Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
Because if you say that to someone, they’re going to come back after a while and say, “Yes, but I’m now desiring not to desire.” And so the Buddha will answer, “Well! At last! You’re beginning to understand the point!” Because you can’t give up desire; why would you try to do that?
It’s already desire. So in the same way you say, “You ought to be unselfish,” or to “give up your ego.” “Let go.” “Relax.” Why do you want to do that? Just because it’s another way of beating the game, isn’t it?
The moment, you see, you hypothesize that you are different from the universe, you want to get one-up on it. But if you try to get one-up on the universe, and you’re in competition with it, it means you don’t understand you are it. You think there’s a real difference between self and other.
But self—what you call yourself, and what you call other are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They’re really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it’s all one.
So if you try to make the north pole get the mastery of it, or the south pole get the mastery over the north pole, you show you don’t know what’s going on. A guru (or teacher) who wants to get this across to somebody, because he knows it himself—and when you know it, you know, you’d like others to see it, too. So what he does is: he gets you into being ridiculous—harder and more assiduously than usual.
In other words, if you are in a contest with the universe, he’s going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous. And so he sets you such tasks as saying, “Now, of course, in order to be a true person, you must give up yourself. Be unselfish.” So the Lord steps down out of heaven and says, “The first and great commandment is: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” You must love me.
Well, that’s a double-bind. You can’t love on purpose. You can’t be sincere purposely.
It’s like trying not to think of a green elephant while taking medicine. But if a person really tries to do it—so, you know, this is the way Christianity is rigged—you should be very sorry for your sins. And though everybody knows they’re not, but they think they ought to be; so they go around trying to be penitent, or trying to be humble.
And they know the more assiduously they practice it, the phonier and phonier the whole thing gets. And so, in this way, it’s called the technique of reductio ad absurdum. If you think you have a problem, you see, and that you’re an ego, and that you’re in difficulty, the answer that the Zen master makes to you is, “Show me your ego.
I want to see this thing that has a problem.” When Bodhidharma—the legendary founder of Zen—came to China, a disciple came to him and said, “I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” And Bodhidharma said, “Bring out your mind here before me and I’ll pacify it.” “Well,” he said, “when I look for it, I can’t find it.” So Bodhidharma said, “There, it’s pacified.” See, because when you look for your own mind—that is to say, your own particularized center of being, which is separate from everything else—you won’t be able to find it. But the only way you’ll know it isn’t there is if you look for it hard enough to find out that it isn’t there.
And so everybody says, “Alright, know yourself, look within, find out who you are.” Because the harder you look, you won’t be able to find it, and then you’ll realize that it isn’t there at all. There isn’t a separate you. Your mind is what there is; everything.
But the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible. That’s one way—I haven’t said the only way, but it is one way. And so almost all spiritual disciplines—meditations, prayers, et cetera, et cetera—are ways of persisting in folly.
Doing resolutely and consistently what you’re doing already. So if a person believes that the Earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that. He knows it’s flat; look out the window and see!
It’s—obviously, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him it isn’t is to say “Well, let’s go and find the edge.” And in order to find the edge, you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles; you’ll never find it that way. So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually, when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the Earth is round.
That’s the only way that’ll teach him. Because people can’t be talked out of illusions. There is another possibility, however.
But this is more difficult to describe. Let’s say we take as the basic supposition—which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori, or awakening, or whatever you want to call it—that this now-moment in which I’m talking and you’re listening is eternity. That—although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, and that we’re sort of vaguely frustrated, and worried, and so on, and that it ought to be changed—this is it.
So you don’t need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn’t try not to do anything, because that’s doing something. And how to explain that?
Because there’s nothing to explain—it is the way it is now, you see? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up. That’s why Zen teachers use shock treatment: to sometimes—why they hit people, or shout at them, or create a sudden surprise—because it is that jolt that suddenly brings you here.
See, there’s no road to here, because you’re already there. And if you ask me, “How am I going to get here?” it will be like the famous story of the American tourist in England, who asked some yokel the way to Upper Tuttenham—a little village—and the yokel scratched his head and he said, “Well, sir, I don’t know where it is, but if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” So you see, when you ask, “How to I attain the knowledge of God? How do I attain nirvāṇa; liberation?” All I can say is: it’s the wrong question.
