recording things; taking photographs, writing them down, and—above all—remembering: it’s a form of resonance.
Because, you see, if you don’t remember anything you don’t know you’re there. A person who had total amnesia and lived in a split second only wouldn’t know he was there. We could conceive (and perhaps there are) some forms of life that don’t know they’re there.
I don’t know whether my particular cells—constituting my body—I don’t know whether they know they’re there. Maybe they do. Maybe they have some wonderful system of resonance that I know nothing about, and they’re all worried about what I’m going to do with them, and having conferences and meetings and their policy-decisions, and so on and so forth, because there’s this person in charge.
You know, it might well be that—when I die, or when we all die—all our cells suddenly say, “God is dead.” And they have their big theological conferences and say, “Well, we just have to fend for ourselves from now on.” And that’s called corruption: where they all go off on their own. So I don’t know—it may be that we’ve got some kind of a system like that. But certainly, to know that you’re there you need an echo.