Why do you want to attain it? Because the very fact that you’re wanting to attain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there. You already have it.
But of course, it’s up to you; it’s your privilege to pretend that you don’t. That’s your game; that’s your life game—that’s what makes you think you’re an ego. And when you want to wake up, you will—just like that.
If you’re not awake, it shows you don’t want to. You’re still playing the hide part of the game. You’re still, as it were, the Self pretending it’s not the Self.
And that’s what you want to do. So you see, in that way, too, you’re already there. When you understand this, a funny thing happens—and some people misinterpret it.
You’ll discover, as this happens, that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior disappears. You will realize that what you describe as things under your own will feel exactly the same as things going on outside you. You watch other people moving, and you know you’re doing that, just like you’re breathing, or circulating your blood.
And if you don’t understand what’s going on, you’re liable to get crazy at this point, and to feel that you are God in the Jehovah-sense. To say that you actually have power over other people, so that you could alter what they’re doing. And that you are omnipotent in a very crude, literal kind of Bible-sense, you see?
And a lot of people feel that and they go crazy. They have to put them away. They think they’re Jesus Christ and that everybody ought to fall down and worship them.
That’s only—they got their wires crossed. This experience happened to them, but they don’t know how to interpret it. So be careful of that.
Jung calls it inflation. People who get the Holy Man syndrome, that I suddenly discover that I am the Lord, and that I am above good and evil, and so on, and therefore I start giving myself airs and graces. But the point is: everybody else is, too.
If you discover that you are that, then you ought to know that everybody else is. Well, for example, let’s see how—in other ways—you might realize this. Most people think—when they open their eyes and look around—that what they’re seeing is outside.
It seems, doesn’t it, that you are behind your eyes, and that behind the eyes there is a blank which you can’t see at all. You turn around and you see something else in front of you. But behind the eyes there seems to be something that has no color.
It isn’t dark, is isn’t light. It is there from a tactile standpoint; you can feel it with your fingers, although you don’t get inside it. But what is that, behind your eyes, you see?
Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around, that’s how it feels inside your head. The color of this room is back here, in the nervous system, where the optical nerves are at the back of the head. It’s in there.
It’s what you’re experiencing. What you see out here is a neurological experience. Now if that hits you, and you feel—sensuously—that that’s so, you may think that then, therefore, the external world is all inside my skull.
But you’ve got to correct that, with the thought that your skull is also in the external world. So you suddenly begin to feel, “Well, wow! What kind of situation is this?
It’s inside me, and I’m inside it, and it’s inside me, and I’m inside it.” But that’s the way it is. This is the—what you could call transaction, rather than interaction—between the individual and the world. Just like, for example, in buying and selling.
There cannot be an act of buying unless there’s simultaneously an act of selling, and vice versa. So the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional. The environment grows the organism, and in turn the organism creates the environment.
The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. And the answer to it simply: they’re all one process. And it isn’t that organisms by chance came into this world.
To put it, rather: that this world is the sort of environment which grows organisms. It was that way from the beginning. Just in the same way—I mean; the organisms may, in time, have arrived in the scene, or out of the scene, later than the beginning of the scene, but from the moment it went bang in the beginning—if that’s the way it started—organisms like us are sitting here.
We’re involved in it. You see, look here: let’s take the propagation of an electric current. I can have an electric current running through a wire that goes all the way around the Earth.
And here we have a power source, and here we have a switch. Alright, here’s the positive pole, here’s the negative pole. Now, before that switch closes, the current doesn’t exactly behave like water in a pipe.
There isn’t current here, waiting to jump the gap as soon as the switch is closed. The current doesn’t even start until the switch is closed, from the positive pole. It never starts unless the point of arrival is there.
Now, it’ll take an interval for that current to get going, and circuit, if it’s going all the way around the Earth. It’s a long run. But the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning.
In a similar way, although in the development of any physical system there may by billions of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life, that billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of that current around the wire. Takes a bit of time. But it’s already implied; it takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
And so in any lump of rock floating about in space, there is implicit human intelligence. Sometime, somehow, somewhere. They all go together.
So don’t differentiate yourself and stand off against this and say, “I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks, and stuff.” It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks.
What are you going to stand on? What I think awakening really involves is a reexamination of our common sense. We’ve got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned; obvious.
And our speech reflects them in the commonest phrases: “Face the facts”—as if they were outside you, as if life were something you simply encountered as a foreigner. Face the facts. Our common sense has been rigged, you see, so that we feel strangers and aliens in this world.
And this is terribly plausible simply because it’s what we are used to. That’s the only reason. But when you really start questioning this; say “Is that the way I have to assume life is?
I know everybody does, but does that make it true?” It doesn’t necessarily. It ain’t necessarily so. And so, then, as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture, you find you get a new kind of common sense; it becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe.
For example, people used to believe that the people who lived in the Antiquities would fall off [the edge of the Earth], and that was scary. But then, when somebody sailed around the world, and we all got used to it, and now we travel around in jet planes and everything, we have no problem about feeling that the Earth is globular. None whatever.
We got used to it. So, in the same way, Einstein’s relativity theories—the curvature of the propogation of light—that began to bother people when Einstein started talking like that. But now we’re all used to it.
Well, in a few years, it will be a matter of common sense to very many people that they are one with the universe. It’ll be so simple! And then—maybe, if that happens—we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense; with love instead of with hate for our environment.
The web of life. Let me try, from the first, to indicate the point that we’re aiming at. The point is this: that human consciousness is—at the same time as being a form of awareness, and sensitivity, and understanding—it’s also a form of ignorance.
The ordinary everyday consciousness that we have leaves out more than it takes in. And because of this, it leaves out things that are terribly important. It leaves out things that would—if we did know them—allay our anxieties, and fears, and horrors, and if we could extend our awareness, you see, to include those things that we leave out, we would have a deep interior peace.
Because we would all know the one thing that you mustn’t know. You know, according to the rules of our particular social game, the one thing you mustn’t know; that’s really not allowed, that is the lowdown on life—and that the lowdown, on the one hand, means the real dirt on things. But the lowdown is also what is profound, what is mysterious, what is in the depths.
And the something left out. And our everyday consciousness screens this out in the same way that, when you say you have weaving, you have—say, on this rug here in front of us—when the black finishes here, the black threads will go underneath, and then appear again over here, then they’ll go underneath the white and they’ll appear again over here, you know? So that the back will be the obverse pattern of the front.
Now—the world is like that. Our sense organs are selective. They pick out certain things; they are receptive.
For example, we have a small, small band of what you might call a spectrum of light, of sound, of tactile sensation, and so on, to which the human organism is sensitive. But we know that outside that small band there is a huge range of vibrations to which we have built instruments that are sensitive—things like cosmic rays, ultraviolet rays, gamma rays, hard x-rays, and so on—they’re all outside the band of our spectrum. And obviously, there are things that are outside the range of our instruments.
We may build new instruments someday, which will evoke—bring into our consciousness—other orders of vibration altogether, that, as yet, we don’t know about them. So you could imagine, you see, the universe as a vast, vast system of vibrations; and has infinite possibilities. All these vibrations, you know, are like the strings on a harp.
And the harps that the angels are supposed to play in heaven are really this huge possibility. See, when you play the harp you select strings. You don’t play all the strings; it’s stupid to just run your finger along the whole edge of the harp back and forth, back and forth, and go “blrrbllrrblllbrrbllrrblllbrr.” What you do is, you pick out with your fingers—select, just like on the piano—you don’t go “brrrrrrmmmp”—you pick out certain notes, and these make the patterns.
But at the same time as you pick out, you reject what you don’t pick out. But it’s all there, constituting a fundamental continuity; the kind of continuity of the thread as they go up to the back of the woven material, and make up the obverse of the pattern that’s on the front. Now, the question that is absolutely basic for all human beings is, “What have you left out?” You see?
You are focused on certain things that constitute what you call ‘everyday reality.’ Look: you single out people, and you see them sitting, sitting, sitting, all around, and you know they are things that are really there. And then, behind the people, are the houses—or whatever we live in—and the Earth, and behind all that the sky, and so on. But we see the world as a collection of rather disjointed events and things.
And I might say to you, as you came in here today, “Now, my goodness! You all forgot something. What did you forget?” And you think, “My goodness, did I put my pants on?
Did I wear a sweater? Did I—got my glasses, and my hair on, or my wig, or whatever?” And—no, no, it’s none of that. Something you’ve forgotten, you see?
Everybody has forgotten something. You left it out; just missed it. See, see?
And so I can bring this out—what you’ve forgotten—if I ask you, “Who are you?” Well, you say, “I’m Paul Jones,” or whatever your name happens to be. I say, “Oh, no, no, no, no, don’t give me that stuff. Who are you really?” And you think, “Well, of course I’m just—I’m just me.” “No!
Don’t give me that! I don’t want to hear all that nonsense. You’re playing a trick on me.
Really, deep down, who are you?” “I don’t know!” Well, that’s the thing to find out. That’s the thing that’s been forgotten, see? That’s the underside of the tapestry; the thing that’s been left out.
Because what we are carefully taught to ignore is that every one of us—fundamentally; deep, deep inside—let’s put it that way—is an act of, a function of, a performance of, a manifestation of, the works. The whole blinkin’ cosmos with all its galaxies, and forever, and ever, and ever, whatever it is beyond that; what you might call God in the Western tradition, or Brahman in Hindu philosophy, or Tao in Chinese. Every one of us is really that, but we are pretending we aren’t.
And we’re pretending with tremendous skill and deception. Now, what I would call a really swinging human being is a person who lives on two levels at once. He’s able to live on the level of being his ordinary ego, his everyday personality, and play his role in life, and to observe all the rules, and so on, that go with that.
But if he is only on that level—if he’s only playing that kind of thing—and thinks that’s all there is, it becomes a drag. He starts being the kind of person who feels that he’s just got to go on surviving, see? It’s terribly important to go on surviving; to live.
And he works at that. And his children learn the same attitude from him. And they—he says, “Well, I’ve got to survive because I’ve got all these children I have to support,” and so on, and so forth, and then they take the same attitude, and they breed up children, and they feel compulsive about supporting them, because they’ve got to go on.
And so nobody really has any fun. It’s just… “Ungh! Ungh!
Ungh! Ungh!” You’ve got to make this thing! You see?
And you don’t have to! See, whenever I get somebody who comes to me and says, “I really can’t go on. I have to commit suicide,” I say, “Well, that’s entirely your right.
There’s really no reason why you should go on, and if you want to commit suicide, do it.” You can check out. Of course, this reduces anxiety; when they feel free to commit suicide they don’t really have to commit suicide so much. You know, you can commit partial suicide.
So the sense that you just have to go on living, see? That life is a ‘must.’ When you say to anything spontaneous—see, life is spontaneous. It happens—in the words of the Taoists—zìrán, which means “of itself so”—that’s the Chinese expression for nature, what happens by itself.
What isn’t pushed, but it just pops up, you see? Like—gee, I’ll never forget—there was a great Zen master I knew once, in New York. He was giving a lecture one evening, and he was dressed in his gold ceremonial robes, and he was sitting in front of an altar like this sort of thing—but he had a table in front of him with very formal candles on it and a sūtra scripture on a little desk—and he was lecturing on the sūtra.
And he said, “Fundamental principle in Buddhism is: no purpose. Purposelessness. When you drop fart, you don’t say, ‘At nine o’clock, I drop fart.’ It happen of itself.” You know?
And all these pious Western devotees, you know, kind of put their handkerchiefs in their mouths and tried not to laugh. So—but, that’s the meaning of “something that happens of itself,” like “drop fart,” or “have hiccups,” or—just—you came into being, you know? It happens in a kind of a plop!
way, like that—see? Now, you can’t tell that process, “You ought to happen! You must happen!” Because that puts a bind on it in the same way as when you have little child, and all the relatives have come to a party on Thanksgiving, and you put the child in the middle of all the relatives and say, “Now, dear, play!” See?
It absolutely bugs the child to do it like that. And so this is the problem for every artist. Because an artist is a man who makes his living by playing—whether he’s dancing, or painting, or playing music, or whatever it is—and he has to overcome this problem.
He has to know how to play in public at a given time on an appointment, see? And that’s not an easy thing to learn. But when you catch on to the trick of it, you can do it—to play on demand.
That’s the hardest lesson of life: to contrive what is called by my Japanese artist friend Saburo Hasegawa a controlled accident. The thing is that we have been educated to use our minds in a certain way. A way that ignores, or screens out, the fact that every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out.
You see, it’s as if you had a light covered with a black ball, and in this ball were pinholes, and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out. So in that way, every one of us is, actually, a pinhole through which the fundamental light—that is, existence itself—looks out. Only, the game we’re playing is not to know this.
To be only that little hole, which we call “me,” “my ego,” my specific “John Jones,” or whatever. If, however—you see—we can maintain, at the same time, the sense of being this specific John Jones with his role in life, or whatever, and know also, underneath this, that we are the whole works, you get a very marvelous and agreeable arrangement. This is a most remarkable harmoniousness—I mean, it gives one’s life a great sense of joy and exuberance—if you can carry on these two things at once.
If you—in other words—you know that all the serious predicaments of life are a game. Now, I want to put it two ways. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, something to be condemned, to take your own individual life seriously, in dead earnest, and to have all the problems that go with that.
Do you understand that being that way—that being a real mixed-up human being—is a manifestation of nature that is something just like the patterns on the waves out here, or like a seashell? You know, we pick up shells—I always keep one around, as sort of an example for many things—and say, “My goodness, isn’t that gorgeous!” There’s not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere. It’s absolutely perfect.
Now, I wonder. I wonder if these fish look at each other’s shells and say, “Don’t you think she’s kind of fat?” “Oh my, those markings aren’t really very well spaced.” Because that’s what we do. See, we don’t realize that all of us—in our various goings-on, and behavior, and so on—are more marvelous, much more complicated, much more interesting.
All these gorgeous faces that I’m looking at. You know, every one of them! Some of them are supposedly pretty, some of them are supposedly not so pretty, but they’re all absolutely gorgeous.
And everybody’s eyes is a piece of jewelry beyond compare. Beautiful! But we have specialized in a certain kind of awareness that makes us neglectful of that.
You see, we specialize in more or less briefly concentrated pinpoint attention. We look at this and we look at that, and we select—from all the things we might possibly be aware of—only certain things. And as a result of that we leave out of our everyday consciousness, generally speaking, two dimensions of experience.
One: amazing beauty of experience that we never see at all, and on the other hand—the very deep thing—the sense of our basic identity, unity with, oneness with, the total process of being. See, because we are staring, as it were, at certain features of the landscape, we don’t see the background. And because we get fascinated with—you know, I could go into details of this shell, as I said, and put myself in the mind of a conch—or whatever it is that lives in this thing—and say, “Hm, that’s not so hot, that one.” Like that, see?
And so I wouldn’t see the whole thing. But when I look at it like this, when anybody looks at it like that, we say, “Oh my God, isn’t that gorgeous!” Another way of talking about the web is that there are different levels of magnification. For example, supposing you take a piece of embroidery.
And here it is, obviously, in front of you; an ordered and beautiful object. And then you take out a microscope, and you look at the individual threads. At a certain point, as you turn up the microscope, you’ll get a hopeless tangle which doesn’t make any sense at all.
The wrapped fiber that constitutes the thread is a mess. Hasn’t been organized, nobody did anything about it. But at the level of magnification at which you actually see it with the naked eye, it’s all been organized.
Alright, now keep turning up that microscope. Take one of those individual threads in the fiber that seems to be so chaotic, and go into the constitution of that. And again, you’ll find fantastic order.
You’ll find the most gorgeous designs of molecules. Then, keep turning it up. And again, at a certain level you’ll find chaos again.
Alright, keep going. And at another level you’ll find there’s marvelous order. Now, you see, order and randomness constitute—in other words—the warp and the woof.
Where everything is—in order, everything’s under control; in randomness, it’s all over—it’s a mess. But we wouldn’t know what order was unless we had messes. It’s the contrast of order and messes that order itself depends upon.